Donald Trump is getting lots of flak for allegedly retweeting a Benito Mussolini quote — after a Gawker journalist set an elaborate Twitter trap for him. The joke is on the mastermind of the sting operation: The phrase "It's better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep" did not in fact originate with the Italian dictator.
Trump's anti-intellectualism is so in-your-face that people who consider themselves intellectuals are affronted. They like to fact-check Trump to show how ignorant he is. When during a recent campaign appearance in South Carolina Trump told an apocryphal story of Gen. Jack Pershing executing Muslim rebels in the Philippines with bullets soaked in pig's blood, rebuttals were all over the media and Internet.
This time around, however, the story everywhere, from The New York Times to the BBC, and even in Italian papers, is that Trump tweeted a Mussolini quote: