If you missed Lawrence O’Donnell last night, please watch the video. He eviscerates the media coverage of Trump’s “press conference” yesterday.
I sincerely hope everyone in the Washington press corps, plus the bigwigs of major media, look at this.
I wish there was a transcript of what Trump said yesterday. There may be one somewhere, but I haven’t found it. O’Donnell reads one of Trump’s answers to a question that would be hilarious if we weren’t in such a desperate situation.
I sincerely believe that Trump is much more mentally impaired than he was in 2016. He told lies then, too, obviously to serve his ego. But now what comes out of his mouth is more like mental flotsam, words and phrases that might have been associated with a coherent idea at some time but which came lose from all context and just washed up on shore, so to speak. For example, his repeated claim that border migrants are coming from “insane asylums” probably came about because he heard them called “asylum seekers,” And then whatever scrambled mess of synapses he has for a brain connected “asylum” to “insane.”
Somehow he’s created a memory now being called the “chopper whopper” that he and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown “went down” in a helicopter at some point. Willie Brown says he was never in a helicopter with Trump. Former Gov. Jerry Brown says he was, but they were never in any kind of forced landing situation. My point is that this is not the sort of lie that a calculating brain might come up with. It came about because random badly remembered things collided in his head and kind of stuck together. He probably believes it’s true.
This was just published at The New Republic:
Former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton was thoroughly unimpressed with Donald Trump’s last-minute presser at Mar-a-Lago, criticizing him as a man so dishonest that he can no longer perceive the difference between the truth and his lies.
Responding to a clip from Trump’s Thursday speech in which the former president claimed he had been “protective” of Hillary Clinton during his administration (despite telling crowds at the time that she should “be in jail” and be “locked up”), Bolton told CNN that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”
“It’s not that he lies a lot because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference,” Bolton continued. “So he makes up what he wants to say at any given time. If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees—well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care and he’s had decades of getting away with it.
“So in his mind, the truth is whatever he wants it to be. And that’s what you heard today,” Bolton added.
Not that I think Bolton is a reliable source for anything, but he may be somewhere in the ball park this time. But I suspect Trump may be even more disconnected from what we might call commonly experienced reality than he used to be. If he honestly doesn’t know that his helicopter story, for example, never happened, that’s kind of a problem. If he does know it didn’t happen, and doesn’t care, that’s also a problem.
On the other hand — McKay Coppins wrote a piece for The Atlantic in January that says he spent a couple of days with Trump in 2014, and says the Trump he saw then is the same person he sees now. Maybe.
Lawrence is spot-on, and thank God for him, the only one.
I'm reminded of that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on his not understanding it"
There are structural reasons, apart from sheer laziness and incompetence why the news media isn't doing its job. Trump, and the clicks he (used to) generate is good business for them. They're in a death spiral and need the revenue.
I'm not the first to say this, but just as newspapers have been in a long decline, so are the major news channels. The rise of blogging twenty years ago is one response to this. So is the rise of Youtube and Substack. People don't need huge corporate structures with their own agendas to find out what's going on anymore.
In Russia, only old people watch TV, which has the same effect as Fox News here. Young people there and here have dumped old media, including newspapers and TV channels. Their death spiral continues.
As a side note, I wonder why Trump hasn't been campaigning? Was he that spooked by the shooting in Butler PA? His protege, JD Vance is campaigning, but he draws almost no crowds. I've seen him called "the Great Lakes Ron Desantis", but with even less appeal.
Not to get all psychobabbly, but I think it has to do with the risk the journalists are feeling at an unconscious level. Trump and his MAGATs have well-proven that they can be vindictive if crossed. Since Biden’s just a regular old guy doing his job, nobody’s really afraid of him. He won't go after their livelihood if challenged.
I gigged at a place where management hammered all the employees as a group, warning us that if we all didn’t work harder and smarter that we’d fail and our competition would win. Their case was factual, rational, and compelling. So a few did just that, work harder and smarter, and some of them very much so. Yet management allowed a gang of mediocres to systematically mob those people, each one at a time, until they quit or got laid off for highly dubious reasons.
Confused, I looked up that sort of behavior. An expert at a social psychology explained that by “trying too hard”, an employee unconsciously telegraphs desperation, which mediocre performing aggressive peers might see as a weakness to be exploited. In my case, management were all physically weak geeks, and since the mobbing gang were physically strong athletic types with aggressive personalities, both performer and management unconsciously capitulated to them out of fear. It was like something out of middle school.
I think you may be on to something. I've also had the misfortune of working for a certifiable sociopath whose symptoms overlapped a bit with Trump's. What I observed is that people just automatically adjusted to her inappropriate behavior. If you worked there very long you were relating to her as a kind of complex of behaviors and issues, not as a human being. And it's also the case that, according to all accounts, Trump has an explosive temper, so everybody is probably tip-toeing around that, too.
Trump's past is now haunting him. Once upon a time he could have gotten away with the chopper whopper story. Now it is another self-inflicted wound. Fewer people trust him and many old allies have been burnt. He finds himself short on aces and long in the tooth. He is in for a very rough ride.
