Human Events reports that CNN and others leaped at the chance to exaggerate comments by President Trump about Meghan Markle, the former American actress who married Prince Harry and is now known as the Duchess of Sussex. Trump granted an interview before his trip to London with "the pro-establishment, anti-Trump reporter Tom Newton Dunn" of The Sun.
Describing his comments, CNN reported in its headline: “Trump tells The Sun: Meghan Markle is ‘nasty'”.
The chyron on CNN’s television segment on the matter read: “Trump Calls Meghan Markle ‘Nasty’ Ahead of UK Trip”.
On Saturday's New Day, CNN's London field producer Salma Abdelaziz noted the president quickly changed his tone and "seemed to bury the hatchet," but they never changed their Trump spin on screen.
They included a clip of Meghan Markle appearing in May 2016 on the since-canceled Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore: “Yes, of course, Trump is divisive. Think about female voters alone, right? I think it was in 2012 the Republican Party lost the female vote by 12 points. That's a huge number, and with as misogynistic as Trump is, and so vocal about it, that is a huge chunk of it. You're not voting for a woman, if it's Hillary, just because she's a woman, but certainly because Trump has made it easy to see that you don't really want that kind of world that he's painting.”
BuzzFeed, Daily Beast, Elle, and Vanity Fair, among others, leaped on the "feud." This is Trump's actual exchange with the British paper:
THE SUN: She can’t make it because she has maternity leave. Are you sorry not to see her, because she wasn’t so nice about you during the campaign. I don’t know if you saw that?
TRUMP: I didn’t know that, no. I didn’t know that. No, I hope she’s OK. I did not know that, no.
THE SUN: She said she’d move to Canada if you got elected. It turned out she moved to Britain.
TRUMP: There are a lot of people moving here [to the U.S.] So what can I say? No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.
THE SUN: Is it good having an American princess then, Mr. President? Does that help the link?
TRUMP: I think it’s nice. I think it’s nice and I’m sure she will do excellently. She will be very good. She will be very good. I hope she does.
It's not misquoting the president to say he called Markle nasty (or her comments nasty). But it was clear from the exchange that he had no ill will toward the duchess at this point.
Any close observer of the news media knows the media will spin furiously about context when it's a politican they like -- say, Ilhan Omar dismissively saying "some people did something" on 9/11. The "fact checkers" turn themselves into pretzels of context.Obama brought the Queen of England an iPod with his speeches on it, and the pro-Obama media didn't blink.
