Whenever the national media put forth a new victim to rally behind in the name of the #Resistance, you should suspect you’re being lied to.

The latest is Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. President Trump said in a recent interview that he was unaware Meghan had spoken negatively about him during the 2016 campaign.

A journalist for the British Sun tabloid asked Trump on Sunday ahead of his trip to the U.K., “Are you sorry not to see her? Because she wasn’t so nice during the campaign, I don’t know if you saw that.”

Trump, informed Meghan, originally of Los Angeles, would be on maternity leave, replied, “I didn’t know that. No, I hope she’s OK. I did not know that.”

The journalist goaded Trump, telling him, “She said she’d move to Canada if you got elected; turned out she moved to Britain.”

“That will be good,” Trump said. “A lot of people moving here, so what can I say? No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.”

This was boiled down to: Trump calls princess 'nasty'!

Trump had actually added in the interview that “it’s nice” that the United Kingdom now has a princess of American descent and that “she’ll be very good.”

The term “nasty” was used by Trump as a stand-in for the reporter’s original characterization of “wasn’t so nice.”

But you wouldn't know the real story by glancing at the news coverage. Washington Post blogger Eugene Scott said Trump’s “attacks” on Meghan were “familiar and unsurprising,” because his use of the word “nasty” reinforced the belief that Trump “is sexist and misogynistic.” (For the record, here's Trump using the word "nasty" to describe Donny Deutsch, David Gregory, Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Charles Krauthammer, to name a few men.)

See, if you just put forth a claim, whether merited or not, and assert, like Scott, that it’s “rooted” in some belief — any belief! — it becomes true!

Charles Blow, always good for a laugh, acknowledged Sunday in his New York Times column that the question by the Sun journalist was a “set up” for Trump. But Blow knew in his heart that it was a "set up" that "both parties wanted.”

Blow lectured that, “A better journalist, if he or she wanted to have Trump weigh in on [Meghan’s 2016] comments, would simply read Meghan’s response and ask for the president’s response." These are lessons in journalism coming from Blow, who proudly skipped a face-to-face meeting with Trump in 2017.

And outside of journalism, it’s stupidity not limited to Blow.

ABC analyst Matthew Dowd tweeted that Trump “used the word nasty … in reference to her.”

CBS News correspondent Bill Rehkopf tweeted, “He called her ‘nasty.’”

Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty tweeted, “He actually calls her ‘nasty’ in this audio. That is the exact word he uses.”

Ben White of Politico tweeted, “This is literally exactly what he says. ‘I didn’t know that she was nasty.’”

Well, yes. This is “literally exactly” what Trump said the same way this morning I “literally exactly” said “I’ll kill you.” It turns out I didn’t mean I’d literally kill my editor. I only meant that I didn’t agree with his decision to remove my use of the word “teats” from a piece about Michael Avenatti.

The media do this type of thing freely whenever they need a new victim to post up against Trump. They’ll lie about Trump calling immigrants “animals” (he was explicitly referring to MS-13 gang members). They’ll lie about Trump calling European allies “foes” (It was CBS’s Jeff Glor who used the word). And they’ll lie about him mocking a reporter who happens to be disabled.

Meghan isn’t a victim and she wasn’t attacked. She’s a critic of the White House and just like all of them, the media are helping her play dead when she gets a response.