Republican donors in attendance called it one of Trump's weirdest lies ever. On Friday night, under a tent erected over the pool at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, President Trump claimed the media were spreading "fake news" when they said he called the CEO of Apple "Tim Apple."
Trump told the donors that he actually said "Tim Cook Apple" really fast, and the "Cook" part of the sentence was soft. But all you heard from the "fake news," he said, was "Tim Apple."
Two donors who were there told me they couldn't understand why the president would make such a claim given the whole thing is captured on video. Nobody cared, they said, and Tim Cook took it in good humor by changing his Twitter profile to Tim Apple.
- "I just thought, why would you lie about that," one of the donors told me. "It doesn't even matter!"
Between the lines: This isn't the first time Trump has tried to persuade people not to trust video. As The New York Times first reported, Trump privately told a senator that the Access Hollywood tape, in which he talks about sexually assaulting women, was fake. (Trump had previously admitted the voice was his, and apologized for "locker room talk.")
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