President Donald Trump mentioned Bob Hope in a tweet on Monday, saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci had more airtime than anyone since the legendary entertainer.
Fauci “gets more airtime than anybody since the late, great, Bob Hope,” Trump wrote.
This is another Trump falsehood; despite his long career as the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Fauci has only been a prominent media figure since the start of coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. Hope appeared in hundreds of TV shows over five decades.
Dr.Tony Fauci says we don’t allow him to do television, and yet I saw him last night on @60Minutes, and he seems to get more airtime than anybody since the late, great, Bob Hope. All I ask of Tony is that he make better decisions. He said “no masks & let China in”. Also, Bad arm!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 19, 2020
Within hours, television historians unearthed a clip of the “late, great” Bob Hope — as Trump described him — actually portraying Trump in the early ’90s.
Hope and frequent collaborator Ann Jillian parodied Trump and his then-wife Ivana as part of the April 1990 “Bob Hope’s Spring Fling of Comedy and Glamour From Acapulco” special.
In the scene, Donald and Ivana “Frump” (Hope and Jillian) check into an Acapulco hotel. In the clip, Hope’s Donald propositions a chambermaid in a French maid’s outfit right in front of Ivana. He tells the maid he’ll “meet her in the linen closet” and backs her into a door. Check out the video below (via NBC News correspondent Steve Kornack):
https://twitter.com/SteveKornacki/status/1318260010074443776
The real Donald Trump divorced Ivana in 1992 following his affair with Marla Maples. Trump married Maples in 1993 and divorced in 1999. In 2005, Trump married Melania Knauss, the current first lady. Trump has been accused by at least 25 women of sexual misconduct dating back to the ’70s.
Hope, who died in 2003, was a conservative and close friend of Nancy Reagan, the wife of two-term Republican president Ronald Reagan. Hope’s personal life was not without speculation about infidelity as well.
“Bob Hope’s Spring Fling of Comedy and Glamour From Acapulco” was one of the 270-plus specials Hope filmed for NBC over five decades. Many of the shows were extensions of his tours to entertain U.S. troops deployed overseas, including in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.