New York Times

Trump Saying ‘People Would Revolt’ if He is Impeached is Not His Opinion, It’s an Instruction

Posted by on December 12, 2018 at 11:02 am. 4 Comments :

The walls are continuing to close in around Donald Trump. And they aren’t border walls. With the sentencing of his former associates, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, there is more information being released that unambiguously implicates Trump in federal crimes. And, as is his customary practice, the more he feels threatened, the more hysterical he gets. He is transparently consumed by fear and desperation.

Donald Trump Revolt

That response was in effect Tuesday when Trump was interviewed by Reuters. The whole interview was woven with lies and nonsense. But one particular part is worthy of notice. When Trump was questioned about talk that he could be impeached for crimes related to his campaign and and his unsavory connections to Russia, he blew up:

“It’s hard to impeach somebody who hasn’t done anything wrong and who’s created the greatest economy in the history of our country. “I’m not concerned, no. I think that the people would revolt if that happened.”

Let’s set aside – after laughing uncontrollably – the patently untrue assertions that Trump has done nothing wrong, or that he’s responsible for the “greatest economy” in history. What is stunning about his comments is his warning that there would be a revolt if he were held accountable for his criminal activities. In fact, this is less a warning than it is instructions to his cult followers. He expects them to resort to violence on his behalf in the event he is impeached by the representatives of the American people.

There are lots of reasons to consider Trump’s impeachment. He shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to his mistresses in order to keep them quiet before the 2016 election. He failed to disclose those expenditures. He has received millions more from foreign operatives funneling money to him through his hotels and other businesses. He and his closest associates have lied repeatedly about his conspiracy to steal the election with his Russian partners. So impeachment is not much of a stretch for such a flagrant law violator, and a bad one at that.

Even more troubling is the fact that this isn’t the first time Trump has threatened violence directed at his critics. Even during his campaign Trump threatened the outbreak of riots if he was denied the nomination. Almost daily he refers to the media in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people.” He has accused the press of “creating violence by your questions […] The fake news is creating violence.” He accused Democrats in Congress of treason for not applauding him at the State of the Union address. “Can we call that treason?” he said. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.” He suggested that the media also committed treason with its coverage of his summit with Kim Jong Un, saying that “It’s a shame the fake news covers it the way they do. It’s really, it’s almost treasonous, you want to know the truth.” Do you detect a pattern?

If you think that this sort of hostile rhetoric is petty trumpery (“worthless nonsense” according to Merriam-Webster), you might want to refer to the polling that shows that one-third of Trump voters say Democrats who didn’t applaud during the State of the Union were “treasonous.”

And you might also note Trump’s obsession with maligning his critics as anti-American. For instance, there was the time he responded to an op-ed in the New York Times by an anonymous White House staffer who called Trump “amoral,” “unstable,” “erratic,” “ill-informed,” and “reckless.” The author further worried that the President has “a preference for autocrats and dictators.” And that other staffers were “working diligently … from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” In response to that article Trump blasted off four tweets attacking the Times, one of which contained a single word:

And that pretty much sums up the position of this wannabe dictator in the White House. He truly believes that any dissent is tantamount to treason, and the consequences of that is death. That’s the message that Trump is sending out to his glassy-eyed cult disciples. And this latest message raising the prospect of “revolt” is another escalation in his war against America, democracy, and freedom.

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

Crybaby Trump Lashes Out at the Media for Accurately Reporting His Frequent Failures

Posted by on October 10, 2018 at 11:06 am. 2 Comments :

With Hurricane Michael bearing down on the Gulf Coast, Donald Trump managed to find time to tweet about the media that he regards as “the enemy of the people.” He’s been doing that most of the last two years, even after the GOP-controlled Senate rebuked him for his blatantly anti-constitutional blather.

Donald Trump

In his latest Twitter tantrum, Trump characteristically whined about what he thinks is biased treatment by the press. He continues to prove that he is a weakling who can’t take the heat of public service like all the presidents who preceded him. So he lashes out incoherently and clings to sycophantic supporters who oblige him with undeserved flattery. Wednesday morning’s rant was especially deranged:

The Media Research Center is a notoriously biased pack of right-wing shills. What they publish as “studies” wouldn’t stand the scrutiny of credible media analysts. And their results are similar to those of dictatorships where the tyrant in residence always seems to get ninety-plus percent in every election. It’s uncanny how much murderous totalitarians like Trump’s pals Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are loved by the people they oppress.

