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  • 2017-08-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Obama Left Trump a White House Full of Roaches? (en)
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  • On 1 August 2017, Golf magazine reported that President Trump had told people at his New Jersey golf club that the White House was a real dump. Although Trump denied that he ever said such a thing, calling the report fake news, a number of outlets rushed to blame the alleged dumpiness of the White House on Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama. The stories, published under headlines like Obama Left Trump A White House Full Of Roaches, were largely based on a 2013 report published by The National Journal entitled Bugged: Obama's Roach Problem. Freedom Daily even claimed that the Obamas brought the cockroaches to the White House: Freedom Daily provided three links following the multiple stories claim, but two of those links redirected to the same 2013 report (one version published in The National Journal, the other reproduced in The Atlantic), and the the third redirected to an aggregated version of the original article. It's also disingenuous to suggest that Obama brought cockroaches to the White House or that his cleanliness contributed to the bug problem (this rumor is often associated with Obama's ethnicity, racial slurs, and ignorance). In fact, the web sites which quoted this 2013 article to blame President Obama for a roach infestation at the White House must have not read it very carefully, as the article simply used a single cockroach sighting at the White House as a launching off point to talk about various infestations that have plagued the residence over its more than 200-year history. President Jimmy Carter, for instance, battled mice during his tenure in the West Wing, and former First Lady Barbara Bush had at least one run-in with a rat: The book Real Life at the White House: Two Hundred Years of Daily Life at America's Most Famous Residence also documented various bug problems at the White House stemming back to its construction. In a passage about President Grover Cleveland and First Lady Frances Cleveland's impressions of the White House, the author writes: We also have not been able to find any reports documenting a roach infestation at the White House in 2017. Recent reports from The Washington Post and Politico concerning renovations at the White House noted that the Trump administration has had to deal with a large number of flies (another common White House problem), but the report made no mention of roaches: It is not surprising that the White House would have vermin infestations, given that Washington, D.C. has a high population of mice and rats, and a fair amount of cockroaches -- which can be observed on summer evenings on sidewalks all over the city. The fact someone saw a roach in the White House in September 2013 has nothing to do with Obama's level of cleanliness. The only surprising thing about the finding -- given the city's relative roachiness -- is that there was just one. (en)
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