Yesterday Fox News aired a report that alleged, without evidence, that the Obama administration had paid a ransom to secure the release of Americans imprisoned in Iran. Accompanying the report was a video that Fox implied was of the transfer of American cash to the Iranians. However, it quickly became clear that the video in fact showed a group of prisoners being released in Switzerland.

That didn’t stop Donald Trump from repeatedly characterizing the video he saw as showing cash being unloaded at a Iranian airport. His remarks were unambiguous as he told supporters that “I’ll never forget the scene this morning. […] the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane. Right?”

Wrong. There is no such video and even Trump’s campaign spokesperson admitted that. Today Trump himself took a step toward correcting the record with a tweet:

The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2016

Some people might interpret that as an admission on Trump’s part that he was wrong about having seen the video he described yesterday. And for Donald Trump that’s about as close to an admission of fault as you’re ever going to get. But when you dissect his tweet it’s clear that he’s trying to backtrack in a particularly awkward fashion.

Notice that Trump is referring to the plane he saw on television as being “the hostage plane.” He’s leaving wide open the possibility that he still saw “the plane carrying $400 million,” but that he didn’t see it on TV. In short, he doesn’t explicitly deny having seen the plane as he claimed. In addition, the people released were not hostages, a term that presumes captivity pending satisfaction of a list of demands. Since that was not the case, Trump is purposefully misleading his readers.

More to the point, Trump’s backpedaling tweet in no way explains the core remarks he made previously, even after being told he was wrong. There is nothing in the tweet that addresses his ludicrous insistence that he saw a video that was made by Iran. Neither does the tweet address his assertion that the Iranians provided the video to embarrass the United States. Read his original comments from yesterday and try to find anything in his tweet that directly refutes the bulk of it:

“I’ll never forget the scene this morning. Remember this: Iran – I don’t think you heard this anywhere but here – Iran provided all of that footage, the tape of taking that money off the airplane. Right? $400 million in cash. How does the President do that? How do you do that? We’re gonna send $400 million in cash, this is in cash, in currency.”

“Now, here’s the amazing thing: Over there, where that plane landed, top secret, you don’t have a lot of paparazzi. You know, the paparazzi doesn’t do so well over there, right? And they have a perfect tape, done by obviously a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane. Right? That means that in order to embarrass us further, Iran sent us the tapes. Right? It’s a military tape, it’s a tape that was a perfect angle, nice and steady, nobody getting nervous because they’re gonna be shot because they’re shooting a picture of money pouring off a plane.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

This tweet was a desperate attempt by Trump to wriggle out of a boneheaded commentary that had no basis in reality. He was humiliated by his campaign staff, his GOP colleagues, and the press. So he tried clumsily to extricate himself from his own idiocy. And most pathetic of all, he even failed at that.