President Donald Trump has seared the phrase "fake news" into the cultural vernacular for decades to come, but all too often it's he who disseminates misrepresentations and blatant lies.
A tweet from Trump ahead of the first round of this week's public impeachment hearings against him was no different. The President shared a fake quote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) regarding the electoral process.
In scrambling to discredit Democrats leading the impeachment charge against him, Trump falsely tweeted that Pelosi said it was "dangerous" to let voters decide Trump's fate.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump credited Fox News with spreading the quote. Even more unsurprisingly, the quote, paraphrased by Fox News's Mike Emanuel, is at best a misrepresentation of what Pelosi said.
The actual quote, from a "Dear Colleague" letter sent to the Democratic caucus at the beginning of this week, reads:
"The weak response to these hearings has been, 'Let the election decide.' That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because POTUS is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections."
Pelosi was highlighting Trump's efforts to taint the 2020 election. He leveraged his position in the Oval Office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Trump's potential 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Therefore, "letting the election decide" as Trump's meddling with it goes unmitigated is what Pelosi was highlighting as dangerous, not the democratic process itself.
Actual journalists didn't let the fake quote go unchecked.
But it didn't take a journalist to call out the falsehood.
Trump isn't expected to set the record straight any time soon.
