President Trump held a news conference regarding the improving job market but diverted from the subject of economics to also comment on the pertinent subject of equality and justice as they pertain to police interactions. He honored George Floyd and noted that equality is “really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about“ and hoped that Floyd might be gazing from heaven with gladness that the country is going through that focus. Nice words. So naturally, every liar who hates him lied about it…
Trumps actual quote + my imagined paraphrase of the collective voices crafting the response went exactly like
“President Trump: “Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race … Hopefully George Floyd is looking down right now & saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country … in terms of equality”.
-followed by something like:
Corporate Press: “crap. Way too unifying and positive. um… lets go with ‘Trump sez Floyd would be impressed by the current jobless rates’, or something. No one googles this shit anyway lol”…
Not very classy, guys… It’s one thing to run with the “Trump sed to drink bleach!” type of fake quotes without looking up the actual video because you think its funny and doesn’t need to be accurate because “it sounds like something he’d say anyway” but you’re really gonna bring George Floyd into that game of liars telephone?… Rude.”
Take a look at this lineup of over a dozen blue-check-marks repeating the lie.
I didn’t examine the time stamps to located which chickens came before which eggs on when the media’s domino of dishonesty started toppling on this narrative, but they all went with the basic theme of cutting out the separation of topics between the economy and equal justice in policing in order to squish Trumps words about the George Floyd together with the other topic of the U.S. economy. The context and separation of topics was in no way unclear, but most news media knows people don’t fact-check anti-Trump reports to any degree of consequence, so it was an easy editorial choice to go with the lie.
I encourage you to follow the link to the other examples of how this was reported, but the award for most boiled-down version of the narrative was this Bloomberg post that basically just took the talking points of the smear and made it a news report. The headline reads “Trump Invokes Floyd in Jobs Remarks as Black Unemployment Soars” as a double misleader that both lies about the President invoking Floyd “in jobs remarks” (he didn’t. It was a conference on job growth but Floyd was never mentioned in any context of anything about jobs) and adding the “as [this other negative thing happens]” technique of leading the reader (as opposed to reporting on Trumps thesis that a strong economy will bring racial justice). The byline bullet point below the headline contradicts it by admitting that Trump said ‘A great day for him’ ‘after remarks on equality’ (not remarks on jobs…), and then reports that black unemployment rose to 16.8%. Then they use *this* photo of Trump mid-action of getting up or down from his seat, just to make sure the point is driven home to the reader that we’re not supposed to be viewing this favorably.
With the number of outlets that ran with the fake narrative in the mainstream media – you can imagine the level of less stringent fact checkers repeating it all over social media. I scrolled through 4 different people posting 3 different links with the lie on Facebook before I even looked other areas to see the ditto’s echoing the line that Trump claimed a deified figure of history would be their fan.
This meme was basically a fake news re-tread of a 2013 story that actually in where Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank museum and opined that “Anne Frank was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber” (his name for his followers).