New York Times

Fox News Urges Trump to Fire Rosenstein Over Comments in the ‘Fake News, Failing’ New York Times

Posted by on September 21, 2018 at 3:25 pm. 2 Comments :

The latest bombshell to emerge from Washington D.C. in the twisted era of Donald Trump comes just as the controversy over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is reaching a boiling point. Is it a distraction or a legitimate news story that demands immediate attention? No matter, it’s already getting the airwave blanketing that was inevitable considering the subject.

Donald Trump, Fox News

The New York Times is reporting that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had floated the idea of secretly recording Trump to gather evidence that he was mentally unstable and unfit for service. There was reportedly further discussion of invoking the 25th Amendment to declare the President incompetent and remove him from office. Other news reports have spoken to sources who say that Rosenstein was being sarcastic. And Rosenstein himself issued a firm denial.

What’s peculiar about this story, other than the distracting effect it has on Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct, is that the only other beneficiary of it would be the White House. It gives Trump an excuse to fire Rosenstein and appoint someone in his place who would put the brakes on the investigation of special counsel, Robert Mueller. But it would be somewhat hypocritical for Trump to do that on the basis of a story from a news source that he considers fake and failing. Consequently, he might need some support from his cheering section (and shadow cabinet) at State TV, also known as Fox News. And he’s already getting it:

https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1043209898341879808
[Note: Ingraham deleted this tweet the next day. Was it because Hannity took the opposite position?]

Wow. Are these three confirmed Trump-fluffers all buying into the “fake news” from the New York Times? Laura Ingraham, Gregg Jarrett, and Jeanine Pirro are three of Trump’s most devoted supplicants on Fox News. And it stands to reason that they would want to rush to give him cover to jettison the bone spur that has traveled from Trump’s foot to his ample backside. But will he take the bait?

Trump has posted ten tweets since this news broke, and none of them are about Rosenstein or the New York Times. Is he consulting with Sean Hannity, Bill Shine, and the rest of his propaganda team to come up with a strategy? Is he afraid to get out too far ahead of the story while it’s still unfolding? Is he getting spanked by a porn star at Mar-A-Lago? Who knows? But the fear factor may be the most plausible scenario. Because even his pals at Fox News aren’t completely in his corner. Shelby Holliday of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal had this to say in an interview shortly after the story was released:

It probably won’t be long until Trump makes his views known about this. He is simply too lacking in self control to keep his mouth shut. But if he does fire Rosenstein he’s going to have to explain why he suddenly believes the “failing” New York Times” whose story was based on the anonymous sources that Trump says don’t exist. He will also have to face more charges of obstruction of justice as Mueller gets closer to wrapping up his probe. But if he let’s it go, then Mueller and company proceed as before. So all told, this is really a lose-lose proposition for Trump.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

LATE BREAKING: Sean Hannity is diverging from his Fox colleagues above. On his program Friday night he had a personal message for Trump, warning him that “Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody.” Hannity thinks Trump is being set up by Democrats – or the deep state, or Satan – and that giving Rosenstein the boot is a “set up,” a plot to justify impeachment. Those insidious demonrats.

Trump’s Incoherent Whining on Fox News About Anonymous Op-Ed in NY Times Actually Affirms It

Posted by on September 7, 2018 at 11:41 am. 3 Comments :

We’re two days into the news cycle on the anonymous op-ed that appeared in the New York Times announcing a “resistance” inside the White House to Trump’s dangerous unfitness for office. If anything, the temperature has increased with more insiders coming forward to warn about Trump’s unbalanced mental state.

Donald Trump

Meanwhile, Trump is proving the allegations against him by bellowing at his staff and behaving even more paranoid than usual. He can’t trust anyone around him but his children, and even that might be assuming too much. The effect this has had on him is obvious and profound. He’s tweeted about this, and the related book by Bob Woodward, eighteen times already. He’s clearly obsessed with these credible depictions of his mental infirmities by people who have access to him and reason to know.

