CNN Host Roasts ‘Stupid’ Trump, 79, for Believing Obvious Satire
Jake Tapper called Trump’s gaffe “insane.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper called out Donald Trump for falling for an explicitly satirical website post, with the network’s Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper taking the opportunity to share why “stupid people don’t know how stupid they are.”
Tapper and CNN posted a video with his comments on Instagram. “President Obama is not getting paid royalties for Obamacare,” Tapper said in an Instagram video Monday, contrary to the screengrabs of the satirical article that Trump posted to Truth Social on Sunday. “It’s not true. There’s no truth to it. It’s insane,” he added.
Jake Tapper said Trump's falling for a satirical article online Sunday was an example of how “Stupid people don’t know how stupid they are.”
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
What’s worse, Tapper explained, is that the site offers a clear disclaimer: “Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.”
With a “WOW!,” President Trump posts a claim about DOGE and “royalties linked to Obamacare” that originated on a satirical website. That site’s own About section reads: “Everything on this website is fiction… If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.” pic.twitter.com/G8vBPVJAgX
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 9, 2025
“The claim, if you can call it that, originated on a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times,” which is named after the Dunning-Kruger effect—a cognitive bias coined by a Cornell psychologist, Tapper said. “It starts in 1995 when some bank robbers outside Pittsburgh are picked up because they had robbed a bank with no mask, no disguise, no sunglasses, no mustaches. They were caught on closed circuit TV, and they were stunned that they were caught,” he continued. “Why were they stunned? Because they were under the belief that if they put lemon juice on their faces, they would be invisible.”
Tapper likened Trump to robbers who "robbed a bank with no mask, no disguise, no sunglasses, no moustaches," because they believed the lemon juice they put on their faces made them invisible.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Likening the phenomena to Trump’s gaffe over the weekend, Tapper explained that Dr. Dunning “heard that and was stunned and wanted to find out more. And he did a study. Basically, the study suggests that the less somebody knows about a subject, the more they think they are an expert on that subject.”
He concluded, “In other words, stupid people don’t know how stupid they are, because they’re so stupid.”
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