El Bizarro, as Usual: White House Debunks Trump’s Claim Melania Knows Kim Jong Un
August 27th 2019
Donald Trump at #FITN in Nashua, NH (Michael Vadon)
By Kaili Joy Gray
The White House is once again trying to spin an impossibly nonsensical statement from Trump.
While addressing reporters at the G-7 meeting in France Monday, Trump praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, as he has done so many times before, but he added a new twist.
“Kim Jong Un, who I’ve gotten to know extremely well — the first lady has gotten to know Kim Jong Un, and I think she’d agree with me — he is a man with a country that has tremendous potential,” Trump said.
There’s just one problem: First lady Melania Trump has never met Kim, which would make it rather difficult for her to get to know him.
But because no one who works in the White House will ever admit Trump got something wrong, Trump’s new press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, offered a statement to try to make Trump’s claim make sense.
“President Trump confides in his wife on many issues including the detailed elements of his strong relationship with Chairman Kim — and while the First Lady hasn’t met him, the President feels like she’s gotten to know him too,” Grisham said.
Apparently, the White House couldn’t get Melania Trump to say that she feels like she knows the North Korean despot — just that her husband has feelings about what she knows and thinks.
It’s the kind of desperate spin that happens all the time with Trump. He says — or tweets — something that is demonstrably false or in some other way incredibly problematic, and then the White House makes Herculean efforts to clean it up.
Over the weekend, for example, Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, insisted that Trump’s Twitter decree last week — “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China” — was not in fact an “order,” but merely Trump “asking” them to consider moving their business.
Now, just one day later, the White House again is trying to clean up an offhand remark rather than simply admit that Trump was wrong.
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