US President Donald Trump has been known for making several controversial statements and for signing even more controversial laws. He has also been criticized for slamming certain groups of people, be it through his speeches or his tweets. This time, an article claimed that Trump allegedly called the members of the Liberal Party in the Philippines as “lazy fools” and good at “drug trafficking, lovemaking and corruption.”
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The story, after being picked up by blogs like viral-dutertenews.blogspot.com, balitangbayan.com, and pinoybuzzfeed.com, was shared by Facebook fan pages including “Sara Duterte Supporters International,” “Duterte Saviours of Filipinos Today,” “Duterte News,” and “Duterte Loyalist.”
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Based on their captions, they either believed or wanted their followers to believe the article’s claim about Trump slamming LP.
However, we find another Duterte fan page, “Atty. Rody R. Duterte Supporter,” sharing the same story. This time, though, their story came from a website that we’re quite familiar with, the fake news site fox-channel.com. Meme Buster has busted several hoaxes from this site.
Even if the fan page indicated in its caption how the article is a “satire,” the comments on the post still showed how netizens took the story as real news.
According to fox-channel.com, whose story was merely copied by the other blogs, Trump is disgusted at Vice President Leni Robredo, Senator Leila De Lima, “Loida Lewis Nicolus,” and other LP members, calling them “lazy fools only good at drug trafficking, lovemaking and corruption.” The American president made this statement during his speech in Indianapolis, during which he also allegedly promised to deport the LP members. Again, the writer misspelled Nicolas, Fil-Am community leader Loida’s surname, as “Nicolus.”
The article even quoted Trump:
“Liberal Party members are very lazy. The best they can do is gallivanting around ghettoes, lamenting how they are discriminated. These are the people America doesn’t need. They are the enemies of progress. Look at their country for example, those people are frustrating their own, President Rodrigo Duterte. They are spoiling their own youth using drugs and go to invest the money in foreign countries. They only qualify to be used as a case study whenever bad examples are required. How do you trust even those who have ran away to hide here at the United States hiding behind education? I hear they abuse me in their blogs but I don’t care because even the Internet they are using is ours and we can decide to switch it off from this side.”
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The article also noted how Trump promised to restore America’s glory by “draining the swamp.”
He allegedly said, “I’m draining the swamp by restoring our dignity that we have since lost through Obama. The more reason why I still believe Obama used to fight Duterte because he knew there were fishy deals between him and these Liberal members.”
But as we tried to verify the statements allegedly uttered by Trump, we found out that the first statement criticizing LP was busted by fact-checking site snopes.com. The statement was also used to write a fake news about how Trump allegedly criticized the Africans. Such hoaxes mainly appeared on African sites, such as Politica.
This time, Trump’s alleged statement was phrased in a way that it was targeted to the Filipino audience by inserting a criticism for the LP members and involving Duterte’s name. However, the statement remains to be false, made-up.
As for that “drain the swamp” line, it was indeed a campaign slogan from Trump last October. However, Trump did not release any statement about alleged “fishy deals” between Obama and LP.
The entire article from fox-channel.com was made up, just like many of its stories, including De Lima being thrown out of Berlin conference hall, De Lima’s son being caught with drugs, VP Leni Robredo being pregnant and getting an abortion, and more.
Sources: (snopes.com, politics.co.ke, time.com)
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