Trump supporters accused me of smearing his campaign manager. Today they’re smearing Jim Acosta.
When Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski physically assaulted Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a 2016 rally, Trump supporters were quick to accuse her of fabricating the entire incident despite the evidence:
“‘It’s a hoax,’ pro-Trump voices on Twitter and in parts of right-wing media claimed. They reasoned that I, a Breitbart reporter sent to cover the rally, had teamed up with The Washington Post’s Ben Terris, who witnessed the incident and wrote about it, to bring down the Trump campaign. I had faked the bruises on my arm and manufactured the audio recording of the incident.”
At the time, Fields couldn’t even imagine anyone seriously making up a story like hers. So she assumed Trump’s supporters couldn’t either, and were all just pretending to buy into the absurd conspiracy theory in order to defend Trump and his campaign no matter what.
How very naive.
Two years later, the Trump administration falsely accused CNN’s Jim Acosta of assaulting a White House intern; promulgated a doctored video as “proof”; and refused to back down even after the video was shown to be fraudulent.
Which is pretty much exactly what the Trump campaign falsely accused Fields of doing back in 2016.
So now she gets it.
“The same people who claimed I was lying about what happened to me in 2016 are standing behind these ludicrous White House accusations. In fact, it’s some of the exact same people. The seemingly doctored video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, a contributor to the far-right site Infowars who in 2016 repeatedly claimed that I was nothing more than a hoaxer. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m pretty sure that the term used for this phenomenon is projection. I was accused of doing something I would never even think of doing by people who thought I might have done it precisely because they themselves were capable of doing it.”
