Swamp of the Ineffectual Presumption

I forgot to publish this…

So about this compromising information that Russian intelligence has on Trump. My understanding is that Buzzfeed published the compromising info without any shred of corroboration or source-checking, like you’d expect from Buzzfeed, a place with zero journalistic credibility.

Then CNN published a fully fact- and source-checked story that there was potentially-compromising intelligence information being passed around, but leaving out the specifics because they could not corroborate it, like you’d expect from journalists with credibility.

Today Trump held a press conference (11 Jan), first one in forever. Now I haven’t watched it or heard it, I only saw the live Twitter commentary and the fallout and maybe a sound bite or two.

Apparently he was openly hostile to a CNN reporter there. The CNN reporter was allegedly threatened to shut up or he’d be kicked out.

Cue the outrage.

Well I’m just going to say it: I don’t have much faith in the White House press corp. I think they are a lot more concerned with their White House access than they are with journalistic integrity, and I’ve had this opinion going back to the Bush administration. How can I tell? That CNN reporter chose to shut up. No points for journalism awarded. If CNN really wants to speak truth to power, they should get thrown out of the press conference for all the world to see. Don’t sneak around afterward saying, “They were mean to me.”

Still, I trust CNN a lot more than I trust Buzzfeed.

Personally, I don’t think White House access is necessary to a functioning democracy. In fact it might be harmful. I mean, White House reporters simply repeat what the president tells them. That seems like it’s more of an advantage for the president than the people of the U.S.

Back to the Russia thing. We all want to believe Trump has been caught red-handed colluding with Russia because … why exactly? We think he’s going to step down? We think we’ll get a “do-over” for the election? We think he’ll be impeached and everything will go back to normal?

We all still remember that Mike Pence will become president if Trump leaves office, right? I mean, it’s not like Trump gets impeached and then Obama goes back into the office, or Clinton comes out of hiding. It’ll be Mike Pence, the guy who is demonstrably worse for the left, policy-wise, than Trump.

Also, if Pence is president, he’s got a pretty good chance of getting re-elected, because he’s likable. If Trump is president, there’s less chance of him being re-elected. (Depending on who the Democrats decide to run, that is.)

I’ve joked on Twitter that because of Trump, Twitter currently presents a clear and present danger to the nation, and somebody should raid their offices and destroy their servers and take the entire service offline.

I’m not entirely joking about that, actually.

P. S. I saw this open letter to Trump from the US press corps. Sounds like exactly what I want to hear, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Mainly because it was actually an open letter from one guy in the press corps. And, well, that guy isn’t on the list of people in the press corps, according to Wikipedia. Nor is his organization the CJR, which is actually a media watchdog group. So it’s basically a “wish list” of how the CJR wants the press corps to behave, not necessarily how they will behave.

Meryl Streep gave a speech at the Golden Globes yesterday.

Trump wrote a bunch of tweets in response.

Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017

Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never "mocked" a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017

"groveling" when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017

Is it really going to be four years of Hollywood versus Trump? Four entire years?

I’ve never really bought into the whole “ivory tower elites” thing but Hollywood really is acting like a bunch of spoiled whiny children lately.

But so is the president-elect so I guess it evens out.

FYI I am suffering from Trump Outrage Fatigue, meaning that I’ve seen so much manufactured outrage over the past month about Trump that it’s blurred into one big mass that I can’t even make sense of any more. Sure, there are things to be concerned about, but overall I think “the left” (a gross generalization that I wish I didn’t have to use) is overly worried because of so-called “fake news” that is biased, premature, unsubstantiated, or otherwise lacks sufficient context. (Not even counting news that is made up out of thin air.)

Here’s the basic problem with the Trump presidency so far: Twitter. He really needs to stop talking on Twitter.

You see, every time he tweets, I lose a little bit more respect for him and inch a little bit closer to thinking, “Okay, yeah, let’s just get Mike Pence in there. We’ll go to war with Russia pretty quick but at least he’ll keep all his back room political dealings secret like the Founding Fathers intended.”

I lose even more respect for the media after every Trump tweet. I mean, it’s as if they literally cannot stop talking about his tweets. They are pathologically compelled to retweet them and then write a story about them.

I was willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say that he shrewdly played the part of someone who would appeal to the more moronic voters in the country. He did an admirable job of that and won the electoral college. Everyone with half a brain knows he was lying about most of his campaign promises just to get votes. That’s fine. That’s what politicians do. That doesn’t bother me.

And in the days following the election, he even acted presidential, at least to the extent that he was capable of doing so. He acted like he respected the office and would give it the attention it deserved.

Now he’s acting like it’s all a big joke. This is exactly what the left has been yelling about the whole time, and he’s giving them exactly what they want on a silver platter.

The Green Party scam to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the badly defeated & demoralized Dems

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

He’s tweeting about the recounts when, as president-elect, he should be ignoring it entirely.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

Saying that he lost “millions” of popular votes due to fraud is just an amazing sucker-punch to American democracy. (I could possibly buy “thousands” nationwide but “millions” is just preposterous.) But now that he’s said it, “millions” of people are going to believe him, and “millions” of people now think our democracy is broken.

