Pants on Fire – Trump Caught Fibbing About Talking to Marco Rubio, then Paul Ryan?
Donald Trump has likely won the Republican nomination for President, but he’s facing more questions about getting his facts straight. Within just the past few days, he’s apparently been busted telling whoppers first about Sen. Marco Rubio – and then about Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump is accused of not just misrepresenting what the men said, but of actually inventing conversations that never took place.
Heat Street broke the Rubio story on Friday. Despite claims from the Trump camp that Rubio had been “very supportive” of Trump during conversations they had after Trump won the Indiana primary — and reports that Rubio was discussing being Trump’s running mate — we reported that Rubio had not talked to Trump recently, and was busy on an official Congressional trip to the Middle East. Three separate senior advisers to the Senator told us that Rubio was “absolutely not” interested in being Trump’s vice president.
A fourth Rubio adviser reaffirmed our story in a text message conversation on Saturday. Rubio was scheduled to return to the United States this weekend and expected to be back at work at his Senate office on Monday.
Rubio seems content to keep focused on his work at the Senate. We reached out to one of the sources from our original story, who postulated that there was a strategic advantage in letting Trump continue to “dig that hole deeper.”
“Why not let Trump keep running out the chain?” he asked. “Marco has no obligation to respond to every crazy thing Trump says, and he’s never liked playing this game.” He mentioned how Rubio had been very disciplined in refusing to respond to most comments from then-Gov. Charlie Crist during their 2010 battle for Florida’s Senate seat.
If Senator Rubio makes a direct statement, it will garner a lot of press. But he is not the only senior Republican backing off Trump. Speaker Paul Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he was “just not ready” to endorse Trump, and former Gov. Jeb Bush published a contemptuous Facebook post saying Trump “has not demonstrated [the] temperament or strength of character” needed to be President.
According to the Speaker’s staffers, Trump has also been misleading about Speaker Ryan. Trump described, on air, an apparently imaginary call of support from Ryan. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times’ reported that though Trump had claimed the Speaker called him up on April 19 to congratulate him for winning the New York primary, Ryan’s spokesman denied the call ever took place.
Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press in a pre-taped appearance that aired Sunday that his alleged conversation with Ryan had been “a very nice call, a very encouraging call,” and that he had been “blindsided” when he heard that Ryan would not be endorsing him.
This is exactly the language used by Trump in describing ‘several recent’ calls of support from Senator Rubio, in which Rubio had said ‘very warm…. Very nice things’. Rubio’s office stated that was also not true, as we reported on Friday.
Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said Trump’s account of a Ryan call after the New York vote in April was incorrect. “They talked in March about our agenda but not since then,” Buck wrote in an email to Haberman.
Trump seems to have stretched the truth even regarding that March call with Ryan, as RedState’s Leon Wolf points out:
Trump at the time tried to characterize the call as Ryan calling to congratulate him and basically to anoint him as the likely nominee; Ryan’s people immediately clarified that the only reason they called Trump was that someone in Trump’s organization had called Ryan and requested a return call, so Ryan called to see what Trump wanted.
The Washington Post observed that Trump’s antagonistic relationship with the truth was unusual even among politicians, noting that he “appears to care little about the facts” and “makes Four-Pinocchio statements [WaPo’s rating for the most egregious lies] over and over again, even though fact checkers have demonstrated them to be false.” Trump’s staff apparently don’t even bother to reply to fact-checking inquiries. WaPo is maintaining a running list of Trump’s Four-Pinocchio statements. Based on just this past week, that list will continue to grow.
Getting compared to a wooden puppet is far from Trump’s only concern. Jennifer Rubin noted that Trump’s flip flops on issues like the minimum wage and taxes, and his factually questionable statements about talking ‘very warm[ly]’ ‘recently’ to both Rubio and Ryan, were making it more likely that Republicans would flee the party to support a third party presidential candidate. “Judging from his conduct over the past few days, Trump is making it easier for principled Republicans to reject him,” Rubin said.
Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter: @rumpfshaker.
