I mean they can’t be serious with this stuff, right? The Atlantic is peddling another anti-Trump story. The president reportedly mocks religious voters. This comes after the publication peddled straight fake news about Trump denigrating America’s war dead when he visited France in 2018. The publication also published a fabricated story about a police shooting this summer as well. So, what’s the deal with this, and are we really going to believe what Michael Cohen says about this nonsense (via The Atlantic):
One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personally—Creflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollar’s quest for a Gulfstream G650.
Trump seemed delighted by the “scam,” Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was “full of shit.”
“They’re all hustlers,” Trump said.
[…]
But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.
[…]
“His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them stay at my hotels—they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,’” said a former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
[…]
In Cohen’s recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his 2011 meeting with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, “Can you believe that bullshit?” But if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he followed their moneymaking ventures closely. “He was completely familiar with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel churches,” the adviser told me.
I mean, seriously. Are they trying to pull an Obama here? We all remember the former president referring to the religious and the rural as “bitter clingers,” but we have (again) anonymous people saying that Trump mocked religious voters, along with a man who will say anything to get out of jail. This publication thought Israel was going to bomb Iran. That hasn’t happened either. Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the fake news story about Trump disrespecting our war dead by calling them “losers” and “suckers” is also a Russian collusion peddler. So, fakes news about Trump and police shootings. That’s the Atlantic thus far this year. Also, what happened to that ‘war dead’ story regarding Trump? What happened? I thought there was going to be more people coming forward. No one in that trash story is on the record. There are over a dozen Trump officials who say it never happened, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, no fan of the president, who said if it were true—he would’ve written an entire chapter about it in his book. It didn’t happen.
Like with the rest of the fake news press, read it for entertainment value but nothing more.