A political scientist and author, a man who is a contributor to Time and has almost half a million Twitter followers, fabricated a quote about Joe, which he attributed to President Trump. Guess what happened next.

If you guessed "Democrats, journalists, #Resistance Twitter, and so on Tweeted it and treated it as true," then ding-ding-ding, you win. Because that is indeed what happened.

The quote, which one can admit is sort of plausible as Trumpism, was "Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleep Joe Biden."



It really caught on, as you can see by the retweets. And although that above number does not include people who "quote retweeted" it, there were plenty. Including Congressman Ted Lieu and CNN contributor Ana Navarro.

We could go on. And on. But you get the picture. On the same weekend when there is a huge flap about fake Pelosi videos, how this was taken at face value is mystifying. Particularly with a track record on taking things at face value the left and media have built up. Kavanaugh hearing, MAGA hat Covington teens, Smollett...

Still, not everyone fell for it, of course. Some learning has happened in the last two years.



But it was fake, of course. And that eventually came out.



And once the truth was out, Bremmer suffered the wrath of the mob something fierce. Here are just two examples. There were many, many more.







This is not a real Trump quote; what he and Sarah Sanders said on this is bad enough as is. If you're basing your views of reality based on Ian Bremmer's tweets in 2019, please reconsider. pic.twitter.com/izVoCXcsly

— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) May 26, 2019





The lesson here is not the one Bremmer intended, though it's close. He seems to think he taught everyone how plausible his fake quote is. But in reality, what he instructed was "Don't trust Ian Bremmer.

And it's a great lesson in letting hate and confirmation bias make you a fool. Journalists have fallen for fake news about Trump time and time and time and time again. When, if ever, will they finally look in the mirror and ask "am I not as objective as I think I am?"

Here's an exit question, based on a tweet from Daily Wire's Ryan Saavedra.



The question: Will it be treated with the same scorn? They will say "but the President did it, not a Time writer" but … what about the Democrats who shared this fake quote?