So naturally Trump rushed frantically to Fox News in order to get a good tongue bathing in an environment where he would be safe from well deserved criticism. He was interviewed by Fox and Friends co-host Pete Hegseth before the crowd at his Montana cult rally. And the part of exchange that covered the New York Times op-ed pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Trump’s rupturing psychoses. It’s a wholly incoherent rant that he seemed to disgorge in a single, panicky breath. (video below):

Hegseth: Folks here might have seen an anonymous column written in the New York Times. [Audience boos] And I think this audience would say that an attack on you was an attack on the people that voted for you. Are you any closer to knowing who did it and what should be done if you find out who did it?
Trump: Well number one, the Times should have never have done that because really what they’ve done is, virtually, you know it’s treason. You can call it a lot of things, but to think that you have somebody in all of the cabinets – some many people as you know they came forward, they’re writing editorials. They’re all saying you know it’s got to be at a fairly low level. Because so many people today, I was just coming out, and I see all the people that are saying such great things. We have a lot of love in the administration, and the White House is truly as you would say, a well-oiled machine – it is working so well. You know we have – I heard you say yesterday, we have thousands of people that in theory could qualify. So they take one person out of thousands, but what’s unfair – I don’t mind when they write a book and they make lies cause it gets discredited. We just discredited the last one, we discredit all of them because it’s lies. But I’ll tell you, when somebody writes and you can’t discredit because you have no idea who they are – usually you’ll find out, it’s a background that was bad, it may not be a Republican, it may not be a conservative, it may be a deep state person that’s been there a long time. You don’t know where – it’s a very unfair thing. But its very unfair to our country and to the millions of people that voted, really for us. They voted for us.

First of all, go back and read the question. Trump came nowhere near anything that might be considered an answer. What you have there is an insane person insisting that he’s completely sane while proving that he isn’t. Trump began by charging the Times with treason. Obviously, he has no idea what the word means or how to apply it. And this wasn’t a hypothetical comment. On Air Force One this morning Trump said he was asking his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to investigate the Times as a “national security” matter. However, he couldn’t explain how a critical op-ed endangered national security. He also said he’s looking into taking some unspecified action against the paper and the author. That would be a flagrant breach of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Trump went on to extol the “love in the administration,” despite the unprecedented turmoil, resignations and terminations during his first two years in office. His senior staff are reported to have called him “an idiot,” “a moron,” “a liar,” “a baby,” and more demeaning, but accurate epithets. If this is his idea of a “well-oiled machine,” what, in heaven’s name, would a squeaky one look like?

Trump also told Hegseth that “I don’t mind when they write a book” because “we discredit all of them.” Notice that he doesn’t say that he refutes them or offers substantive rebuttals. He astonishingly admits that he goes straight for character assassination. He affirms that by complaining that he can’t discredit the author if he doesn’t know who it is. Of course, he could dispute what was said, but the only thing he’s interested in is attacking the person, not the allegations. That’s because he can’t attack allegations that are demonstrably true.

The more Trump defends himself from charges of mental infirmity, the more he is demonstrating the validity of the charges. And he’s behaving like the cornered animal that lashes out wildly at any perceived threat. That’s the same behavior he’s exhibited with regard to the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Trump is clearly afraid and in panic mode. And that is turning his responses to these situations into more evidence against him. So keep ranting, Donnie. You’re signing your own impeachment order.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Hannity Insanity: Trump ‘Is the Most Sound-Minded Person to Ever Occupy the White House’

Posted by on September 6, 2018 at 12:56 pm. 7 Comments :

The question of Donald Trump’s fitness to serve as president has been a frequent topic of discussion in recent weeks. Dozens of psychiatric professionals are among those who have weighed in on the subject, declaring that Trump has severe mental deficiencies that pose grave risks for the nation. But Sean Hannity of Fox News, without any training in the subject, disagrees.

Donald Trump Sean Hannity

Speculation about Trump’s declining mental state is not a new concern. News Corpse addressed it two years ago with an analysis of his advancing senile dementia. And with every new day our obviously disturbed President provides new examples of why he must be removed from office. On Wednesday an op-ed was published in the New York Times by a “senior official” in the Trump administration that affirms much of the concerns expressed by others for the past two years.

