CNN’s Stelter: ‘Trump World Embraces Conspiracy Theories Because The Truth Is Not On’ Trump’s Side
Following President Donald Trump’s conspiracy-peddling tweets in which he rejected the Puerto Rico death toll from Hurricane Maria while falsely claiming Democrats were fudging the numbers to make him look bad, numerous media loyalists came to the president’s defense and sided with his baseless assertions.
At the top of Reliable Sources this morning, CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter addressed the president’s continued reliance on conspiracy theories, stating it is one of the “only common threads of the Trump presidency.”
After pointing out that the president tweeted out last night that five deaths had been recorded from Hurricane Florence despite the fact that the official death toll at that time was already up to 11, Stelter said that if Trump is willing to lie about small stuff it “makes you worry about the big stuff.”
“I think you should be worried because the president continues to spread conspiracy theories, even about hurricanes,” the CNN media critic noted. “He does this to evade responsibility, to deflect blame and to keep his fans fired up. But we in the press corps have to keep calling it out. We can’t get immune to this.”
Bringing up the Puerto Rico conspiracies, Stelter explained that the president found support from his media enablers, playing a clip of Fox Business host Lou Dobbs claiming that the “numbers were inflated, and the president was right to call out the organizations who threw out science, statistics, and evidence to discredit the Trump administration.”
“Okay, Lou,” Stelter deadpanned after the Dobbs clip played.
“All right, Trump World embraces conspiracy theories because the truth is not on the president’s side,” the host said. “Puerto Rico is just the most recent example.”
He would go on to highlight some of the other conspiracies that Trump has pushed in the recent past, specifically his Deep State/Muller Witch Hunt claims and his baseless assertion that millions of illegal voters prevented him from winning the popular vote in 2016.
Watch the clip above, via CNN.
