The lie that President Trump called asylum seekers “animals” has escaped the confines of social media and is being repeated now as a fact on cable news.
Basically, the press’ stunning lack of due diligence is even worse than you thought, as evidenced by several examples flagged this week by the Washington Free Beacon.
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“You have a president who … [refers] to immigrants as ‘animals,’” former Obama administration official and CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto said Monday.
Earlier, on Saturday, the Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter characterized Trump’s supposed remarks as “truly shameful.”
“He compared people going to the border to animals,” Alter said on MSNBC. “Now anybody who has studied any history knows that when you start calling people animals when you dehumanize them that way, that’s when the killing begins.”
MSNBC contributor Jess O’Connell also claimed Saturday, “You saw just this week, he compared immigrants to animals.”
On Friday, Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden claimed in an appearance on MSNBC that the president had that very day called immigrants “animals.”
None of this is true.
As explained here, this particularly embarrassing episode of media malpractice is based entirely on a single, since-deleted tweet from a guy named Mark Elliott, who claimed on April 5 that Trump said in reference to “people asking for asylum ‘These aren’t people. These are animals.’”
I have learned that Trump’s comments were in response to a specific question about MS-13 members and not about asylum seekers more broadly. I have chosen to delete the tweet, but am copying it here. My apologies for not being more accurate. pic.twitter.com/oDTdNvzSdq
— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) April 8, 2019
His tweet included a video that showed Trump saying:
Elliott’s original viral claim is an outright lie. Trump was not speaking about asylum seekers at all. He was referring specifically to members of the brutal, barbaric Salvadoran gang MS-13, whom his administration has targeted for removal from the U.S. Further, the video Elliott tweeted is from 2018. It’s not from “this week,” as Alter, O’Connell, etc. were all too willing to repeat.
Elliott deleted his tweet Monday, but not before it had gone viral with the support of re-tweets and comments from members of Congress, mainstream reporters, celebrities with massive followings, and even 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. He helped prove an important point about how credulous and lazy these people are.
I cannot stress enough how wild it is that the people citing Elliott’s now-deleted tweet as proof of Trump’s evil seem to have forgotten that we litigated these exact same comments a year ago, back when the press first claimed falsely that Trump had called immigrants “animals.” We had this exact same fight over this exact same White House video. That pundits and reporters with national platforms were all too easily taken in by a Twitter account they have likely never heard of before, which shared a video they had already seen, is a cause for concern.
