Category: Not Factual

Trump says he intentionally called Apple’s Tim Cook ‘Tim Apple’

President Trump on Monday claimed he intentionally referred to Apple CEO Tim Cook as “Tim Apple,” seeking to push back on media coverage of his remark, which was mocked online.

Trump wrote on Twitter that he just tried “to save time & words” by referring to the tech industry titan by the wrong name last week at a White House meeting with business leaders.

“The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!” he tweeted.

Trump made the slip of the tongue while he thanked Cook for investing in his company’s U.S. operations.

“I mean, you’ve really put a big investment in our country. We really appreciate it very much, Tim Apple,” Trump said at the time.

Cook reacted playfully, changing the name on his Twitter profile to Tim with an Apple logo emoji.

While the encounter was a viral moment for only short amount of time, it has stuck with Trump, who is sensitive about the way he is portrayed in the media.

Axios reported Sunday that Trump told a group of Republican donors over the weekend he actually said “Tim Cook, Apple” very quickly but that the “Cook” was said quietly.

A video recording of the event, however, shows Trump said “Tim Apple” and not “Tim Cook, Apple.”

[The Hill]

Media

Trump Denies Calling Tim Cook ‘Tim Apple.’ It Happened on TV.

Last week, President Trump made a small, comic gaffe when he called Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, “Tim Apple.” Friday night, at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Trump called the reports “fake news.” Jonathan Swan reports that Trump told the donors he actually said “Tim Cook, Apple,” very quickly, with the “Cook” part under his breath, so it sounded like “Tim Apple.”

That is not what happened. Here is the video:

“I just thought, why would you lie about that,” one of the donors told Swan. “It doesn’t even matter!”

Trump has consistently generated anxiety among the Republican elite through his habit of lying about absolutely everything, rather than just the things Republicans want him to he lie about (tax cuts don’t increase deficits, greenhouse gas emissions don’t warm the planet, repealing Obamacare won’t take away anybody’s coverage, etc.). Part of it has to do with the fact that Trump has far more things he actually needs to lie about due to his extreme shadiness. But another part is that Trump is simply a pathological liar, who tells weird and obviously made-up stories in his campaign speeches for no apparent reason.

You might think a Trump donor watching this could have some misgivings about handing money to help a pathological liar keep the most powerful job in the world — at a fundraiser held at Trump’s privately owned club, in order to guarantee that his campaign work lines his own pockets, no less. Instead the prevalent attitude is, It would be great if the president was not a pathological liar, but what are you gonna do?

[New York Magazine]

Trump: I did not break campaign finance laws

President Trump on Thursday doubled down on his assertion he did not break the law when he involved himself in a scheme to pay two women who alleged in the lead-up to the 2016 election that they had extramarital affairs with him.

“It was not a campaign contribution, and there were no violations of the campaign finance laws by me. Fake News!”  Trump tweeted.

The comments come after The New York Times reported Trump signed checks to reimburse his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, while he was serving as president.

Cohen last year pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, in addition to other financial crimes, and lying to Congress. He was sentenced to three years in prison. Cohen implicated Trump in the scheme in court and in congressional testimony.

Federal prosecutors in December alleged that Cohen acted at the direction of “Individual-1,” a person widely believed to be Trump, when he committed the campaign finance violations.

Prosecutors said the payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who said she slept with Trump, broke the law because they were meant to influence the outcome of the election. Cohen reached the agreement with Daniels in October 2016, one month before Election Day.

During his explosive testimony last week to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Cohen presented several checks signed by the president he said were meant to reimburse him for payments to Daniels.

The Times reported Wednesday that Trump authorized one of the checks for $35,000 in October 2017, nine months after his inauguration.

While the checks do not prove Trump committed a crime, they could be used as evidence by prosecutors should they pursue a case alleging that the president directed an illegal hush money scheme while in office.

Trump initially denied any knowledge of the payments to Cohen, but then shifted his explanation after Cohen pleaded guilty, saying the payments did not violate the law because they “didn’t come out of the campaign.”

Then in December, Trump said he “never directed Michael Cohen to break the law” while repeating his assertion that Cohen’s actions in the hush money scheme were not illegal.

[The Hill]

Trump Retweets Known Racist Jim Hanson ‘No Obstruction’

In a continued effort to “work the refs” and obstruct justice, Donald Trump retweeted Jim Hanson’s defense of the president, claiming

“.@JerryNadler admits on #CNN they have no proof of Obstruction by @realDonaldTrump it’s just his “personal opinion”

Of course that was a complete mischaracterization (lie) of Representative Nadler’s comments:

“He tried to protect [former national security adviser Michael] Flynn from being investigated by the FBI. He fired [former FBI Director] James Comey in order to stop the ‘Russian thing,’ as he told NBC News,” Nadler continued. “He’s intimidated witnesses in public.”

Rep. Nadler on ABC’s This Week (not CNN)

For one, Trump famously (or infamously) fired FBI Director James Comey for not stopping his angency’s investigation into him and his campaign… which is textbook obstruction of justice.

The president just called the CEO of Apple ‘Tim Apple’

Tim Cook is a pretty well-known figure in the business world. I know a lot of people don’t care about computers and that’s fine, but if you’re in the industry or having some sort of professional interaction with him, I have to think people usually know his name going in.

And yet, at an American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting today, the president pretty unmistakably called Tim Cook “Tim Apple.”

At first I thought I was just hearing things? Then I thought it might have been part of a trailing sentence like “Thank you Tim… Apple is doing great.” But no, he stops pretty abruptly after saying Apple, and it really sounds like he thinks that’s the last name.

