In a since-deleted tweet, an aide to Washington State Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal claimed that President Donald Trump had ignored a "child in (a) wheelchair" who reached up "twice to shake the president's hand" after a Friday speech. It turns out that the aide, Ansel Herz, clearly engaged in the kind of "selective editing" critics claim conservative undercover journalists commit (but almost never do). By the time Herz deleted the tweet, the damage had spread around the world, as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, unhinged GQ critic Keith Olbermann, and others ignorantly pounced on the deceptive tweet as proof that Trump is a heartless monster.
The complete video of the event shows that Trump specifically greeted and spoke with the wheelchair-bound boy before the speech.
Here is the video snip Herz used:
Here is a snip from earlier in the official White House full video, with Trump greeting the boy at the 2:19 mark:
Given what happened earlier, the idea that Trump engaged in some kind of carelessly negligent and hurtful behavior towards the wheelchair-bound boy as he departed is absurd.
Herz's tweet led Rowling to launch into a six-tweet rant seen at Twitchy.com. Among other things, she accused him of pretending "not to see a child in a wheelchair, as though frightened he might catch his condition," and of being a "monster of narcissism (who) values only himself and his pale reflections." As of when this post was drafted mid-morning on Saturday, the opening tweet in her series had been retweeted over 73,000 times and had garnered over 148,000 likes. The complete series of tweets was also still present at Rowling's Twitter account.
Meanwhile in a now-deleted tweet (HT Washington Free Beacon), Olbermann wrote that "this is mortifying, revelatory. OTOH, I'm somebody who shook his damnable hand. The child is fortunate he didn't touch the evil."
Some left-wing bloggers also took the bait. Over at the Daily Kos, the related post's headline still reads, "This video of Trump ignoring a disabled child repeatedly trying to shake his hand is heartbreaking," even though the post's author has admitted that "Another video surfaced of him greeting the child on the way in." Actually, as we have seen, Trump's greeting is in an earlier portion of the same video.
Once again, the left's constant insinuation that the center-right is the source of fake news is proven spectacularly wrong.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
