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Nailed It: Trump is Gaslighting the Media
In the wake of the incessant “crowd size” stories and handwringing last weekend, President Trump’s media strategy has never been clearer. As Glenn Reynolds opined in USA Today, he’s gaslighting them.
Many of my fellow RedState writers will roll their eyes at this opinion, but I’m going with it anyway. Trump’s not a dummy. He rode this strategy all the way to the White House, so why should he stop now? It allows him to keep on doing whatever he wants while the press – and some conservatives – twist into pretzels with every new controversial quote or tweet.
Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.
In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).
President Trump also visited the CIA last Saturday, and what was the mainstream press takeaway from that speech? “ZOMG! He went to Langley and talked about how great his inauguration was and crowd size! What an egomaniacal idiot!” They were smart enough to realize it was significant that he went to the CIA first after the issues with outgoing chief John Brennan. Trump’s point with the crowd size comments was that the press had it out for him and they couldn’t be trusted. Do you think that rank-and-file CIA employees, the non-political ones, trust the press? That perhaps this was a way of bonding with these employees?
The press think Trump couldn’t possibly have a strategy for dealing with them, because they think he’s dumb.
As Richard Fernandez writes on Facebook, they think he’s dumb because they think he has lousy taste, but there are a lot of scarily competent guys out there in the world who like white and gold furniture. And, I should note, Trump has more media experience than probably 99% of the people covering him. (As Obama operative Ben Rhodes gloated with regard to selling a dishonest story on the Iran deal, the average reporter the Obama White House dealt with “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” In Rhodes’ words, “they literally know nothing.”)
And they show no signs of being capable of the analysis and self-control necessary to recognize, let alone correct, their behavior. So we should all buckle up and get ready for four years of media meltdown.
The post Nailed It: Trump is Gaslighting the Media appeared first on RedState.
Source: http://www.redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2017/01/27/nailed-trump-gaslighting-media/
Amidst the gaslighting there is significant stuff, for eyes and ears to hear it. For example, at the CIA meeting, while he was distracting the press with crowd size, he told the CIA employees that he was going to rebuild the CIA without it being a fifth column. “A new room with no columns”, as I recall the quote. They understood. The press didn’t.
Considering that for far too long the press has pretended to be far more important than they actually are with all of their pretending to be a government agency and trying to police people, I think a lot of people have had it with media in general.
I know that for years the local news where I am does “investigative reporting”. Which is to say, they go out and watch people , then confront them while shoving a microphone in their face.
One of our local assholes did that to some woman, and she ran over his ass and broke his leg. I was ecstatic!
Imagine yourself just experiencing some horrible event and dealing with grief and having one of the twats shove a mic in your face and asking you some absurd question just to help sell commercials with sensationalism.
Tell me that wouldn’t make you feel like snatching that microphone and beating them over the head with it.
That mindset travels all the way with the ones who end up in national news positions. They are vultures.
The news readers are to media what ambulance chasers are to the legal system.
Good on President Trump for finally treating them the way they act dictates they should be treated.