This isn’t like making up Abraham Lincoln quotes, but it is getting in the same ballpark.

President Trump is in Germany of the G20 summit in Hamburg (let’s hear it for the Reeperbahn!) and he’s expected to be greeted by a lot of the anarchist/anitfa-style protesters to prove the #Resistance lives. According to CNN, this is all part of Angela Merkel’s grand design:

The good part starts at 0:28.

There’s a reason for it. Quite simply, Angela Merkel has chosen to hold this summit in an environment, in a location that can be surrounded by protesters. Not as we see some summits on a remote hilltop where the whole village or the town around it is secure. And there will be protesters here. There were protesters last night. The police had to turn a water cannon on about a thousand of them. They just sort of rained it on them, didn’t wash them off the street. There was a women’s protest just down beside here a little while ago. The essence of the idea here is, not forgetting Angela Merkel is in a reelection campaign this year, the protesters will be able to get close so that, in part, President Trump can hear the voices of dissent here in Germany, here in Europe. And that voice of dissent, Angela Merkel’s voice of dissent, with President Trump over their different views on trade, their concerns about protectionism from the United States. Angela Merkel was quoted in a popular weekly political paper here saying that ‘The United States sees globalization differently to how we do. We see a win win situation,’ she said. ‘The United States see winners and losers where only some profit in globalization.’ So the stakes have been set pretty high there and the people of Germany and others will be able to give voice and vent their frustrations and feelings that perhaps the German chancellor is too polite to say in the terms that they will.

There are two problems with this.

First, the odds of Angela Merkel wanting the G20 Summit in Hamburg to be remembered for tens of thousands of protesters engaging in street battles with ill-tempered Polizei are slim. You can’t unleash a riot and expect to be able to control it. The last thing Merkel needs in a reelection campaign is to be associated with anarchy.

Second:

The German government says it will host a summit of the Group of 20 major world economic powers in Hamburg on July 7 and 8 next year. The government said Friday that the meeting will likely be held at the northern port city’s congress center. The venue contrasts with the remote hotel in the Bavarian Alps where Germany hosted last year’s Group of Seven summit, but the government says it “fulfills all the logistical and security demands.”

This is from June 10, 2016. I guarantee you that in June of last year Merkel was not thinking, “that damned Donald Trump is going to be president and I will humiliate him next year.”

(h/t to Mollie Z. Hemingway at The Federalist)

This is where I part company with those who give the media the benefit of a doubt. These errors are not the result of bad luck or chance. These errors are part of a conscious effort on the part of reporters to show Trump in the worst possible light. They aren’t content to merely report what he does, which can often be bad enough, they have to concoct stories like this that are provably false.