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In September 2017, right-wing websites accused actress Jennifer Lawrence of blaming President Trump for the deadly hurricanes that recently ravaged several Caribbean nations along with Texas and Florida. Newsbusters, for example, reported that Lawrence said 'Mother Nature’s Rage’ Directed at U.S. Because of Trump. Two days later, Fox News host Tucker Carlson dedicated a segment to Lawrence's purported comments with an accompanying online article headline that reads, Tucker Slams 'Out of Touch' Jennifer Lawrence for Linking Hurricanes to Trump. In the segment, Carlson and his guest poke fun at Lawrence for suffering from what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome. The false rumor is a twisted version of comments that Lawrence made during an interview on British television to promote her new movie Mother!, a psychological thriller that uses climate change as a central metaphor. During the interview, Lawrence said science has demonstrated that climate change is the result of human activity. When prompted by the interviewer, she added that she was troubled by the 2016 presidential election results. She never mentioned President Trump by name in that interview, but within hours various publications were sensationalizing it with commentary claiming the actress blamed him for hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which struck southeast Texas and Florida in late August and early September. It didn't take long for the rumor to spread to more traditionally mainstream publications like the New York Daily News and celebrity site Us Weekly, which put the false claim in their headlines. The British publication The Independent further took liberties with the actress's comments by reporting, inaccurately: The Independent story has an even more misleading headline if one sees it in a Google search result: Here is a transcript of the actual exchange: On 10 September 2017, Lawrence herself responded to the controversy on her official Facebook page, writing: During the interview, Lawrence did express sadness in the failure to adequately address climate change and environmental degradation and said that the power to do so comes from Americans' ability to vote for their elected leaders. President Trump has been on the record denying climate change and has selected fellow climate change deniers to head key agencies such as the EPA and NASA. However, although Lawrence has made it no secret she is not a supporter of the president, she didn't blame him for the recent hurricanes.
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