In Las Vegas, with Project Veritas Action founder James O'Keefe in the audience, Trump attempted to draw attention to a video O'Keefe's group had released Monday.

“I believe it was her campaign that did it. Just like if you look at what came out today on the clips where I was wondering what happened with my rally in Chicago and other rallies where we had such violence,” Trump said. “She's the one and Obama that caused the violence. They hired people. They paid them $1,500, and they're on tape saying be violent, cause fights, do bad things.”

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To the viewer who had not followed the story on Fox News, it was not clear what Trump was talking about. He was referring to a video titled “Rigging the Election — Video I: Clinton Campaign and DNC Incite Violence at Trump Rallies,” which led to the firing of Wisconsin-based strategist Scott Foval from the group Americans United for Change. Over several aggregated clips of undercover interviews, Foval explains how he has paid and trained activists to tempt Trump voters into violence.

“It is not hard to get some of these a--holes to pop off,” Foval says. “It's a matter of showing up, to want to get into the rally, in a Planned Parenthood T-shirt. Or, Trump is a Nazi, you know. You can message to draw them out, and draw them to punch you.”

Aaron Black, a Democratic National Committee rapid response director, is quoted taking credit for the disruptions that undid a Trump rally in Chicago. Zulema Rodriguez, an Arizona activist, is filmed saying, “B and I did the Chicago Trump event where we shut down the — yeah." (It's not explained who “B” is.) Statements from Democracy Partners founder Robert Creamer about his own daily talks with the DNC are spliced it, implying that the Democrats are paying for all of this.

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But contemporary reporting on the Chicago protests found that student groups, not Black or the DNC, organized to “stop Trump.” Rodriguez was paid $1,610 for work in Arizona, not Chicago. Foval began working as a contractor the DNC months after the Chicago rally.

In the debate, Trump glided past this, saying that the debacle of the Chicago protest was “now all on tape, started by her.” He put it in a way that couldn't pass muster with fact checkers and was downright confusing for anyone who had not clicked onto the Project Veritas video.

Similarly, in the first debate, Trump attempted to deflect a question about his promotion of the “birther” theory — that President Obama might have been born outside the United States — by referring to sketchy reports that Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal had told a McClatchy editor to look into the theory. (It was revealed that Blumenthal had pushed an unrelated story about Obama's political meddling in Kenya.)

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“Sidney Blumenthal works for the campaign and close — very close friend of Secretary Clinton,” Trump said. “And her campaign manager, Patti Doyle, went to — during the campaign, her campaign against President Obama, fought very hard. And you can go look it up, and you can check it out. And if you look at CNN this past week, Patti Solis Doyle was on Wolf Blitzer saying that this happened. Blumenthal sent McClatchy, highly respected reporter at McClatchy, to Kenya to find out about it. They were pressing it very hard. She failed to get the birth certificate.”

Trump never actually explained what Blumenthal allegedly did, and misrepresented what Solis Doyle had said — that a Clinton volunteer who had shared a negative meme about Obama's citizenship was immediately fired. In the second debate, Trump made another attempt to promote the story and was tongue-tied again.

“Your campaign, Sidney Blumenthal — he’s another real winner that you have — and he’s the one that got this started, along with your campaign manager, and they were on television just two weeks ago, she was, saying exactly that. So you really owe him an apology. You’re the one that sent the pictures around your campaign, sent the pictures around with President Obama in a certain garb. That was long before I was ever involved, so you actually owe an apology. Number two, Michelle Obama. I’ve gotten to see the commercials that they did on you. And I’ve gotten to see some of the most vicious commercials I’ve ever seen of Michelle Obama talking about you, Hillary.”

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In fact, Obama's campaign had never used Michelle Obama in an anti-Clinton ad. Trump was apparently thinking of two speeches the future first lady gave in 2007, when she said that “if you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House.” This week, belatedly, the pro-Trump super PAC, Keep the Promise I, cut that quote into a TV ad. But nine years earlier, President Obama had insisted that the quote was a reference to his family's delicate arrangement of its schedule to take care of Malia and Sasha, then preteen girls.