President Trump attended Easter services this weekend, contrary to a widely shared tweet from a New York pollster.
“The Obama’s spent every Easter attending church service. Trump hasn’t attended church once since his inauguration. Where’s the GOP outrage?” Matt McDermott tweeted Sunday at 8:39 am ET.
He added in a separate note, “No truer hypocrites than those who spent 8 years calling Obama a Muslim, now seemingly unconcerned that their president is not religious.”
The Obama’s spent every Easter attending church service. Trump hasn’t attended church once since his inauguration. Where’s the GOP outrage? pic.twitter.com/5zOBO616LM
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) April 16, 2017
As of this writing, McDermott’s first tweet has been shared more than 34,000 times. It has been “liked” more than 69,000 times.
The only problem is it’s a load of nonsense. Trump and his family attended a Sunday service at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Fla. The church is located not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The president, first lady Melania Trump, Tiffany, Barron and other relatives sat near the front of the church.
Happy Easter! pic.twitter.com/pzJ7ouViDZ
— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 16, 2017
McDermott’s original tweet was sent before the first family attended services. After CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski notified McDermott that Trump had, in fact, gone to church that day, the pollster refused to retract his claim. His supposed slam-dunk “gotcha” was apparently too good to correct.
McDermott dug in, refusing to delete or correct his initial claims, and attempted instead to defend himself with some extraordinarily tenuous logic.
“[T]he hypocrisy still stands: we had people who spent 8 years calling the president a Muslim, now holding up Trump as ‘a true Christian,'” he said. “It wasn’t factually inaccurate when it was posted, nor (unless I totally missed it) was it on [White House] schedule this AM where it should’ve been!”
In further defense of his false claim, McDermott added it is relevant, “in that this [White House] has chronically chosen shadows for transparency. There’s no reason for things like this not to be on public schedule.”
Welcome back “fake but accurate.” We missed you.
To be clear, this isn’t a case of the press spreading a bogus story. McDermott is an activist pollster from New York. Actual members of the press immediately and repeatedly corrected his bogus claim. Journalists told the pollster point blank that he was wrong. Nevertheless, in the face of all the facts, McDermott persisted.
