Trump just made an astounding, ridiculous claim about the Dakota Access pipeline

President Donald Trump, a beacon of self-awareness in these trying times, said on Tuesday that he didn’t even know the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, two extremely divisive projects he resurrected during his first days in office, were “controversial.”

“As you know, I approved two pipelines that were stuck in limbo forever,” Trump said at a listening session with local sheriffs in video posted online by ABC News. “I don’t even think it was controversial. You know, I approved them, and I haven’t even heard one call from anybody saying, ‘Oh, that was a terrible thing you did.’”

“I haven’t had one call,” he continued. “Usually if I do something, it’s like bedlam. I haven’t had one call, from anybody.”

The president went on to say “nobody showed up” to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline and that after “years of getting approvals,” not allowing the pipelines to move forward was “unfair” to the private companies behind them. This is laughably “unfair” to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and their allies, who spent months and months camped out in the wilderness to protest the pipeline’s construction through their water source and sacred lands, and who received a ferocious, often violent response from law enforcement for doing so.

In his remarks, Trump also peddled the statistic that Keystone would create “potentially” 32,000 jobs “almost immediately.” Although the CEO of TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, has said it would create 42,000 “ongoing, enduring” jobs, a State Department estimate sussed out that those jobs would only last for about a year. All told, Keystone will likely create fewer than 50 long-term jobs.