By Despite having very, very recently found her testimony to be "very credible", Donald Trump has attacked Dr Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the Senate judiciary committee over her alleged sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh as "a hoax set up by the Democrats".
Kavanaugh vehemently denied Ford's accusations, and Trump declared the new Supreme Court Justice to be "proven innocent", despite the judge not having actually stood trial to be found either innocent or guilty, and ignoring the enormous outpouring of sympathy for Ford following the committee hearing.
Trump didn't really given any other details on how this hoax was perpetrated. However, the word 'hoax' is one that regularly floats to the top of the small bag of words which Trump jams a fist into when he's either angry ('witch hunt', 'phony') or vamping like a QVC host trying to flog a not-quite-china plate commemorating Princess Michael's wedding ('beautiful', 'the greatest', 'hand-crafted by artisans in Stoke-on-Trent'). Here are seven more times he threatened to blow the lid on apparent conspiracies.
Obviously.
Climate change
Before he had the Mueller investigation and allegations of Russian interference to worry about, global warming was Trump's favourite hobby-hoax. Most famously, he called it a hoax perpetrated by China to undermine America's economic competitiveness, but he was also moved to tweet that it was a massive lie when he realised that December and January were very, very cold.
The unemployment rate
Before the 2016 election, Trump had a swing at the Labor Department, calling its estimates of the number of people in work a "hoax" in a speech. It's not really clear what he meant by that, though he did suggest that the real unemployment rate was as high as 42 percent while on his campaign trail. As unemployment rates during the Great Depression topped out at about 25 percent, that was a bit of a stretch.
Barack Obama
Despite Clint Eastwood's assertion, Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States and continues to exist to this day.
The death toll of Hurricane Maria
Hurricane Florence, which hit North and South Carolina and Maryland this summer - and which Trump assessed as being "one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water" - was the second major hurricane of Trump's presidency. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and Dominica in September last year, and according to a report commissioned by the governor of Puerto Rico, killed roughly 2,975 people both directly and in the months which followed. A separate study put the 'excess death' rate as high as 4,645. Trump disagreed with these know-nothing eggheads, and suggested that the rising death toll was part of another devilish conspiracy.
New Orleans Saints linebacker Manti Te'o and his 'late' 'girlfriend'
American football is a bit weird at the best of times, but the September 2012 controversy during which Te'o was accused of inventing a girlfriend, Stanford University student Lennay Kekua, who had tragically died after a car crash and a battle with leukemia was several shades beyond weird. Basically, Te'o said that he had promised Kekua that he'd continue playing for Notre Dame even if she died.
However, a Deadspin investigation suggested that 'Kekua' was a fiction, and was actually a male family friend of Te'o named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, and that pictures of 'Kekua' were actually of Tuiasosopo's classmate. After Notre Dame send in a private investigator, it turned out that Te'o and 'Kekua' had had an online relationship and that he'd lied to pretty much everyone about meeting her because he was a bit embarrassed about going out with someone he'd never met. As it turned out, Tuiasosopo had been behind the whole thing as he said he had fallen in love with Te'o and constructed the alter ego to get closer to him, even putting on a feminine voice to talk to Te'o on the phone. Trump had his own suspicions...
Trump left it three minutes before answering his own rhetorical question.
James Gandolfini and ObamaCare
Imagine Trump staring at a Trump Tower office wall covered in bits of red string connecting Sopranos characters to the West Wing. Be careful, Mister.
The whole Russia thing
Obviously.