I went through the trouble of transcribing what the president said, just to be sure this is all really happening:

We’re going to be opening up the labor forces because we have to. We have so many companies coming in,” Trump says. “People like Tim — you’re expanding all over and doing things that I really wanted you to do right from the beginning. I used to say, ‘Tim, you gotta start doing it here,’ and you really have you’ve really put a big investment in our country. We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple.

[The Verge]

Media

GUY WHO DUBBED NEO-NAZIS “VERY FINE PEOPLE” SUDDENLY CONCERNED ABOUT ANTI-SEMITISM

In August 2017, Donald Trump responded to the Charlottesville riots that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer by insisting that a violent mob of white nationalists—whose ranks included neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us”—also contained some “very fine people.” For his first International Holocaust Remembrance Day as president, the White House’s statement did not include any mention of Jews or anti-Semitism, a decision it defended by claiming that such a reference would have excluded all the other people who died, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and anarchists. While running for office, Trump tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton’s face against a backdrop of $100 bills alongside the Star of David, and closed out his campaign with a dog-whistle to anti-Semites about a group of Jews who make up the “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” But on Wednesday, the president insisted he’s super committed to stamping out anti-Semitism in a tweet that was 100 percent sincere and not at all politically motivated:

Trump, of course, is all worked up after progressives in the House Democratic caucus protested plans to vote on a resolution condemning religious hatred, in the wake of the uproar over freshman Representative Ilhan Omar’s bad tweets questioning U.S. support for Israel. There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around: Republicans spent years ignoring Rep. Steve King’s paeans to the white race, until King literally asked when the term “white supremacist” became offensive. In 2002, Rep. Steve Scalise, who bashed Omar on Fox News, just happened to pop up at a white supremacist-hosted rally. Just this week, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler attacked Republican Rep. Jim Jordan for an “inane AND anti-Semitic” tweet in which he spelled the name of billionaire Tom Steyer, a liberal activist whose father was Jewish, with a “$” in place of the S. (In a statement, Jordan’s spokesman said, “Congressman Jordan has always stood against hatred and bigotry,” adding somewhat strangely, “Also, according to public sources, Steyer is Episcopalian.”)

Omar, for her part, isn’t apologizing after criticizing a “political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” After Rep. Eliot Engel called her apparent reference to dual loyalty a “vile, anti-Semitic slur,” Omar shot back that the charge of anti-Semitism is “designed to end the debate” about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—a sentiment echoed by Bernie Sanders in a statement Wednesday.

The entire debate is surely above Donald Trump’s head, but that isn’t stopping him from weaponizing the issue to his benefit. Strangely, his pure moral outrage was nowhere to be seen in 2015, when he was telling a group of Jewish Republicans that they couldn’t control him because “I don’t want your money” or outing Jonathan Leibowitz—“I mean Jon Stewart”—as a Jew. In sum, everyone involved here is terrible.

[Vanity Fair]

Trump begs GOP to ‘stay united’ in support of border wall measure

President Trump on Wednesday implored Senate Republicans to “STAY UNITED!” and vote for his wall on the southern border, dismissing arguments raised to support blocking his national emergency declaration.

“Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent, they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall,” Trump posted on his Twitter page. “Our Country is being invaded with Drugs, Human Traffickers, & Criminals of all shapes and sizes. That’s what this vote is all about. STAY UNITED!”

The Democrat-controlled House voted last month to block Trump’s emergency declaration, a move the White House says would allow the president to divert money from the Pentagon construction fund for barrier construction.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his chamber will vote on the resolution before lawmakers go on recess on March 15, but he said there aren’t enough votes to pass it.

Four Republicans have announced that they will vote against it – Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

[New York Post]

Trump slams Democrats over probe he calls harassment

President Donald Trump is claiming Democrats “have gone stone cold CRAZY” with their investigations of him and his surrogates.

Trump has been grumbling about “harassment” a lot lately, but obviously, his newest tweet is a response to the new investigation House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has launched against his administration. Between the scope of the probe and the number of people who’ve been asked to turn over documents of interest, it seems the increased levels of oversight could become a new, lasting source of frustration for Trump.

[MarketWatch]

Trump Accuses Adam Schiff of ‘Illegally Leaking to Fake News CNN’

President Donald Trump baselessly accused Rep. Adam Schiff of leaking to CNN on Sunday.

Trump’s accusation, framed with a question mark at the end, came on a busy day of tweeting for the president.

At one point, Trump seemed to blame Democrats in some way for his lackluster North Korean summit, writing: “For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the ‘walk.’ Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!”

And then this

[CNN]

Trump points to Dems over failure of North Korea summit

President Trump on Sunday appeared to point blame at Democrats for the collapse of his negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week.

“For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the “walk” Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!” Trump tweeted.

The president was referring to the testimony of his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, which occurred simultaneously with his summit in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

Cohen testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where he accused the president of lying to the public about hush money payments and floated the possibility of Trump’s collusion with Moscow.

Cohen was sentenced to prison last year after pleading guilty to financial crimes, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. He sentence is set to begin on May 6.

While Cohen was on Capitol Hill, Trump was in Hanoi, at his second meeting with Kim.

Trump entered negotiations with the hope of securing a deal that involved North Korea denuclearizing, but talks ended abruptly without any type of deal, which Trump alludes to in his tweet. 

The president told reporters following the summit that the U.S. was not willing to fully lift sanctions in exchange for partial denuclearization, stating that “[s]ometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times.”

A North Korean official disputed that characterization of the country’s position adding that Kim “may have lost the will” to engage in future negotiations.

“This proposal was the biggest denuclearization measure we could take at the present stage in relations to [the] current level of confidence between the DPRK and the United States,” North Korea’s foreign minister said.

[The Hill]

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