Enter Sean Hannity. On his Wednesday evening episode of Trump-Fluffers on Parade, Hannity hosted one of his favorite fluffing guests, “doctor” Gina Loudon. She and Hannity jumped right into a defense of Trump’s self-made image as a “stable genius” with an awkward segue from the New York Times story. Hannity began by charging that the op-ed’s author is a “crazy, anonymous, gutless, cowardly,” person. And, fatigued from heaving so many insulting adjectives, he threw the question to Loudon (video below):

Hannity: There is a madness to this and your background and your book discusses this derangement. What do we call it?”
Loudon: We’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, Sean. That’s what most people have called it to this point. But my book actually uses science, and real data, and true psychological theory to explain why it is quite possible that this president is the most sound-minded person to ever occupy the White House.
Hannity: Literally, liberals heads are gonna explode at what you just said.
Loudon: That’s the fun part of the madness. Watching them go crazy over the fact that he’s really pretty unphased by them. And I believe that. And I know him.
Hannity: And that’s what drives them nuts.

This is an Olympian feat of delusional, propagandizing hogwash. Loudon isn’t satisfied with merely claiming that Trump is of sound mind. Nope, she has to embellish it with the flaming absurdity that it’s the soundest mind ever. And what’s more, she has scientific evidence of it. How she can prove by scientific methodology that Trump, or anyone, has a mind that is more sound than any other, has yet to be revealed. She should release her “research” immediately, so that we can all have a good laugh. As for being “unphased,” his own hair-raising Twitter feed contradicts that bullcrap.

Hannity then went on to say that the media are “like drug addicts” who wake up every day and, if they don’t get their fix, their “hate for the day,” they “break out into sweats.” Sounds more like he is describing himself and/or his Dear Leader. Trump is the one who begins every day with rabid tweetstorms in all caps. The media is just reacting to the manic outbursts of the Commander-in-Tweet. Meanwhile, Loudon criticizes Bob Woodward’s book and praises her own, because he doesn’t know the President and she does. Which is really an endorsement of Woodward’s book because he isn’t going to be biased by a personal association, but she will be.

The gargantuan, Kool-Aid infused, suck up to Trump’s allegedly sound mind has to ignore two years of off-the-rails idiocy. Is it sound to kiss up to foreign dictators while lambasting long-time allies? Is it sound to continually take credit for the achievements of your predecessor and to lie about your own innumerable failures? Is it sound to brag about how effectively you are destroying the environment and sabotaging healthcare? Is it sound to praise neo-Nazis and to abduct children from their parents and warehouse them in cages? According to Hannity and Loudon (and the rest of Fox News), the answer is a resounding “Dah!”

This tendency to lavish effusive praise on Trump is a hallmark of his own hyperbolic rhetoric. He can’t say anything, particularly about himself, without making it the bestest of all time. Conversely, any criticism he has of someone else is automatically the worst in the history of the world. There is probably a psychiatric term for this condition, and we can just add to the list of the mental infirmities that Trump is suffering from. Unfortunately for America, it’s a long list.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

A Confused Donald Trump Posts Witch Hunt Tweet that Actually Debunks His Witch Hunt Claim

Posted by on September 3, 2018 at 8:00 pm. 6 Comments :

Nobody is going to fall out of their chair by encountering a mindnumbingly boneheaded comment from the Dotard-in-Chief, Donald Trump. To the contrary, any sign of intelligence would be more likely to require a whiff of smelling salts. But every now and then our nation’s idiocy dispenser squeezes out something that really underscores our lowest expectations of him.

Donald Trump

Monday was such a day as Trump manned his Twitter machine to rant about some perceived slight and/or yowl at his many looming enemies. When he isn’t lashing out manically at critics, he’s protesting too much about his fake innocence, or insisting that he’s a beloved figure about whom all the polls are lying. All of these harangues are disgorged on his Twitter feed, which is all too often an incoherent mess. For instance, just last week he boasted that his approval rating had climbed to fifty-two percent. But that was actually his disapproval rating. He also posted what he said was a “big story” that turned out to be a big lie from a wingnut website. And tucked into his latest tweetstorm was a little gem that truly captured the full measure of his dementia.

