Throughout his campaign, Donald J. Trump — or, as I like to call him, Daddy — treated the mainstream media as his personal plaything. Now as the 45th President of the United States, he shows no signs of stopping.
Something similar is currently happening to me, although fortunately for feminists, black lives matter activists, fat people, vapers and cyclists I have no political aspirations.
Remember, the Trump campaign received free advertising from the mainstream media worth an estimated $5 billion dollars. They hated his guts, but couldn’t stop covering him!
Daddy’s latest triumph involves baiting the media, especially CNN (or, as they are now referred to on twitter, “those CNNTS”), into devoting more coverage to acts of Islamic terrorism around the world.
The President’s strategy was simple: accuse them of not covering Islamic terrorism, and then watch them fall over themselves to prove him wrong.
“It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” Trump said at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. “And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.”
The media, especially CNN and their intellectual peers at Buzzfeed, have for a while now been engaging in a desperate campaign to frame the White House and its spokespeople as being purveyors of fake news.
From going after Kellyanne Conway for use of the perfectly intelligible and uncontroversial term “alternative facts,” to their dust-up with Press Secretary Sean Spicer over the disputed inauguration crowd size, the media are convinced they can undermine trust in the administration. I, too, have beef with Sean Spicer, but it has more to do with him snatching a job I thought I had in the bag.
The attacks aren’t working. Trump’s approval rating is at 42 percent and rising, while trust in the media remains at a dismal 34 percent — the lowest in history. Yet the media still believe they can get the public to mistrust Trump as much as they mistrust them. Of course their coordinated move to introduce the concept of fake news has failed so miserably, due to their own fakery, that they’ve started walking back the term after just months!
Here’s a snippet from a recent CNN article about the media’s coverage of terrorism:
There are 16 terrorist attacks on the White House list of purportedly under-covered attacks that each elicited more than 3,000 media mentions.
The following are a representative sample:
- In Ottawa in October 2014 Michael Zehaf-Bibeau killed a Canadian soldier.
- Two months later in Sydney, Man Haron Monis killed two Australians.
- In March 2015, 21 tourists were killed at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia.
- Two months later in Garland, Texas, two ISIS-inspired militants attacked a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest. Luckily no one was killed except the terrorists.
- In Tunisia, also in 2015, 38 were killed at a beach popular with Westerners.
- In October 2015, 224 were killed in Sinai, Egypt, when ISIS brought down a Russian passenger jet with a bomb.
The terror attacks in Paris and Nice, France, that Trump cited in his CENTCOM speech also received more than 3,000 media mentions.
This is exactly what Trump was hoping CNN would do. Why do people keep underestimating Daddy? It’s mystifying to me.
It’s not like this is the first time that Trump has baited the media. His unquestionable tour de force was the unveiling of the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C in September, during the election campaign.
Trump announced in advance that he was going to address the issue of then-President Obama’s birth certificate at the unveiling, which of course caused the entire mainstream media to descend on the event. They were certain Trump was going to embarrass himself with an outlandish, potentially campaign-killing conspiracy theory. Or, alternatively, walk back his previous remarks, which he never does and which they could spin as a victory.
Instead, Trump devoted just one sentence to the “birther” issue, at the very end of the event, where he flatly acknowledged that Obama was born in America. But in order to get to that, the mainstream media not only had to cover the opening of Trump’s new hotel, but also a string of military veterans endorsing him for President. The media were giving free publicity to his business and his political campaign. A fuming Jake Tapper called it a “political rickroll.” I wont lie, I was aroused for weeks.
I said it right at the start of his campaign: Donald Trump is the king of trolling his critics. And in the media, he’s found a perfect, and widely-despised mark. Here’s hoping it never ends.
DANGEROUS is available to pre-order now via Amazon, in hardcover and Kindle editions. And yes, MILO is reading the audiobook version himself!
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