Trump's media allies are jumping ship.
He lost the New York Post: They wrote: "Stop the insanity."
He lost the Washington Examiner. They wrote: "Dubious tweet. . . confusion. . . fact check."
Trump is being jettisoned and re-branded by his former friends.
The Washington Examiner fact-checked Trump. His tweet about the Pennsylvania election was simply and obviously not true. There was no other way to spin it. They chose not to ignore it.
The Examiner was a loyal voice of Donald Trump, the DC alternative to the Washington Post. I visited with a frank and cynical Examiner reporter in New Hampshire in 2015, when we were both attending an event where Joe Biden got photographed serving bowls of chili to New Hampshire union firefighters prior to their going out to canvas door-to-door for him.
The reporter said he tried to write honest reports, but the editors wanted "an angle" on every story. Maybe Biden looked tired; maybe the firefighters weren't really going to canvas; maybe Bided spilled some chili; maybe the crowd was small; something. He said he would be accurate, but there always needed to be the Examiner feel to the story.
Yesterday Trump tweeted out a message that was so ridiculous that the Examiner blew the whistle. Trump's millions of trusting supporters--like the retired physician this blog quoted yesterday--might swallow Trump's position whole, but a newspaper needs a fig leaf of plausibility. A misstatement so easily disproven cannot be allowed to stand at face value.
Yesterday Trump tweeted this:
There are nine million registered voters in Pennsylvania and under seven million votes were cast. Anyone could have checked to determine this. Trump was mis-quoting a confused and inaccurate statement written six weeks prior by a group of Pennsylvania lawmakers, a position they long since abandoned.
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| Washington Examiner headline |
"A spokesperson for Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar shared a statement with the Washington Examiner that noted that state and federal judges 'have sifted through hundreds of pages of unsubstantiated and false allegations and found no evidence of fraud or illegal voting' and asserted that the Republicans' 'so-called analysis was based on incomplete data.'"
Trump is being rebranded, and it is happening to him, not by him. Trump is treated as a cranky loser doing pointless, crazy rants. He is a King Lear character, a description now being used frequently. He appears sad, confused, and angry at what he considers abandonment by his former allies. Even his media allies now describe Trump's reality and the reality, and they aren't the same.
The "respectable" conservative mass media-- the news part of Fox News and the Washington Examiner--have concluded that they cannot just re-publish and extend Trump's fantasies. This is paradigm shift. Trump triumphed by being an outlaw-hero, the impolite kick-ass fighter. Trump hit a tipping point. His status changed when he lost the election. He won't be president. And, simultaneously with that, his denials of the election results went from implausible to crazed. Frantic. Unhinged. Provably dishonest. There were too many accusations that didn't hold up and they were contradicted by too many people with credibility, i.e. Republicans.
Trump was attacking them, too, calling them fake along with the others. Trump had become unreliable.
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| King Lear |
They will miss Trump. He was good for business. But he became unreliable and a liability. They are doing what a company board of directors needs to do when the founder and face of the company becomes an embarrassment.
They have cut Trump loose.
3 comments:
Narcissistic personalities are unreliable friends. Their loyalty is to themselves and to others only to the extent it profits them. The separation/ divorce that is taking place in my viewpoint was inevitable. Trump held loyalty through fear of him, not through respect. Now that his presidency is ending, there is less fear. I suspect very few people who really know him like him. I saw this happen to my narcissistic boss of twenty years.
“They have cut Trump loose.”
Good. The working class / populist movement needs a new and saner leader if they are going to take back the presidency in 2024. This is the beginning of the process to find that new leader.
Despite Trump’s many flaws, his supporters were right about one thing: our political elites suck and their destructive rule needs to be ended.
A Facebook retired friend from Kentucky posted the New York Post headline - "Stop the Insanity" the other day. His last post and no more from him since. We had a running "meme battle" but agreeing to disagree and IF we ever saw one another again to have a long discussion over a bottle of fine Kentucky sour mash. I don't want to read too much into his silence. It could be he's gone snowmobiling in the Sisters area or his wife has prevailed that his anger is becoming a health risk to him. And there's nothing that he or she can really do - Biden IS the next POTUS! He is a Navy veteran and swore an oath to the Constitution and to the Commander-in-chief. He is loyal to Trump. I imagine he will remain loyal no matter what happens he will rationalize it. I angered him when I shared his posts side by side to his condemnation of President Obama at every turn. Little things like the going golfing or vacationing or travel expenses on Air Force One and earning money from his book deals contrasted to Trump's golfing, vacationing and use of his Foundation to funnel taxpayer money into his pockets. He never answered the question I raised - why the blind loyalty? Why not the loyalty to President Obama as well? Instead I got memes on Lock Her UP and Benghazi as if those were comparable and some that were blatantly racist. Mostly he reacted and posted inline with FoxNews commentators. He is a strong supporter of Trump and, though he's gone quiet, he's anti-Democrat at every turn. His attitude is solid and I believe representative of a majority in his social circle. I expect the Biden/Harris tenure with be a ground game that is slow and torturous and magnified in the negative direction by right leaning individuals and groups. They will draw their "righteous anger" from the demonstrations against Trump as justification. Emotion will rule, reason will not penetrate. 2021 will bring back a shell of our democracy with many more severe cracks than the Liberty Bell. We have a republic if we can keep it! But do we have the staying power for this long drawn out battle of ideas. Time will tell.
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