Let’s set aside Trump’s tiresome and false assertion that the New York Times is failing. Thanks in part to Trump’s perpetual circus of psychoses, the Times is enjoying a financial renaissance. The meat of this tweet lies in the preposterous illogic of his quotation. What he is apparently too obtuse to observe is that the existence of an FBI probe so long before he was a candidate, and two years before special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, is proof that there was no witch hunt.

What’s more, Trump is quoting Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times from an appearance on CNN, a network that he swears he never watches. And Rosenberg himself noticed Trump’s tweet and promptly corrected it:

So in this one tweet, Trump managed to debunk his own witch hunt conspiracy theory and to exonerate all of the “Deep State” conspirators that are such a core part of his warped imagination. And, of course, by extension, he validates the credibility of the FBI’s work which only snagged him as a consequence of the evidence turned up in their prior, unrelated investigation. It takes a special kind of stupid to do all of that in one little tweet.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Truth Isn’t Truth? Trump Unleashes a Tweetstorm of Frantic Desperation and Fearful Guilt

Posted by on August 19, 2018 at 3:03 pm. 1 Comments :

Donald Trump couldn’t look more guilty if he tattooed it on his forehead in neon ink. Everything he does and says these days reinforces his fear and unambiguous knowledge that he and his crime family are in deep legal peril. And it gets worse when he has time off (from golfing) to act out on Twitter. That’s what happened Sunday morning as the President hammered out half a dozen tweets protesting (too much) that’s innocent, dammit!

Donald Trump

The tone and substance of these tweets are almost pathetically begging for absolution from a bevy of sins that he knows he committed. What’s more, most of these ravings are merely repetitions of the same carping he has been unloading for months. He has become a robo-bitcher whose mindless outbursts make little sense and avoid facts at all costs. He began by trotting out his familiar, and untrue, nickname for the New York Times:

Let’s just set aside that no matter how many times he tries, he simply can’t spell “counsel” correctly. More to the point, Trump’s characterization of White House Lawyer Don McGahn as a loyal subject flies in the face of reality. You don’t sit for thirty hours of testimony with a special prosecutor without supplying some critical information. And Trump didn’t even bother to refute the allegation in the Times that McGahn was afraid that Trump was setting him up to be the fall guy.

Even worse is Trump’s slap at John Dean. During the Watergate affair, Dean had the job that McGahn has today. He courageously came forward to tell the truth about the crimes being committed in Richard Nixon’s White House. He is generally regarded as a hero for having told the truth under immense pressure. And for that, Trump thinks he’s a “RAT.” Which makes perfect sense because Trump thinks that anyone who might tell the truth about him would be vermin. Trump is allergic to the truth, which is why he avoids it so studiously. But the fact that he thinks Dean is a rat, while the rest of America is grateful for his patriotic service, putting country before party, shows just how deranged Trump is.

Trump is also congratulating himself on his alleged “transparency” for “allowing” McGahn to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller. That was not exactly his call. If he had tried to claim executive privilege he would have set off a court battle that he likely would have lost. And the loss would have opened the door to more access to his staff and more trouble for him. And then there was this:

Notice that Trump slipped in the required “witch hunt” reference which, by executive order, must appear in at least one out of every five tweets. And he continues ranting about his fake transparency. He says he allowed “all others” to be interviewed by Mueller. But he left someone important to the investigation out: himself. If he really wants this probe to end he needs to sit down with Mueller and try not to lie (admittedly, a difficult task for him). If he really has nothing to hide he should schedule that meeting today. And then there was this:

This is just Trump having a “whataboutism” seizure. One of his favorite defenses is to accuse others of crimes that he is committing. And then there was this:

Here Trump is repeating what said a an hour earlier. But he also took the opportunity to repeat his Stalinist, anti-First Amendment screed about the media being “the enemy of the people.” And then there was this:

