Trump Reportedly Mistook Archived Footage Of North Korea For Live Missile Launch

‘That’s old footage, old footage!’ Senator Lindsey Graham reassured the president.

Senator Lindsey Graham says in a new interview that President Donald Trump once thought that archived footage of North Korean missile launches was happening in real time, The Hill reports.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, senior United States Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham was invited to the White House for lunch. Trump, Graham, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster watched Fox News while dining.

Eager to get Lindsey Graham’s thoughts on national security, Trump started a conversation with the senator — Graham is a self-proclaimed national security expert — who singled out Iran and North Korea as two of his biggest concerns.

Coincidentally, at that point, Fox News started showing archived footage of North Korean missile launches. Apparently, President Trump started worrying that the launch was happening in real time. Luckily, Senator Graham reassured him.

“That’s old footage, old footage!”

Graham laughed while recounting the memory for the Washington Post.

“I think he’s a kook” Graham said of Trump in 2016, but the senator has gone from one of the president’s most prominent Republican critics to a loyal ally.

From supporting Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Brett Kavanaugh to praising the president’s golf skills, the senator keeps publicly defending the POTUS. How did this change of tune come about?

“I’m always intrigued by the desire to figure out why somebody acts the way they do in public life,” Graham explained to the Washington Post, arguing that he has “truly grown” to like Trump. Even if he sometimes doesn’t agree with everything that the president says or does, Graham sees Trump as “a good vehicle for a conservative agenda.”

In Fear: Trump in the White House, journalist and author Bob Woodward wrote about President Trump’s impulsiveness and lack of political knowledge, and alleged that the president had once urged that the American troops leave South Korea, according to the Business Insider.

According to Woodward, Secretary of Defense James Mattis pleaded that the president leave the troops in South Korea, since their removal could “lead to World War III,” considering North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

Fox News, President Trump’s favorite network, is seemingly a powerful influence in the White House, infiltrating the president’s mind and – to an extent at least – shaping policy. Trump often live-tweets while watching Fox News, echoing the talking points expressed by the conservative network’s pundits. Earlier today, after President Trump accused anti-Kavanaugh protesters via Twitter of being “professionals” paid by George Soros and others, the Daily Beast noted that that the president’s tweet was published about an hour after a Fox News anchor implied that Soros may be “behind all this.”

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