CNN’s Jake Tapper took President Donald Trump to task Wednesday for decrying “conspiracy theories” in the media, given the President’s history of promoting them.
On Twitter, Trump said, “The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC and @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!”
“Of course, these stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and elsewhere are not conspiracy theories. These are news stories sourced by government officials,” Tapper said. “Conspiracy theories are different. They’re false. They’re crackpot. They’re nonsense.”
He went on to review several conspiracy theories Trump himself had promoted.
As a candidate vying for the Republican nomination, Trump falsely said Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was with Lee Harvey Oswald before President John F. Kennedy was killed.
And Trump for years was the leading proponent of the racially-tinged “birther” theory, which alleged the nation’s first black president was not born in the United States and thus ineligible for the office.
After CNN reported that some of his top aides were in constant communication with Russian officials during the campaign, Trump on Wednesday tweeted, “This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign.”