Talk about your fake news. If anyone in the media called to “complain and apologize” it could only have been Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, or some other similarly bootlicking Trump-fluffer trying to keep his spirits up. I guarantee that no credible journalist called him for that purpose. This is something he does frequently, but then refuses to provide any names. And finally there was this:

Holy crap. Trump is attempting to draw a parallel between the corrupt and corrosive Sen. Joe McCarthy and reporters doing their jobs exactly as they are supposed to. And advising people to study McCarthy is hysterical because you can bet the bank that he never did. Unless, of course, it was get pointers on how to be a demagogic sleazeball. What he isn’t saying is that McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, was Trump’s close friend and mentor. He even wished he had a lawyer like Cohn.

After unleashing this flood of whining and victimization, Trump looks more guilty than ever. When was the last time an innocent man lashed out with such wild, incoherent blather? And no matter how often he howls “no collusion, no obstruction of justice, witch hunt,” etc., it will not change the facts that are causing him to tremble in fear. While Rudy Giuliani may believe that “truth isn’t truth,” the rest of the civilized world knows what hogwash that is. Just wait until he tries to explain that to a jury.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

ON TRUST: Donald Trump Polls Way Less than CNN – and Every Other TV News Network

Posted by on July 31, 2018 at 3:17 pm. 1 Comments :

For someone who is obsessed with castigating the news media as “fake” and “enemies,” Donald Trump is sure suffering from an approval deficit by the American people. He tweets furiously at all hour of the day and night about how dishonest the press is, but all of that animus and bile has produced nothing in terms of respect from the public at large.

Donald Trump

A survey conducted for the Brand Keys Research Intelligencer rated the levels of trust for each of the major television news networks. The results placed the BBC at the top of the pile (with 90%) as the most trusted source. Fox News came in second (87%), followed by PBS (86%). It’s important to remember that this survey was conducted by surveying respondents who watched the rated network at least three times a week. So to some extent it was collecting the views of people who were regular viewers. That would explain the Fox number, whose viewers are devoted and worshipful cultists.

The placement of the rest of the broadcast and cable news networks ranged respectably from MSNBC (80%), CBS (72%), NBC (70%), ABC (69%), and CNN (69%). But the most interesting number in this survey was the one for Donald Trump. He managed to pull in a paltry twenty-nine percent who say that he is trustworthy. That’s less than a third of what the BBC did. Even more troubling from his perspective is that it’s less than half of what his arch nemesis CNN did. And when the numbers were broken down by political affiliation, Trump’s base of Republicans still only rated him at a measly thirty-five percent. Even lower, of course, were Independents (22%) and Democrats (14%).

So while Trump has spent the past two years relentlessly attacking the media in the most vicious terms, he has managed to achieve nothing but solid goose eggs in terms of respect or trust from the public. This survey affirms similar polls conducted in the past that found Trump trailing every news enterprise, TV or print, on the question of trust. And by wide margins.

It also affirms the results of a unique study published by The Economist this week that revealed that the media that Trump hates the most (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) actually became stronger and more popular during the seventeen months since Trump was inaugurated. So despite his efforts to drag down any press operation that wasn’t unflinchingly adoring, he actually had the opposite effect of boosting their profiles with the public. What’s more, his reliance on, and promotion of, Fox News and Breitbart produced sharp downslopes for those flagrantly biased outfits. And if that’s what he means by “winning,” let’s have more of it.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

THE TRUMP EFFECT: His Attempts to Destroy the Media Have Actually Made it Stronger

Posted by on July 31, 2018 at 11:09 am. NO Comments :

One way to look at the presidency of Donald Trump is as a contrarian indicator. Whatever he tries to achieve ends up producing the opposite results. For instance, when threatened Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury,” he later embraced him as an “honorable” man who would abandon his nuclear ambitions. And now we learn that Kim is actually escalating his intercontinental ballistic missile program.

Donald Trump Effect

Trump is a sort of reverse King Midas: everything he touches turns to – let’s say garbage. His tax scam has benefited the wealthy while adding a trillion dollars to the deficit. His EPA has ignored environmental protection in favor of loosening regulations for polluters. His border wall is nonexistent and Mexico definitely isn’t paying for it. What he calls “winning” is just papered over failure, much like his casinos and university.