In Trump’s attack on the press he makes a point of calling out all of the broadcast media offenders: ABC, CBS and ABC. He must really hate ABC because he put them in there twice. And surprisingly, he left out NBC, the network he hates more than all the others. Is his hostility just so intense that he can’t even bring himself to utter their name? And Trump’s complaint about negative stories is completely off base. The press is reporting on him accurately, and it isn’t their fault that almost everything he does is negative.

Trump did manage to include his newspaper nemesis, the New York Times, which is hardly failing. Trump is very upset that the Times didn’t put the Kavanaugh “victory” on the front page Tuesday. First, let’s note that Dr. Ford, and millions of American women, don’t think that Kavanaugh’s presence on the Supreme Court is a victory. But more to the point, Trump is once again demonstrating his ignorance and/or dishonesty. That’s because the Senate confirmation vote occurred on Saturday, and it was on the front page of the Times on Sunday:

It continues to boggle the mind how Trump can keep exhibiting ever lower stages of mental infirmity. The simplest things are screwed up to an astonishing degree. And even when he is apprised of his errors, he persists in repeating them. It’s a symptom of his senile dementia and malignant narcissism. And it’s embarrassing to the nation and the majority of its citizens. But what’s even more troubling is that there is a small core of StormTrumpers who eat this up. They are as delusional as he is and are incapable of being corrected no matter how solid the facts. What’s truly frightening is that Trump will eventually be gone, but they will remain.

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

Tucker Carlson of Fox News Confesses that he ‘Can’t Look in the Mirror Without Self Loathing’?

Posted by on October 2, 2018 at 3:14 pm. 3 Comments :

On Tuesday, the morning crew at Fox News invited their primetime colleague, Tucker Carlson, to visit with the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends for a masters class in mind-numbing hypocrisy. Of course, that’s standard fare on Fox News, but this episode stretched the boundaries of the journalistic quackery that Fox is famous for. And it gave Carlson an opportunity to expound on something other than his white nationalist dogma.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson

The segment that featured Carlson was focused on criticizing the New York Times for a recent report about Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The story concerned an incident in 1985 when Kavanaugh was involved in a bar fight investigation. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt introduced the segment with a graphic showing the Times’ headline: “Kavanaugh was questioned by police after bar fight in 1985.” So it was a pretty straight forward account of something that no one disputes took place.

Nevertheless, Fox and their friends were aghast that anyone would bring up an incident that occurred when Kavanaugh was only twenty years old. As everyone knows, it’s improper to investigate a public figure’s past unless they are Democrats. In which case, you can go all the way back to their birth certificate. Consequently, Carlson reacted with shock and sarcastically proclaimed that “I wish they’d have told me that. I never would’ve supported him.” He dismissed the article as “stupid and irrelevant” and generally mocked the Times for having published it. But the discourse sunk even lower as this exchange with Steve Doocy demonstrates (video below):

Carlson: This is the problem with so much of our coverage, and so much of the way we think about things. No self awareness at all. […] If you’re writing that story does part of you think “Is this why I got into journalism? To carry water for a political party? To be a propagandist? To write something so stupid that I can’t look in the mirror without self loathing?”
Doocy: Don’t you know the answer to that question?
Carlson: Some people never pause to ask “What am I doing with my life?”

Imagine having such a pitiful lack of self awareness that you can ask about the self awareness of others while you’re oblivious to what you’re saying at that exact moment. Tucker Carlson was actually chastising the Times for “carry[ing] water for a political party” and for being “a propagandist.” Those are two things that Fox News in general, and Carlson in particular, are best known for. So if Carlson thinks that someone being that big a suck-up “can’t look in the mirror without self loathing,” then he’ll have to remove every mirror from his home and office in order to get through the day. And knowing his degree of narcissism, that’s a lot of mirrors.

It was also somewhat curious that Doocy asked Carlson if he already knew the answer to his own questions. That sounds like Doocy was accusing Carlson of the political sycophancy he was complaining about. Which would be wildly out of character for Doocy. Regardless, Carlson just laughed it off with his patented smuggery. And in the end, none of them realized that what they were criticizing was what has been the central mission of Fox News for twenty years – if we’re allowed to go back that far.

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

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.