Thanks, Trump. (That’s the new “Thanks, Obama.”)

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016

Then he went on to accuse Virginia of widespread voter fraud without a shred of evidence to back it up. I went to the Googles and found one story alleging that three people were charged with voter fraud in Florida and Virginia. Three people. And no fraudulent votes were cast in that case, by the way, so the system worked. There was another case where a handful of dead people were registered to vote. Registered. They didn’t actually vote. Because they’re dead.

"@HighonHillcrest: @jeffzeleny what PROOF do u have DonaldTrump did not suffer from millions of FRAUD votes? Journalist? Do your job! @CNN"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016

And of course his latest tweets put the burden of proof on the media. “You guys aren’t doing your job unless you prove there was no voter fraud!” Sure, whatever, prove that negative.

[UPDATE: Oh I keep forgetting that he does retweets weird. That last one was a retweet. Still, it’s a very convincing imitation of Trump himself.]

What is the guy even thinking?

Well, clearly, he’s still driving the media narrative away from things that actually matter to him. The entire thing is a big smoke screen to cover up his massive stack of conflicts of interest that for some reason, we are only just now learning about. Or we were, until he started tweeting.

Then again it could just be a Russian hack. Hey-oh!

I’m actually not that concerned with the business conflicts. I assume that every president has them in some way or another. No president is ever going to be poor, before or after an election, that’s all I’m saying.

Technically I don’t have a problem with the recounts either. I don’t expect it to change anything, though. If it did, I think we’d have a much bigger problem in this country than four years of Donald Trump. Again I have to ask what do people think is going to happen when they find out the president they elected doesn’t take office in January? The right has been denying for weeks that they would ever stoop to protesting the results of an election, unlike those dirty liberal loons, but I bet we’d find out differently if it turns out Clinton is the one sworn in.

I read an interesting article on The Guardian today about the media’s role in Trump’s election. These kinds of articles are pretty common now, but this one seemed more thoughtful than usual. Essentially they wondered if maybe Trump had been playing the media for chumps the whole time, and maybe they didn’t do a good job covering him.

To which I can only respond with, “Duuuuuuuuuuh.”

It was incredibly obvious that the media was covering Trump more than any other Republican primary candidate. It was stupifyingly obvious that the media was covering Trump more than Clinton after the conventions. It was mind-numbingly obvious that Trump was taking advantage of all of it. I mean, stunningly, staggeringly obvious.

Personally I thought that the media felt responsible for accidentally helping Trump win the Republican nomination, and then set out to tear him down in the general election by relentlessly picking at everything he said, while totally ignoring Clinton. At some point the general public saw that too, and viewed Trump as the underdog fighting against all the forces of that evil corporate media, and that’s probably (one reason) why he won. (That and Democrats didn’t bother to vote.)

Even when Comey popped up at the end with those emails again, the media didn’t seem all that interested in it. They framed it all in terms of how it might help Trump win (making the election more exciting), and didn’t focus at all on the actual content of the emails.

He’s still manipulating the media, by the way. Today he met with The New York Times [Fox link to prevent accusations of liberal bias], which will lead the news for days. One can’t help but wonder what that might be covering up.

I’m inclined to agree with Trump that the media is a joke. I’ve seen these patterns repeated quite a lot in the past week:

Intereviewer: Thank you for joining us, Important Person Joining The Trump Administration. Did you mean that outrageous thing you said or did in the past that nobody would ever in a million years acknowledge on television?

Important Person: Of course not, that’s silly.

Interviewer: Do you think that other guy joining the administration meant it when he said or did that outrageous thing in the past that nobody would ever in a million years acknowledge on television?

Important Person: Of course not, that’s silly.

Interviewer: There you have it. Our job is done. You’re welcome, America.

Later that night…

Trump: Tee hee, now I’ll tweet something!

Media: OH MY GOD TRUMP TWEETED SOMETHING WE’VE GOT OUR HEADLINES FOR THE REST OF THE DAY!

The Hamilton story blowing up on Twitter today isn’t really worth commenting on. (Fun fact: I haven’t seen or heard Hamilton.) It’s The story is blown way out of proportion (on both sides).

Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2016

The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2016

Just my two cents but I think Trump enjoys making the Internet dance to his puppet strings whenever he tweets something. And the Internet appears perfectly willing to dance for him. I’m sure his team is glad to know it will be really easy for them to distract people from any policy mistakes made over his term.

Also I can’t help but wonder if the news for the next four years is only going to be reports on the president’s Twitter feed.

And by the way if I were really worried about Trump turning into Hitler, I definitely wouldn’t be calling him an idiot on Twitter all the time. Because, you know, it makes it easy to identify who to round up and make disappear. All the accounts are even verified now.

[Updated to clarify that I meant the Hamilton story was blown out of proportion, not the Hamilton play, which I’m sure is a fine play.]