Now the Economist has published the results of a study that tracked the fortunes of the mainstream media for the eighteen months he has occupied the White House. During the entirety of that time, Trump has castigated the supposedly free press as “horrible people,” “liars,” “sleazy,” and he has adopted Stalin’s rhetoric by calling the media “the enemy of the American people.” Lately he has also adopted the behavior of tyrants by trying to ban journalists who dare to challenge his omnipotent (more accurately, impotent) authority.

It turns out that the media enterprises that Trump has attacked the most have gained popularity and success. The Economist’s poll asked a representative sample of Americans to rate large American news organisations on a scale from “very trustworthy” to “very untrustworthy.” The outcome of this survey is a useful lesson on the ineffectual tactic of childish browbeating that is Trump’s sole method of interacting with society. According to the Economist:

“From October 15th 2016, shortly before he was elected, to this month, confidence in Mr Trump’s two most frequently targeted newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, has actually grown. During the same period, trust in two media outlets that offer him reliably fawning coverage, Fox News and Breitbart, has withered.”

So the outlets Trump hates most are flourishing, and the ones that suck up to him are suffering. The study also found that this growth was not limited to liberals stepping up their support for news that affirms their biases. Even Trump supporters were leaning more favorably toward the objects of his hostility. And the allegedly “failing” New York Times saw monthly online readership double to 130 million since Trump’s inauguration.

Combine this with other polling that shows that the American people trust the media far more than they trust Trump and you have a recipe for continuing delusions from a president who is already acutely disturbed. And this new study proves that Trump’s rabid attacks on on the Constitution are only strengthening the subjects of the First Amendments protections. Nice work, Dotard.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Breaches ‘Off-the-Record’ Promise to the New York Times with Unhinged Rage-Tweets

Posted by on July 29, 2018 at 2:37 pm. 4 Comments :

For someone who relentlessly bashes the media for its honesty and ethics, Donald Trump seems to have little concern for either, particularly with regard to the media. And this goes much farther than his reckless attacks that media experts have warned are likely to result in violence against journalists who are just trying to do their job.

Donald Trump

On Sunday morning Trump posted a peculiar tweet that, on the surface, suggested a bit of thawing in his persistent hostility toward the press. He revealed that he met with A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, one of Trump’s most reviled foes. In the past, Trump has maligned the Times as liars who deliberately publish false stories with sources that Trump says don’t exist (they do). In this tweet Trump pretended that the meeting was cordial and productive:

As it turns out, Trump was not only lying, he actually violated an agreement that he insisted on that the meeting be off the record. We learned this when the Times posted a response to Trump’s tweet to set the record straight. The statement by the Times is a wholly unprecedented occurrence that could not have even been thought of in the administration of any other president. But this is where we are now. Here is the Times’ statement in full:

Statement of A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher, The New York Times, in Response to President Trump’s Tweet About Their Meeting
July 29, 2018

Earlier this month, A.G. received a request from the White House to meet with President Trump. This was not unusual; there has been a long tradition of New York Times publishers holding such meetings with presidents and other public figures who have concerns about coverage.

On July 20th, A.G. went to the White House, accompanied by James Bennet, who oversees the editorial page of The Times. Mr. Trump’s aides requested that the meeting be off the record, which has also been the practice for such meetings in the past.

But with Mr. Trump’s tweet this morning, he has put the meeting on the record, so A.G. has decided to respond to the president’s characterization of their conversation, based on detailed notes A.G. and James took.

Statement of A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher, The New York Times:
My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.

I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.

I told him that although the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists “the enemy of the people.” I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.

I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.

Throughout the conversation I emphasized that if President Trump, like previous presidents, was upset with coverage of his administration he was of course free to tell the world. I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.

