If you were under the impression that the president of the United States surrounds himself with only the best intelligence, deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland is here to disabuse you of that notion.
The following anecdote is distressing for several reasons, not least of all because it suggests White House staffers have the ability to feed President Trump bogus information, and that he’s susceptible to it.
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McFarland, for example, recently handed Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers.
“One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter,” Politico reported. “Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy.”
There’s a huge problem with the supposed information McFarland fed to her boss. The 1970s Time cover is a phony. It’s a doctored image that has been floating around on the Internet for years.
Luckily for Trump, his other White House staffers caught the mistake before he made a great, braying jackass of himself over the matter, Politico noted.
Now before you dismiss this anecdote with the tired and well-worn rallying cry of “Fake news!” bear in mind a Trump White House official basically confirmed it as true. The official even trotted out the extremely worn-out “fake but accurate” defense.
“While the specific cover is fake, it is true there was a period in the ’70s when people were predicting an ice age,” the official said. “The broader point I think was accurate.”
McFarland, who is slated to become ambassador to Singapore, did not respond to requests for comment.
The president boasted during the 2016 election that he would hire only the best people. Indeed.
Get it together, fellas. This is the White House.
