Donald Trump Fell For Internet Hoax: Report

WASHINGTON, DC — A remarkable new report claims that President Donald Trump was recently duped by an internet hoax, prompting White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to warn senior staff not to secretly slip things to the president.

Politico reports that K.T. McFarland, deputy national security adviser, gave Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers, one from the 1970s warning of the coming Ice Age, and another from 2008 about surviving global warming.

Trump was furious after seeing the two covers, according to the report, incensed about the hypocrisy of the media.

There's just one problem: The widely circulated 1970s Time cover showing a penguin standing atop an iceberg with the headline "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" is a hoax. The original headline was "The Global Warming Survival Guide," and the issue was from 2007, not 1977. The Photoshop artist even changed the three stories listed above the main cover story to match what you would expect in a 1977 copy of the magazine.

Staff reportedly had to intervene and inform Trump of this before he went and tweeted or discussed it in public.

It's not the first time the president has been fooled. According to Politico, someone handed Trump a printed copy of an article from GotNews.com — run by a man who has been permanently banned from Twitter — that claims deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh was behind a "bunch of leaks" in the White House. There was no evidence provided, and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon denied the report, but that didn't stop Trump from asking his staff about Walsh.

The incidents showcase just how quickly Trump's attention and agenda can be shifted by something being shoved in his hand, even if that something wouldn't stand up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny.

Trump had admitted multiple times he doesn't bother to fact check the information he comes across.

"Hey, Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic?" Trump said on "The O'Reilly Factor" in November 2015 after being questioned about a false statistic he tweeted grossly overstating how often black people kill white people. "I get millions and millions of people, @RealDonaldTrump, by the way."

Earlier this year, Trump made the easily debunkable claim that he had gotten the most Electoral College votes since Ronald Reagan, when in fact every president since Reagan other than George W. Bush scored much larger victories than Trump. When a reporter confronted him on the false claim, Trump essentially shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, no, I was given that information," he said. "I don’t know, I was just given that. We had a very, very big margin."

Image via Gage Skidmore