Senior Trump administration officials privately acknowledged the phoniness of many of the president's talking points on the migrant caravan in Latin America headed to the US — but praised him all the same for riling up his conservative base.
In conversations with The Daily Beast, officials noted that Donald Trump's increasingly-unlikely assertions aren't entirely true.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate,” one senior official told the website. “This is the play.”
A GOP operative noted that one such claim — that liberal megadonor and popular right-wing boogeyman George Soros is funding the impoverished migrants — is likely made-up.
"Soros is probably not masterminding these people coming to the border,” the operative told The Daily Beast before adding that such truth-stretching "happens on both sides."
"It's an issue that motivates Trump's most ardent conservative base,” the operative said. “If your worry was that we’re not going to be able to turn our base voters out, well—what’s the opposite of kryptonite?”
According to the report, administration officials fielding press calls Tuesday would not defend Trump's claims that there are "unknown Middle Easterners" among the Latin American migrants in the caravan, instead directing reporters to "the Mexican authorities."
"The president has made his comments on it," a senior official who spoke on background told The Daily Beast. "We’re not going to speak for him on what that looks like."
Read the entire report via The Daily Beast.