Our thin-skinned president has changed his story about his senior moment when he referred to Apple CEO Tim Cook as “Tim Apple” at a meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board last Wednesday.
President Trump’s gaffe was much ridiculed at the time by the media that he already regards as his enemy, with jocular speculation about whether he also speaks with “Jeff Amazon” and “Bill Microsoft” rife within the mocking coverage of the verbal slip.
The derision he faced after the mental lapse obviously got under the president’s skin since he initially called out the reports of his misidentification of the tech mogul as “fake news.”
According to Axios, Trump told Republican donors at an RNC fundraiser at Mar-A-Lago on Friday that he never uttered the words “Tim Apple” but had instead “actually said ‘Tim Cook Apple’ really fast, and the ‘Cook’ part of the sentence was soft. But all you heard from the ‘fake news,’ he said, was ‘Tim Apple.'”
Perplexed donors hearing Trump’s denial wondered why the president would bother to make such an easily disproved claim since the original moment was captured on video for everyone to review and plainly hear that he did not say what he was now claiming to have said.
“I just thought, why would you lie about that,” one of the donors told Axios. “It doesn’t even matter!”
The president’s attempts to cover up his embarrassing mistake led to even more ridicule. Tim Cook himself even got in some gentle ribbing at Trump’s expense by changing his Twitter handle to include an apple emoji after the story went viral.
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Now, nearly a week after the gaffe, Trump is still apparently fuming over the humiliation of the senility-suggesting mental lapse. He dropped his phony claim of never having made the verbal error at all and tweeted out a new excuse for his fruity expression.
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Ah yes, Trump is now trying to claim that in his desire to achieve maximum verbal efficiency his quick wit merely abbreviated the executive’s name and company in a conflated manner.
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The president’s transparent face-saving effort might have been more successful had he offered it before attempting to lie about what he actually said. What is most hilarious about this tweet is Trump’s audacity in referring to the media’s accurate reports about what he said —there is video, after all, to back up their accounts — as “Fake News.”
Trump may blame the media for “yet another bad Trump story!”, but the president — who is psychologically unable to take public responsibility for any of his own mistakes —created this pitiful story on his own and made it worse than it would have otherwise been with his pathetic lies and defensive posturing.
Donald White House is his own worst enemy.
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Original reporting by Jonathan Swan at Axios.
