President Trump, who rants about “fake news,” got some from a White House staffer, according to a report on Monday.
Deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland gave the president printouts of two Time magazine covers — one from 1977 that warned of a coming ice age and one from 2008 about how to survive global warming — that got Trump worked up about media hypocrisy, Politico reported, citing White House officials.
But the 1977 Time cover was part of a hoax that had been circulating on the internet for years, the report said.
Staffers discovered the mistake before Trump was able to tweet or talk about it, the report said.
The incident also led White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to warn staffers not to secretly slip information to Trump in an effort to manage the paperwork the president gets so he doesn’t go off on unexpected tangents and to conform to recordkeeping laws.
McFarland did not respond to requests for comment from Politico, but another White House aide defended it as an honest error that was “fake but accurate.”
“While the specific cover is fake, it is true there was a period in the ’70s when people were predicting an ice age,” the official told the website. “The broader point I think was accurate.”