“A total waste of time”: Trump dumps on Fox News in Saturday tweet fest
It’s difficult to decide whether the United States is better off when Donald Trump is sitting holed up in the White House tweeting his random synaptic impulses over the interweb to infect the national discourse or when he’s at least surrounding his misinformation-laden bloviating with at least a few people with actual expertise in their fields — people who can subtly correct the president’s ungrounded “gut feelings” with actual facts and statistics — as during his coronavirus press briefings.
With no public events scheduled on this Saturday of Easter weekend, the public can decide for themselves whether the more limited distribution of Trump’s tweets make them any less damaging than the extended reelection campaigning that he conducts from the podium of the White House briefing room.
After an initial tweet perplexingly boasting about his trade policies, Trump’s next missive was a combination of blame and unwarranted cheerleading in a post that marks perhaps the first time the words “Clinton” and “Thank you” have ever appeared in the same post from his tiny fingers.
….economy was shuttered. This is unprecedented, it is unsettling and challenging but, we will rise to meet the occasion.” MACK MCLARTY, Clinton White House Chief of Staff. @LelandVittert @FoxNews Thank you Mack. We will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
Of course, Trump’s next two tweets were a return to one of his favorite topics: why Americans should trust his own word over that of the mainstream media. In this case, he ignores his own venerable penchant for disseminating completely unsourced conspiracy theories to attack the news media’s use of anonymous sources in writing stories about the inner workings of the behind-the-scenes scheming, brawling, and sausage-making behind his administration’s shambolic but always destructive policies.
When the Failing @nytimes or Amazon @washingtonpost writes a story saying “unnamed sources said”, or any such phrase where a person’s name is not used, don’t believe them. Most of these unnamed sources don’t exist. They are made up to defame & disparage. They have no “source”…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
The dead giveaway in any of Trump’s attacks on the media is that they are always likely projections of his own mind’s inner workings as he projects how he himself would handle any given situation. As a proven habitual liar, the president simply assumes that his critics operate the same way that he does…and has had so ostentatiously in the past.
An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2012
Thanks for revealing your methodology, Donald.
….Does anyone ever notice how few quotes from an actual person are given nowadays by the Lamestream Media. Very seldom. The unnamed or anonymous sources are almost always FAKE NEWS.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
As Trump’s treatment of whistleblowers and of those that advance their narratives proves, any named journalistic source would face serious negative consequences from the president as a result of their truth-telling so few people are willing to go on the record when their consciences get so overwhelmed that they are inspired to leak the information that Trump is so desperate to suppress.
When the information leaks despite Trump’s efforts to keep it on the down-low, the president labels it “FAKE NEWS.”
Ironically, this accusation comes from a man who habitually couches some of his most outrageous lies with the qualifiers “people are saying” or “everybody is talking about” without any attribution whatsoever.
Trump’s next tweet was one of his disconnected Tourette’s-like, all-caps exclamations that he periodically likes to send apropos of nothing.
WE WILL BUILD IT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
What IT is, is left unsaid, but if Trump is involved, you can be sure it will a shoddy construction job masked by gaudy faux gold-plating with a bevy of unpaid contractors left in its wake.
The president also sent tweets promoting the Easter service that he claims he will be watching tomorrow morning conducted by Dr. Robert Jeffress, the homophobic pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, and retweeting a Wall Street Journal op-ed from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) that attacked the credibility of the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Trump must be having difficulty both discovering positive posts about himself to retweet and finding anything worth watching on TV, judging from his latest two tweets.
The first is a quote from an unnamed “West Virginia Resident” (hmmm, must be “FAKE NEWS”) who praised the president’s coronavirus press briefings in an interview on C-Span.
“The President and the Federal Government are doing an excellent job. When they say the death toll isn’t going to be as high as reported, they (the opposition) act like they’re sad because it’s lower. I think they are (Press Conferences) wonderful.” West Virginia Resident, C Span
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
The second tweet, and the last of the day so far, makes it quite obvious that Trump is sitting around the White House bored and scrolling through the TV channels looking for people saying nice things about him to feed the voracious appetite for praise that his ravenous ego requires.
Watching @FoxNews on weekend afternoons is a total waste of time. We now have some great alternatives, like @OANN.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
Trump is sending his bat signal to the Murdoch family warning them to beef up the compliments on Fox News weekend afternoons or else he’ll use his influence to send his followers eyeballs to the more obsequious environs of OANN. Cutthroat competition is the very basis of Trump’s economic philosophy with the carcasses of the losers strewn across the information superhighway and the president can’t stand being associated with the losers.
Fortunately for America, Trump’s performance during this COVID-19 pandemic — one in which he feels entirely comfortable spending his Saturday channel surfing and tweeting instead of doing his job — is likely to leave him amongst the losers. along with those members of the GOP who have spent more time worrying about big business than the common citizen, in November’s election.
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