You don’t need to make things up to embellish Trump’s idiocy

Donald Trump is touring Japan at the moment, and within record time, his trip has already produced its first viral scandal. A photo of Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a koi pond quickly rocketed around the media yesterday, purportedly capturing Trump as he upended his box of fish food like a bored toddler chucking an entire bread loaf at ducks. The outrage and mockery was swift and, in some cases, scientific; many were quick to point out that overfeeding is a serious issue with koi, and that Trump’s carelessness had surely led them to gorge themselves to death. Others mourned the “poor palace employee” who would likely be dispatched to clean up the damage before these other, floundering orange creatures with zero self-restraint completely imploded. Obvious parallels were drawn, and everyone had a good morbid chuckle at this first meme-able blunder in President Griswold’s Japanese vacation. Except it didn’t happen that way, and reporting that it did is only making things worse.
As you can see from the full, unedited video, Abe was the first to empty the rest of his fish food into the pond, meaning Trump was simply following his host’s lead. Was Abe’s toss comparably gentler—a gesture of respectful communion with the animal locally regarded as a symbol of strength and steadfastness in the face of adversity—while Trump just seems to be carelessly dumping it on their heads like so many paper towels for hurricane survivors? Of course. But the fact that the story was reported as “Blundering Asshole Kills Fish”—and outlets such as CNN even edited around the video to make Trump look like an impetuous buffoon—is exactly the sort of petty bullshit that fuels the “fake news” narrative that Trump and his supporters so depend on to foster blanket mistrust of the media. Great.
Hey, here’s another one! In a meeting with Japanese automakers, as both CNN and Business Insider reported, Trump suggested they “try building cars in the United States”—which, as many analysts haughtily pointed out, they already do, by the millions. Ha ha! What a maroon!
Only, once again, this has been taken completely out of context, as The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out, with the full text of Trump’s remarks showing clearly that Trump is aware that they’ve been doing it “for a long, long time,” while also singling out Toyota and Mazda for just that. By deliberately omitting that, you’ve thereby given a million American flag emojis on Twitter two more “lies of the anti-Trump media,” which they can append to every legitimate criticism you’ll ever write, in between ranting about uranium.