If President Donald Trump wants people to start talking about “real news,” he may want to stop making up fake phone calls.
This week, Trump touted two phone calls that the people allegedly on the other side of the line say did not happen.
The first was a call Trump said took place between himself and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.“As you know, the border was a tremendous problem and they’re close to 80 percent stoppage,” Trump said. “And even the president of Mexico called me—they said their southern border, very few people are coming because they know they’re not going to get through our border, which is the ultimate compliment.”
Mexico’s government, however, says the call never happened. In a statement to CBS News, the Mexican Foreign Ministry said Nieto “has not recently spoken to President Donald Trump over the telephone.”
The second apparently fake call stems from Trump’s controversial speech at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree in West Virginia last week.
“I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal, according to a transcript of the interview published by Politico.
However, the Boy Scouts cast doubt that the call occurred. “We are unaware of any such call,” the organization said. It added that neither President Randall Stephenson nor Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh—the people you might think of as the “head of the Boy Scouts,” as Trump put it—placed such a call.