President Donald Trump views on “fake news” are well established. But his opinion on “fake art” is murkier. Tim O’Brien, a biographer of the reality-TV-star-turned-politician reveals that Trump owns a version of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting Two Sisters that he is insists is an original—even though the work famously hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. When O’Brien saw the work years ago on Trump’s private jet, he pointed this fact out to the future president, but Donald insisted the work was real. More recently, O’Brien noticed the work hanging in Trump Tower, in the background of a presidential interview on 60 Minutes. “I’m sure he’s still telling people who come into the apartment, ‘It’s an original, it’s an original,’” O’Brien says on Vanity Fair’s Inside the Hive podcast. “He believes his own lies in a way that lasts for decades. He’ll tell the same stories time and time again, regardless of whether or not facts are right in front of his face.” O’Brien argues that this personal foible could become a national dilemma as Trump’s war on the media and fake news gathers steam. “Its foundation is that he’s the final arbiter of what is true and what isn’t, and it’s one of the reasons that he’s so dangerous.”
Fox News
