President Trump Signs Executive Order Banning Impeachment –Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
President Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would ban the impeachment of presidents going forward.
The Truth:
False reports that President Trump is considering an executive order that would abolish the impeachment of presidents stem from a website that publishes political satire.
The story appeared at NewsWerthy.com on May 29, 2017, under the headline, “Trump Wants Executive Order Abolishing Impeachment.” The story claims that Trump was considering the move in response to “mountains of bad press and talk of impeachment,” and that he had convened his legal team to explore options:
President Trump reportedly called an impromptu meeting of his entire legal team in the Oval Office, which one anonymous source was able to recount entirely. The source detailed that as soon as the meeting began, President Trump was red in the face and “clearly angry” over some of the media reports he had been reading online. Trump stated that he wanted to “end the liberal crusade, once and for all.”
After ranting for some time about “fake news” reports, the president went on to say, “I’m tired of all the pressure. Jared has done a lot of good, loyal work for me, and it’s all being threatened. Don’t people know that the President needs to have some secrets? Politics is a dirty game. Everyone knows that!”
As the report spread across social media, angry readers quickly (and correctly) pointed that it was not within the president’s powers to amend the Constitution of the United States, which outlines terms for impeachment, via executive order:
Those readers, however, forgot to look at the source of rumors about President Trump considering prohibiting impeachment. NewsWerthy.com is a political satire site that, according to its “About” page, aims to mislead and even anger social media users with fictitious stories to remind them that the media and the government are both a joke:
The current state of affairs with our government, global politics, and the news media is just one giant joke. If you take everything personally, how could you not become a cynic? How could you not be angry at the Facebook post that offends your ideals? All we want you to do is to remember that the establishment of media and government is a giant joke. We at NewsWerthy believe that it’s perfectly okay to laugh at this joke! Embrace it. Take. Life. Srsly! Besides … what other options do you have? High blood-pressure?
Of course, stories published by NewsWerthy.com and similar lesser-known satirical sites are frequently mistaken for factual news, which contributes to the perception that “the establishment of media and government is a giant joke” rather than fixing it.
In the end, claims that President Trump has signed an order prohibiting impeachment are “fiction.”