You know you’ve gone too far when even Twitter has called out a Never Trumper organization. The problem came from The Lincoln Project, for tweeting misinformation about the president.
The Lincoln Project was fact-checked by Twitter for sharing a clip of President Donald Trump’s Independence Day speech, which was taken completely out of context. The video, which Twitter claimed had been “edited in a way that makes it appear as though the president says Operation Desert Storm took place in Vietnam” was tweeted by The Lincoln Project.
The group had tweeted it with the caption, “What’s wrong with the President?” The video, which has since been deleted, was labelled with a “Manipulated Media” interstitial, or filter, that linked to a Twitter “Events” page. The events page was titled “Donald Trump did not say Operation Desert Storm took place in Vietnam, Snopes and CNN reporters confirm.”
The events page summarized the controversy by explaining the context of the entire speech and how it was deceptively edited:
During his Independence Day address, US President Donald Trump listed a number of wars the nation has fought in, referencing the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. Reporters from Snopes and CNN confirmed that a short clip from his speech being shared online is misleading because it has been edited in a way that makes it appear as though the president says Operation Desert Storm took place in Vietnam. A member of Trump’s campaign shared a longer clip from the speech to show the president listing the wars separately.
Rapid Response Trump campaign member Giancarlo Sopo responded to the incident by posting a longer clip which put Trump’s words in context. He said:
This video is grossly misleading.
President Trump did not say Operation Desert Storm is in the jungles of Vietnam.
All this person had to do was back-up the video some 15 seconds.
While Trump had stumbled over some of his words, he truly had been summarizing how American aircraft had been engaged in many battles over the last 75 years in his speech:
In a few moments, we will bear witness to awesome aircraft representing every major military conflict over the last 75 years. These planes once launched off massive aircraft carriers in the fiercest battles of World War II. They raced through the skies of Korea’s MiG Alley. They carried American warriors into the dense fields and jungles of Vietnam. They delivered a swift and swip- — and you know that sweeping — it was swift and it was sweeping like nobody has ever seen anything happen — a victory in Operation Desert Storm.
