It is clear that Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, thinks we are all idiots. This was made even clearer in a recent clip from CNN’s news coverage of Trump’s recent comments about President Obama, Hillary Clinton and ISIS.

In the video, his spokesperson, Katrina Pierson, literally butchered the actual history and origins of the War in Afghanistan and ISIS to try and smear President Obama and Clinton. But, the host, Victor Blackwell, was having none of that.

After playing a clip where Donald Trump calls Obama the “founder” of ISIS and intimates that Clinton had a hand in it too, Blackwell asks Pierson if this was simple sarcasm or something deeper.

In response, Pierson basically repeats Trump’s sentiments and adds that Obama’s and Clinton’s policies “gave rise to the formation of ISIS” post-2009 and moved us into the War in Afghanistan.

Blackwell pushes back on her comments saying, “You know that ISIS actually started in 2004 with AQY, al Qaeda in Iraq? Then morphed into, in 2006, the Islamic State in Iraq.” Black well continues, “So this is not something that started during the Obama Administration…many people have said that there is a path there for Donald Trump but he is saying that was sarcastic but not that sarcastic about something that happened in 2004.”

“If you want to go way back, we can look at the troop surge, and after 2007 al Qaeda was essentially in ashes,” Pierson replies. “It was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who then destroyed the entire rollout by wanting to pull out early, announcing their plans, ignoring intelligence… That is the reason why ISIS is a global issue.”

Then, Blackwell attempts to course correct the conversation to actual facts about what actually happened leading up to the War in Afghanistan. But, Pierson sticks to her non-factual talking points.
“Remember, we weren’t even in Afghanistan by this time. Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem,” Pierson says. She also pivots to Hillary Clinton’s alleged involvement in Libya.
Blackwell asked her to clarify, and she said, “That was Obama’s war, yes.” She also double-down on her wrong statement saying that Obama, “created the hotbed for global terrorists to travel the world under the name ISIS.”
Blackwell jumps in to ensure that the conversation actually has some basis in reality saying, “For factual sake, for the sake of just correct information,  when you said that Barack Obama took the country into Afghanistan, it was not during the – of course, as you know – during the Obama Administration that we first went into Afghanistan….It was President Bush who took us to Afghanistan shortly after 9-11.”
Pierson then says, “I thought we were talking about the founding of ISIS. I mean ISIS came out of the Obama side of the war. Is that not a fact?”
“No, it is not a fact,” Blackwell replies matter-of-factly.
If nothing else, this clip shows the lengths that Trump’s surrogates and spokespeople will go to in order to manipulate political happenings and actual history to support their agenda. The fact that this individual could end up President says so much about this country and the direction we’re headed in.
Watch the full clip below:

Photo: CNN/ YouTube Screenshot