So Sulzberger accepted the meeting with the hopes that he could moderate Trump’s animus toward the press and his hostility toward the Constitution’s First Amendment. That was a wildly optimistic expectation. But what we still don’t know is why Trump asked for the meeting in the first place. Presumably to bitch about “fake news” and threaten to punish the Times if they didn’t bend to his will. He has recently been throwing around threats at journalists who have dare to exercise independence and free speech.

Sulzberger’s warnings to Trump about the use of phrases like “fake news” and “enemy of the people” were appropriate and long over due. Trump needed to hear directly that his callousness was “putting lives at risk” and “undermining the democratic ideals.” Not that he would listen or understand. And, unfortunately, there was no indication in Sulzberger’s statement as to whether Trump grasped the significance of these points or if he was even paying attention. However, Trump himself gave us a pretty good idea of what he thought of the meeting in a series of angry tweets a few hours later:

Trump incredibly blamed Sulzberger for “reveal[ing] the internal deliberations of our government” that Trump himself revealed on Twitter first. And if there is substantial negative coverage of his administration it’s only because he’s an incompetent boor who has failed in everything he’s ever attempted in his life. What he regards as “positive results” are the hallucinations of a maniacal narcissist.

Sulzberger diplomatically avoided any disclosure of the substance of their discussions. That’s how adults behave when trying to resolve contentious relationships with the aim of finding some common ground. But Trump is behaving like a china shop bullshitter by disparaging the Times, and the media at large, with insulting allusions to it being a dying institution that is never going to change – by which Trump means suck up to him.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

In the end, Trump demonstrated that his original assertion that the meeting was “very good and interesting” was just another Trump lie. His subsequent tweets prove that he never meant that. He was just posturing with the expectation that his disingenuous blather wouldn’t be revealed. And when it was he just made matters worse by unleashing the rancorous bile that is always just below the surface of his unnaturally orange and lace-thin skin. Same as it ever was.

Awkward: Giuliani Implies that Mueller Has ‘Uncovered Something’ that Proves Trump is Guilty

Posted by on July 7, 2018 at 10:27 am. 1 Comments :

There has been talk in recent days about the peculiar disappearance of Donald Trump’s lead Russia attorney, Rudy Giuliani. After a flurry of embarrassing media appearances a few weeks ago, Giuliani has been uncharacteristically quiet. Perhaps he’s still confused about the ongoing investigation that he said was “essentially over” a couple of months ago. He laughably told Fox News that Mueller and company are “just in denial.” But as of Friday afternoon, the cause for worry was relieved when the New York Times released a new interview.

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump

Let’s just set aside Rudy’s choice of the allegedly failing New York Times as the platform for his latest public pronouncements. After all, there’s nothing unusual about the President’s lawyer fraternizing with “the enemy of the American people” is there? And on Saturday morning Trump tweeted his baseless prediction that the Times was going out of business. Nevertheless, Giuliani saw fit to call the Times when he wanted to unveil some new PR bullcrap. He told the Times that he was issuing new demands that must be met before Trump would interview with special counsel Robert Mueller:

“If they can come to us and show us the basis and that it’s legitimate and that they have uncovered something, we can go from there and assess their objectivity,”

In other words, if Mueller has the goods on us, we’ll talk. If we’ve successfully hidden our crimes, screw you. Notice that Giuliani isn’t saying that there is nothing to be uncovered. He’s saying that any evidence of crimes that might be uncovered would determine whether Trump would be deposed. That’s about as close as you can get to an admission that incriminating information exists without just pleading guilty. But the Trump camp doesn’t want to show their dirty hands unless the prosecutors already have them nailed.

Even with this new position regarding Trump’s reluctance to come clean, Giuliani betrayed his own bad faith negotiating by conceding that Mueller was unlikely to agree to the interview demands. So Giuliani is just throwing more obstacles in the path of justice, and he’s doing it deliberately. And according to the Times, this obstruction doesn’t stop there:

“The president’s lawyers want Mr. Mueller to explain how the Justice Department gave him the authority to investigate possible obstruction of justice by the president in what began as a counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s election meddling. […]

“The lawyers also want evidence that the special counsel exhausted every other investigative measure before asking the president to answer questions, and that he is the only person who could provide them with the information they are seeking.”

