GOP officials decline to delete culture war tweets about burgers and VP’s book after stories fall apart

Politicians remain committed to politicking

Joe Biden’s burger ban and Kamala Harris’s superheroes are still everywhere on the GOP menu despite the two major stories unravelling under further scrutiny.

Republican lawmakers were quick to pounce this week on two bombshell claims; the White House was sending copies of the vice president’s book to child migrants while also planning to dramatically limit Americans’ meat consumption.

The New York Post published a front-page report that migrant children received welcome kits containing Ms Harris’ 2019 book "Superheroes Are Everywhere", but it was later updated after a Washington Post fact check revealed it was a single copy donated at a book drive.

The writer of the story, Laura Italiano, quit the Post over the piece, saying it was "an incorrect story I was ordered to write" and which she failed to push back on.

Tweets from key GOP figures seizing on the yarn to leverage their political message, from Lauren Boebert to Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan to Jody Hice, remain live.

Tweets also remain sizzling away on The Daily Mail’s report that the president’s plan to cut greenhouse emissions "could limit" burgers to just once a month, with an infographic saying Americans might have to cut "90 per cent of red meat out of diet" and eat only 4lbs a year.

Fox News issued a mea culpa on repeating the claims, with anchor John Roberts saying the "data was accurate but a graphic and the script incorrectly implied that it was part of Biden’s plan for dealing with climate change. That is not the case."

Donald Trump Jr, Marjorie Taylor Green and Texas governor Greg Abbott, however, are standing by their hot takes.

Politicians politicking is a long-running tradition in Washington DC, with key Democrat figures also refusing to delete tweets about debunked stories leveraged in service of the culture war.

From transport secretary Pete Buttigieg to senators Kristen Gillibrand and Dianne Feinstein, the influential Democrats still have live tweets claiming Donald Trump called immigrants "animals" despite PolitiFact debunking the narrative, and the original poster deleting the tweet and apologizing for not being accurate, more than two years ago.