There is nothing more gratifying than longform Donald Trump interviews, because unlike his tweets – which are demented, don’t get me wrong – proper interviews consistently prove that his mouth is always two steps ahead of whatever spasmodic thoughts happen to drift through his ossified brain tissue.
Case in point: this looooooong YouTube interview with Mike Huckabee, the ultraconservative Christian who once served as the Governor of Arkansas. There’s much to enjoy in this interview, which you can watch here if you are that committed to ruining your Monday morning:
But the best bit that everyone is talking about came in the context of an inevitable conversation about ‘fake news’. In it, Trump seems to claim that he either invented or popularised the word ‘fake’.
“I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake’,” he tells Huckabee. “I guess other people have used it, perhaps over the years, but I’ve never noticed it.”
Yes, it is indeed possible that people used the word ‘fake’ at some point in history before it passed unobstructed from between Donald Trump’s withered lips. But really, you must admit that he was more or less the first to say it.
Even if you charitably assume Trump specifically meant that he invented ‘fake news’, then that is also wrong – he merely reclaimed something that Democrats were saying in the immediate aftermath of the election, when they suggested that fake Facebook news had helped swing the election. In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to say given that Trump conclusively owns that phrase now. But he didn’t invent it.
There are more than three years left of this at the very least.