With regard to the explanation for Mueller’s authority to investigate obstruction of justice, Giuliani could have answered that question by simply reading the Justice Department’s order appointing Mueller. It explicitly grants him investigative authority over the Russian meddling affair and any matters that arose from it. And the demand that all other sources of evidence be exhausted before Trump will talk is just plain loony. It’s like saying that the ringleader of a bank robbery will only testify if prosecutors already know everything. Trump is the ringleader, and his testimony is relevant regardless of what other evidence has been obtained. But then, his avoidance (fear) of testifying is relevant in its own way.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The bottom line here is that Giuliani is just engaging in obvious delaying tactics that have no legal basis. He actually admits it by conceding that the special counsel will reject his impotent demands. It’s a strategy that betrays Trump’s consciousness of guilt. This is not the behavior of someone who is confidant of his innocence. And by floating the existence of evidence that has yet to be uncovered, Giuliani is once again doing harm to his own client. Nice work, Rudy.

Gaslighting: Did Trump’s Own Lawyers Leak the Memo He’s Accusing the Justice Dept of Leaking?

Posted by on June 2, 2018 at 1:11 pm. NO Comments :

The New York Times has published an article about a memo by Donald Trump’s lawyers that asserts essentially that the President is above the law. The memo asserts that the Constitution empowers Trump to terminate any inquiry and, therefore, makes him immune to prosecution or even questioning by legal authorities.

Donald Trump

That, of course is nonsense and has no legal foundation. Nevertheless, the Times’ article states that:

“President Trump’s lawyers have for months quietly waged a campaign to keep the special counsel from trying to force him to answer questions in the investigation into whether he obstructed justice, asserting that he cannot be compelled to testify and arguing in a confidential letter that he could not possibly have committed obstruction because he has unfettered authority over all federal investigations.”

This is the sort of unfounded logic that has been promulgated by Rudy Giuliani and the Trump-fluffers on Fox News. There is no legal precedent for that conclusion, and the memo doesn’t even cite any. But what makes this even more interesting is that Trump blasted the release of the memo before it was actually released. He tweeted:

First of all, the special counsel investigation is a bargain compared to previous investigations, and it has already produced dozens of indictments and five guilty pleas. But more to the point, where did Trump get the idea that the memo was leaked? The story had not yet been published. Potential leakers might include the Times, or someone interviewed by the Times. But in order to figure out who was most likely to leak this information, you have to ask the old conspiracy question: Who benefits?

There is very little to suggest that any opponents of Trump would benefit from the disclosure of a legal position that Trump is above the law. The most likely beneficiary would be Trump himself, as he and his legal team seek to make that theory mainstream. It’s a theory that has already been advanced by his legal representatives and his supporters on Fox News.

If Trump wanted to push the notion that he cannot be questioned or indicted, then a good way to do that would be to get the New York Times to publish his own lawyers’ interpretation of the law. But he couldn’t allow it to be known that the leak came from his team. So he would then post a tweet pointing the finger of blame to the Justice Department or the special counsel, who he has already sought to discredit.

However, by posting the tweet before the article was published, he reveals that he was already aware of the article. How did that happen? Perhaps because it was him or his people who leaked the memo in the first place. The Times reporter, Michael Schmidt, was concerned about the President’s tweet and posted a tweet of his own:

If Trump or his team were responsible for the leak, Schmidt could not say so without violating an agreement with his anonymous source. But his tweet suggests that Trump’s involvement was more than a little suspicious. So that puts Trump in an advantageous position. He can say what he wants about the article, the memo and how it all became public, without having to worry about being exposed as the source. That is, unless Schmidt were to regard Trump’s dishonesty about the leak as a de facto breach of the agreement that would free him to acknowledge the identity of the source.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

All of this is highly speculative at this time, but it’s worth considering. Particularly in light of Trump’s penchant for gaslighting America. He is a known liar who will use any and every tactic for obfuscation and deceit. Which makes the probability of him leaking this memo and them blaming it on a Justice Department he despises pretty damn high.