Now where is my tiny violin. I need to work up a little fake sympathy.
Well – I think he's reliable here. Maybe he's wrong, but I agree that Trump says what he wants to say, facts be damned. I've always felt that way about him. I felt the same way about George W., and I think that's why I felt a bit hurt that Condi Rice lied about the aluminum tubes – I didn't get that vibe from her. She *really* lied, not like George W. BSing us constantly.
I wonder if there's a sign, or a tell, something we neurodivergent people see, because so few people seem to mention his "damn the facts, full speed ahead!" approach, even when it makes him look dangerously incompetent. "Maybe he *thought* the DNC server was in Ukraine," is a prime example. What, he believes unfounded rumor over the entire information gathering arm of the US government? And that's *okay*?
But in 2016, he could keep up with lots of right wing noise machine, and had lots of material. Now, he can't. He's whiny, and repetitive, and, as you see about the FDA ban question (if you read the transcript) he clearly has no idea what the question was, so he just tried to bluff, and couldn't even do that very well. "Follow up question: Is it a dessert topping or a floor wax?" and his' head would have literally exploded, if heads literally exploded when they should, damn it.
This wasn't like Joe Biden's "stutterer's meander" on a debate question – Joe touched on actual topics in a linear manner, and just couldn't wrap it up in a clean sentence. Ask Joe the follow-up, and he would have either said "it's both," because he remembered the SNL skit, or said something like "come on, jack, ask a real question!"
He has no discipline. Remember that he’s never held a real job in his life. Most of us who have some kind of profression, including working for a business, learn that we have to be careful with facts. If you make a decision based on X data you may have to defend it to your boss, so you learn to be careful you’ve got the data right. He’s probably never in his life had to do that. He’s just gone with what he wants to be true, and he’s more or less gotten away with it. He’s not going to learn anything different now.
I watched Lawrence live that night, he said it like it is the MSM including msnbc is invested in keeping Stump liable, it makes them money.
"Not that I think Bolton is a reliable source for anything, but he may be somewhere in the ball park this time"
His analysis sounds right on the money to me, he would know he worked for the big bag of shit. I honestly don't know why we have to keep analyzing Stump's behavior, he's a narcissistic pathological liar. I knew that the first time I heard him speak at the foot of the escalator, nothing has changed he lies constantly. There really is no point in considering anything he says, it's all bullshit. Has he got worse, maybe but that is sort of the purview of a pathological liar isn't it, everyday they tell more lies so the next day they need to tell more and on and on.
I've disproved that claim several times already. Give it a rest. Trump's antics made them money in 2016, but not now. People are tired of his act.
"Most of us who have some kind of profression, including working for a business, learn that we have to be careful with facts. If you make a decision based on X data you may have to defend it to your boss,"
I contacted a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times in 2014, long before my flight. He was then a Pulitzer Prize runner-up, and the book he wrote in 2016 became a best-seller. He was working for Axios last year and received a "press release" as a reporter from the Governor's office when DeSantis was running against Trump.
He replied to the DeSantis office that it was not a press release – it was propaganda. I read it and that was an accurate description. He didn't call it propaganda in a published article – he might have. But he didn't because he was fired from Axios before he could have.
It's easy to miss the critical dynamic here. It's not that DeSantos is a POS, wanna-be-Trump-style dictator. Unsurprisingly, the DeSantis office pushed back against this accurate description communicated in a private email. He hurt their feelings. Axios responded to a threat (IMO) from the governor's office if they didn't deliver Ben's head on a platter. (What the threat was is open to speculation.) Axios lacks a director with an ounce of professional ethics. It's obviously run by bean-counters who would not know professional ethics if the animal bit them on the butt. I think this is true of the NYT and WaPo.
There are still journalists out there, like Maddow and O'Donnell. MSNBC has provided them a haven to speak factual truth. (Maddow is painstakingly thorough in presenting facts and differentiating between a known thing and what she presents as reasonable speculation built on a foundation of evidence. This type of reporting will get your network into expensive litigation. (ABC – George Stephanopolis is being sued by Trump for calling the outcome of Trump's trial "rape.")
Against a statesman like Biden, there is no risk of litigation (or Fox would have been in court against the DOJ for defamation long ago.) The same attack dogs in the WH briefing room turn into poodles for Trump because they know they can't trust their senior management to back them. No reporter will report that the management offices are all expensive whores masquerading as journalists. Not only would you lose your job, you'd never work in any media job run by whores.
The indictment shouldn't be against reporters – the blame lies with the clearly defined standard that most media runs by. The standard was set by owners who want profit and are terrified of the expense of litigation and/or the lack of access to candidates (or elected officials.) Their cowardice leaves them open to extortion and intimidation. That's what we're seeing.
It would be a shame not to reference Maureen Dowd's bit in the NYT. In a piece elaborating on Trump's bigger number obsession, she writes of the meltdown:
Written by a true master of the metaphor.