HOW TO PAINT BARACK OBAMA AS A HYPOCRITE BY MAKING STUFF UP, THE FOX NEWS WAY (updated)

Historian David Garrow has published a massive new biography of Barack Obama called Rising Star, and Fox News would like you to know that, according to Garrow, the future president (and Donald Trump basher) actually admired Trump in his youth:

More than two decades before he railed against Donald Trump’s “temperament” and “core values,” a young Barack Obama dreamed of becoming the billionaire businessman.

Obama revealed his idolization of The Donald – and what he stood for – in a never-published book written with a classmate during his Harvard Law School days, portions of which are published in the upcoming Obama biography “Rising Star.”

Americans have a “continuing normative commitment to the ideals of individual freedom and mobility,” Obama wrote in the manuscript, revealed in a Washington Post book review. “The depth of this commitment may be summarily dismissed as the unfounded optimism of the average American — I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don’t make it, my children will.”

Obama wrote the discarded book, alternately referred to as “Transformative Politics” or “Promises of Democracy: Hopeful Critiques of American Ideology,” with classmate Rob Fisher during Obama’s enrollment at Harvard from 1988-1991. More than 25 years later, Obama, now a former president, has given a far different evaluation of Trump, the current president who has promised to undo much of Obama’s White House legacy and was a frequent critic of Obama during his tenure in the Oval Office.

This appears at FoxNews.com under the headline

Obama Once Dreamed of Being Trump, Manuscript Shows.

At Fox Nation, this story is excerpted under the headline

Manuscript: Obama Once Idolized Trump

Wow! Is this true? Did Obama really idolize Trump thirty years ago?

No, of course not. Here's what the Washington Post review actually says about that:

Obama had considered Donald Trump long before either man won the presidency, and brushed off his existence as a misguided national fantasy. Americans have a “continuing normative commitment to the ideals of individual freedom and mobility,” Obama wrote in the old Harvard book manuscript, now more than 25 years old. “The depth of this commitment may be summarily dismissed as the unfounded optimism of the average American — I may not be Donald Trump now, but just you wait; if I don’t make it, my children will.”

You probably could have figured that out just from carefully reading the quote -- but c'mon, it's 2017. Who does that? Who reads the body of a news story at all? Your right-wing uncle, after reading just the headline, will send you this story and tell you that even Obummer knew Trump was a great man until someone -- the Chicago political machine, the owners of the "Democrat plantation," Bill Ayers, George Soros -- told him to get reeducated.

Remind me again: Why is Fox considered a news organization?

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UPDATE, MAY 13: The right can't let this go. Story at the Daily Caller yesterday: "Obama Once Said The American Dream Is To ‘Be Donald Trump.’" Jim Hoft today at Gateway Pundit: "Long before failed president Barack Obama was trashing Trump on campaign stops he was praising him as the 'American Dream' come true."

Nope -- still not true.