What did Donald Trump do today?
He repeated an already disproven lie about Sen. Bob Corker's (R-TN) position on the Iran nuclear agreement.
Trump began the day agitated even by the usual grumpy standards of his morning Twitter rants, lashing out in a five-tweet tirade that Sen. Corker "helped President O give us the bad Iran Deal."
In reality, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Corker did more than almost anyone else in the Senate to frustrate approval of the original deal, forcing the Obama administration to include provisions for congressional oversight of the process. Corker did vote for the revised version--and so did almost every other member of Congress. It passed 98-1 in the Senate and 400-25 in the House.
(Trump's objection to the six-nation agreement seems to be mostly about his belief that he is a master negotiator, and that it happened on President Obama's watch.)
Repeatedly asked to explain Trump's comments, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted that it was Corker alone who had "rolled out the red carpet" for the agreement and not the other 497 members of Congress who voted for it.
Why does this matter?
- False statements do not become true just because a president keeps saying them.
- It's fair to wonder, as at least two Republican senators did today, if Trump is capable of controlling his moods.