Trump Cites Fake Obama Quote That Actually Came From Fox News Guest
President Donald Trump’s Twitter fingers have been working overtime today. Besides railing against the Bob Woodward book and retweeting pro-Trump propaganda accounts, the president has boasted about his administration’s economic success by sending out blatantly false information and quotes. Hours after wrongly claiming that the GDP rate is higher than the unemployment rate for the first time in 100 years — it has happened dozens of times since the late ’40s — the president quoted his predecessor.
“President Trump would need a magic wand to get to 4% GDP,” stated President Obama. I guess I have a magic wand, 4.2%, and we will do MUCH better than this! We have just begun.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2018
Only one little thing — President Barack Obama never said “President Trump would need a magic wand to get to 4% GDP.” Now, this may surprise you, but the president got this supposed Obama quote from a Fox News segment that aired minutes before his tweet.
During today’s broadcast of America’s Newsroom, Washington Free Beacon writer Liz Harrington claimed Obama had a bad track record of campaigning for fellow Democratic candidates while talking about Obama’s recent speech in which he criticizes the current president.
“He didn’t help Hillary Clinton all that much in 2016,” she said. “And what is the message exactly? Then, he was saying President Trump would need a magic wand to get to 4% growth. What’s he gonna say now? That Trump found it!”
OUR A-TEAM: @wjmcgurn @JMfreespeech @LizWFB discussed former President Obama criticizing President Trump #nine2noon pic.twitter.com/jcrt2uAssn
— America's Newsroom (@AmericaNewsroom) September 10, 2018
President Obama never said that, however. It would appear that Harrington was grossly mischaracterizing what the 44th POTUS said at a 2016 PBS town hall. Regarding then-candidate Trump’s repeated promises to bring back manufacturing jobs, Obama noted:
“Well, how exactly are you going to do that? What exactly are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually, the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”
As you can see, Obama made no reference to GDP growth in that quote. It was specifically about job promises the current president had made on the campaign trail.
Also, one wonders why Obama would have said that four percent growth was impossible. During his administration, the economy experienced four quarters of greater than four percent growth, including one quarter that exceeded five percent.
Meanwhile, Harrington took to Twitter to complain about “fact check nerds” and “hyper-literalism” who pointed out that Obama never said that, claiming this was why the “media still doesn’t understand Trump.”
The hyper-literalism is super annoying, and a big reason why the media still doesn't understand Trump. Obama asks if Trump has a "magic wand" for the economy. Media said it was impossible to hit 4% growth, and the Obama admin were the ones who said "new normal" was low growth
— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizWFB) September 10, 2018
Fact check nerds and their hyper-literalism are v annoying. No, I wasn't directly quoting Obama. But how is this quote better?! https://t.co/pPW5svT3Jy pic.twitter.com/0xLlCTkkG7
— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizWFB) September 10, 2018
Once again, it should be pointed out that Trump claimed this was an actual quote from Obama.
