Here come the armrest truthers.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson fired off an unusual defense of the candidate, who was accused in The New York Times of raising the armrest of a first-class seat in order to grope a female passenger next to him more than 30 years ago.
Pierson told CNN’s Don Lemon that the incident couldn’t have happened as described because the armrests on planes back then didn’t move.
“Guess what? First-class seats have fixed armrests!” she said. “So what I can tell you about her story, if she was groped on a plane, it wasn’t by Donald Trump and it certainly wasn’t in first class.”
Along with claiming the armrests were fixed ― which was not always the case in every first-class configuration at the time ― Pierson noted that certain aircraft didn’t even fly to New York in the early 1980s.
Aviation enthusiasts quickly debunked her:
Twitter user Parker Benchley found images of aircraft from the era with moveable armrests in first class:
The other panelists involved in the CNN conversation weren’t the only ones flummoxed by her strange defense:
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.