I'm with Bump on this one - The unamusing effect of treating the ‘fake Melania’ nonsense seriously
"Just how do i know that photo you used isn't a total photo-shop. I don't think it was photo shopped because..."
Analysis by Philip Bump National correspondent March 13, 2019 at 12:05 p.m. EDT
Last Friday, President Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron, 12, left the White House to board Marine One, the president’s helicopter.
(Evan Vucci/AP) [...] For a brief moment, they stood side-by-side in silence.
(Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
And that moment kicked off a new round of one of the stupidest rumors to have emerged in a very stupid time.
You may recall a moment last October [2018] when conspiracy rumors spread on the Internet about Trump deploying a body double to stand in for Melania at an official event. It was a rumor started by a guy who sells hemp oil for a living and was quickly and easily debunked .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/18/weve-idd-the-mystery-woman-in-those-melania-trump-impostor-rumors-its-melania-trump/?utm_term=.9534357adc50&itid=lk_inline_manual_16 . Even setting aside the sheer dumbness of the idea that Trump would want or need to have an impostor at an event where the first lady’s presence was completely optional, the photos that were offered to prove that the attending Melania wasn’t the real Melania actually quite obviously showed that it was the real Melania. [...] This new version of the rumor, too, is obviously false. The timeline above makes clear that the same woman who left the White House is the one who got on Marine One and then Air Force One and then went to Alabama. Where was this theoretical body double swapped in? Midflight from Maryland to Georgia? Does she wait upstairs at the White House until needed? And, most of all: Why? Why bother doing this?
You may tack on another question: Why are we talking about this now? And the answer is that Trump himself did Wednesday morning, in a distinctly Trump fashion.
-- The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that it’s actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. They are only getting more deranged with time! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 --
There are several things happening here that bear mentioning.
The first is Trump’s conflation of talk shows and culture reporters covering the story as a lark with “fake news” broadly. It’s a nifty rhetorical trick that he deploys often: Any coverage of any sort that’s at all unflattering becomes evidence that the media broadly is out to get him. This is not a story that ran on the front page of The Washington Post after four reporters uncovered that a fake Melania was present in Alabama. It was “The View.” Granted, Trump often conflates Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” with hard news coverage, so it’s clear that the line is blurrier than it may seem.
The second thing that Trump does in the tweet is expand his allegations of what the media did wrong into the realm of falsehood. It’s not clear where the hemp guy’s photo of Melania came from, but there’s no obvious evidence that it was manipulated. (In a prior life I worked at Adobe and helped write the manual on Photoshop, so I think I know of what I speak.) Almost no one looks the same in every photo, especially when the person is surrounded by cameras every time she is out in public. Hemp Guy simply leveraged that inconsistency — twice — to go viral.
Where’d Trump get that detail? He appears to have heard about the story when it was covered Wednesday morning on “Fox and Friends.” The hosts and guest Tammy Bruce discussed the segment on “The View" and looped it into a broader critique of the left, but they don’t appear to have suggested the photo had been altered. (Bruce thought her appearance may have been different because Melania was emotional at the memorial.)
And Trump may well have made it up from whole cloth, simply to bolster his idea that the media is so deranged (as he and his followers like to say) that they’d intentionally make the first lady look different to reinforce this weird conspiracy theory.
And that’s the problem. Nothing the media can do short of outright obsequiousness will prevent Trump from offering critiques or stretching the truth to force one. But perhaps the media broadly, including light daytime talk-show fare, should ignore obviously nonsensical conspiracy theories fostered by people just trying to get attention.
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. He writes the weekly How To Read This Chart, to which you should subscribe. Twitter
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