"PEOPLE ARE SAYING...":

Trump has put thousands of fake news stories out there, some enormous and others so small you wonder why he bothers. Here are 14 fake news stories from the recent and distant past that Trump has created or promoted.

1. Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who never attended Columbia University.

Trump began courting his base in 2011, when he assumed a position as a lead voice among the birthers, a group of racists and Islamophobes desperate for any reason to delegitimize the first black president. For half a decade, Trump relentlessly peddled birtherism and other overtly racialized lies. He suggested that President Obama fabricated his time at Columbia University, a favorite contention among a right-wing that reserves a particularly visceral hatred for educated "elites" of the uppity black variety. Trump also demanded--demanded, with all the gall and entitlement of a mediocre "self-made" white trust fund kid--that Obama prove he was good enough and American enough to hold the office. To ensure this demand was as demeaning as possible, Trump offered Obama $5 million (he would later lie and say it was $50 million) to show his passport and longform birth certificate, as if Obama would shuck and jump at the money. When Trump finally dropped all the birther stuff earlier this year, he tried to slither out of it via more fake news, and invented a story pinning the whole thing on Hillary Clinton.

2. Hillary Clinton was too ill to serve as president. [...]

3. Ted Cruz's father was involved in a plot to kill President Kennedy. [...]

4. The Central Park 5 are guilty and deserve the death penalty (1989). [...]

6. 'Thousands and thousands of [Muslims] were cheering' on 9/11. [...]

7. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. 

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