Someone who should’ve been president once said, “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” For all the ridiculous things Donald Trump has tweeted about, and all the verifiably false things he’s said, there has perhaps been no better demonstration of the truth of Hillary Clinton’s words than Trump’s angry tweet about an Iranian missile test that didn’t happen.
If you hadn’t noticed, Trump hates our nuclear deal with Iran, which placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. He complained about it at the UN, calling the deal an embarrassment, although unsurprisingly, he likely doesn’t understand that pulling out of the deal would probably lead to things worse than embarrassment.
So, when he heard that Iran had test-launched a missile “capable of reaching Israel,” he was quick to give the people the unfiltered truth/his inane ravings on Twitter. He wrote, “Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They [sic] are also working with North Korea.Not [sic] much of an agreement we have!” The problem with that—aside from the fact that such a missile test wouldn’t go against the agreement anyway—is there was apparently no such missile launch.
As both CNN and Fox News have learned, for whatever reason (perhaps because someone is easily taunted by such things), Iran seems to be lying about successfully launching their new Khorramshahr missile. The video of the missile launch appears to be from a failed test in January, with U.S. intelligence having detected no such activity in the “just” timeframe Trump mentioned above. I’m sure he’ll just say it doesn’t matter whether the launch happened in January or now, or whether it was successful, but it should alarm everyone that, despite his access to the best possible information on what’s really going on, he’ll believe whatever he sees on the internet, as long as it fits his existing position.
Not only do we have a president who can be easily fooled by misinformation when he’s the person in the best position to get the facts, but the entire world knows it.
(via Gizmodo, image: Shutterstock/a katz)
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