Republican donors in attendance called it one of Trump's weirdest lies ever. On Friday night, under a tent erected over the pool at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, President Trump claimed the media were spreading "fake news" when they said he called the CEO of Apple "Tim Apple."
Trump told the donors that he actually said "Tim Cook Apple" really fast, and the "Cook" part of the sentence was soft. But all you heard from the "fake news," he said, was "Tim Apple."
Two donors who were there told me they couldn't understand why the president would make such a claim given the whole thing is captured on video. Nobody cared, they said, and Tim Cook took it in good humor by changing his Twitter profile to Tim Apple.
"I just thought, why would you lie about that," one of the donors told me. "It doesn't even matter!"
Today he tweeted this:
At a recent round table meeting of business executives, & long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple, I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words. The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!
Trump's father suffered from Alzheimer's Disease and I would guess he's afraid he's going to get it too. That's understandable. This was an odd moment, although it just seems to be a funny slip of the tongue not a memory problem.
I would feel sorry for him for having to worry about this except for the fact that if the shoe were on the other foot he'd be relentlessly cruel to a political rival who made a similar slip.
Trump has had some other strange moments like this:
