After Trump Denies His Climate Denial, His Surrogates Try to Explain It Away

At the presidential debate Monday night, Donald Trump denied that he ever said climate change was a hoax cooked up by the Chinese. The only problem is he did say exactly that.

In a tweet in 2012, Trump wrote: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein sought clarification from an array of Trump surrogates and spokespeople after the debate and published transcripts of those conversations Tuesday.

Here, for instance, is a portion of Stein’s exchange with Trump supporter Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee:

HP: Do you believe that climate change is a hoax?

BLACKBURN: I do not believe in climate change. I think the Earth is in a cooling trend. It is not in a warming trend.

HP: You currently think the Earth is in a cooling trend?

BLACKBURN: It is in a cooling trend. It has cooled for about the past 10 years. And the thing that is so interesting is that when you say global warming or climate change, the climate will change. So yes, in that, I agree that it does. You have to ask, “Is it cyclical?”

HP: You know we’ve had about nine of the hottest years in the history of the planet have been in the past 10 years?

BLACKBURN: We have also seen the past 10 years a little bit of a cooling.

Others Stein spoke to include Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, campaign staffer Sarah Huckabee, and advisor Sen. Jeff Sessions

“Rarely are there moments when you can definitively state, with zero reservation, that a presidential candidate is lying. But this was one of them,” Stein writes.

You can read his complete report here.

[image copyright: Boris Ryaposov, via shutterstock.com]