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CNN Hires Former Trump Administration Flack Sarah Isgur As Political Editor

CNN Hires Former Trump Administration Flack Sarah Isgur As Political Editor

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Early on in the Trump administration, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions ran into a staffing problem as he took over the Department of Justice. According to The Washington Post, Sessions very much wanted to hire longtime Republican political operative Sarah Isgur as his chief spokeswoman, but she had “criticized [President Donald] Trump, repeatedly, during the 2016 Republican primaries,” and thus her “prospects for a Justice Department job stalled.” To break the logjam, the Post reported, Isgur paid Trump “a cordial visit during which she told the president she was on board with his agenda and would be honored to serve him.”

The incident was noteworthy when the Post reported it last April because it demonstrated both the president’s overriding need for loyalty and the willingness of Republican operatives to kiss Trump’s ring as a means of career advancement. The story has taken on new relevance now that the same Sarah Isgur who personally expressed her loyalty to the sitting president has reportedly been hired as a political editor at CNN.

In certain respects, this is a baffling move by CNN. According to Politico, which first broke the news, Isgur will assume her editorial role at the network in March and “will coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign.” Isgur is a career political operative — she’s worked for Sessions, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the Republican National Committee, and Carly Fiorina’s failed 2016 presidential campaign — but there is no indication that she has ever worked in any capacity as a journalist (unless you count appearing as a pundit on cable news, which you should not). CNN has hired a person with zero experience producing news to oversee the production of news.

Not only that, but the network has turned over its 2020 political coverage to person who is more or less a walking conflict of interest. Politico notes that Isgur, because of her employment history, “will not play a role in covering the Department of Justice.” How on earth can a cable news channel have a political editor who can’t cover DOJ? The workings of the Justice Department are at the heart of some of the most critically important political stories of the Trump era. The Russia investigation and the special counsel’s office are going to be hugely important topics for the 2020 campaign, and Democratic candidates are likely going to spend considerable energy attacking DOJ policies that Isgur defended, such as Sessions’ legal assault on sanctuary laws for undocumented immigrants.

It doesn’t make much sense to have a political editor who has never worked in journalism, and it doesn’t make any sense to have a political editor who is walled off from important stories that will be central to the very coverage she is supposed to be coordinating. And those problems rest uneasily atop issues that arise from Isgur’s partisan leanings and her loyalties to current and former high-ranking Trump officials. Isgur’s presence will lead to persistent, difficult-to-answer questions about how her politics and conflicts of interest are shaping the network’s 2020 coverage.

CNN’s choice of a Trump administration veteran does, however, fit in with the network’s fantastically self-defeating strategy of hiring pro-Trump mercenaries who shill on behalf of a president and administration that delight in demonizing CNN. The journalism industry does not lack for talented, experienced professionals who are desperate for work, but CNN opted to give this important job to a Jeff Sessions acolyte who has never worked as a journalist. That sure feels like the network sabotaging its own interests in order to send a conciliatory message to a political movement that will always view it as an “enemy of the people.”

Howard Schultz’s Cable News Fantasy Campaign

Howard Schultz’s Cable News Fantasy Campaign

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

Howard Schultz might be running for president and nobody knows why. No one asked him to run for president, and there was no existing political movement to recruit the billionaire former Starbucks CEO into a presidential campaign. The Schultz 2020 experiment just materialized out of nothingness, and in its short, cursed existence it has commanded outsized media attention despite the fact that pretty much everyone seems to hate it.

Since he teased his potential candidacy, Schultz has been interviewed on 60 Minutes, Morning Joe, The View, Anderson Cooper 360, and various other high-wattage news programs. Though he hasn’t articulated a single policy, big-name columnists have bestowed their imprimatur upon the would-be candidate and he’s being credited by political analysts with “driv[ing] a sustained debate on both policy and politics.” Meanwhile, Fox News is having a love affair with Schultz and the prospect that he’d assist Donald Trump’s re-election by splitting the Democratic vote.

There are two factors sustaining Schultz’s media blitz. The first and most obvious is that he’s a rich guy, and when a rich guy makes a splashy announcement — no matter how misguided and self-serving it is — the unwritten rules stipulate that he must be given credulous media attention.

The second factor is Schultz’s embrace of the “centrist independent” mantle. The idea of a presidential candidate who floats serenely above the interparty squabbling of D.C. while uniting the country with an ideologically neutral platform is a fantasy, but it is a fantasy that holds deep influence among cable news pundits and other media figures. To the extent that Howard Schultz has a constituency, it exists largely in America’s green rooms.

Schultz’s 2020 trial balloon is just the most recent misguided attempt by intensely deluded wealthy people to manufacture a centrist political movement out of nothing. Back in 2006, the Unity08 movement sprang up with the goal of nominating a bipartisan presidential ticket that would run on a platform chosen by online delegates. It couldn’t attract any real support and fizzled out after its founders joined a campaign to draft former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race (that campaign also failed).

2010 saw the creation of No Labels, a well-funded but determinedly useless “centrist” organization that promises to end “fighting” but also practices clandestine partisan warfare. The 2012 election cycle bore witness to the Americans Elect catastrophe, in which $35 million of hedge-fund money was spent on a cockamamie scheme to break up the two-party system with an online presidential primary (no candidate reached the minimum threshold of support).

The consistent failure of these third-party centrist movements doesn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm for third-party centrism among political pundits. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman gave his full-throated endorsement to Americans Elect. In 2016, Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing the creation of a new political party — The Innovation Party — that would “disrupt” American politics by making Mark Zuckerberg president. After Donald Trump was elected president, David Brooks wrote in The New York Times that “the most important caucus formation” in Trump’s Washington “will be in the ideological center” as envisioned by No Labels.

Pundit enthusiasm for third-party centrism persists despite the fact that “centrism” has no appeal and no natural constituency. The fatal mistake all these centrist wishcasters make is in assuming that public frustration with left-right political gridlock will automatically translate into enthusiasm for someone who stands up and says, “That’s not me!” The centrist ethos is consistently defined by what it isn’t; groups like No Labels go to absurd lengths to show everyone that they’re neither “left” nor “right,” and in the process they reveal that they don’t actually stand for anything.

And the centrist “agenda,” to the extent that it exists, is divorced from practical concerns that motivate voters. Schultz hasn’t proposed any detailed policies of his own, but he is singularly concerned about the national debt and has attacked Democratic proposals for health care and education as unaffordable. (Democratic candidates have also said they’ll increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for their programs, but Schultz opposes that, too.) Schultz’s whole pseudo-campaign has thus far consisted primarily of telling voters that Democrats are too extreme while mouthing vague slogans about unity.

This drivel plays well with the pundit class, which will extend to Schultz the presumption of viability for no reason beyond his wealth and self-identification as a centrist. Asked about the left-wing backlash to Schultz’s potential candidacy, CNN’s Michael Smerconish declared himself “dumbfounded” and said: “Here’s a guy who tweets and then says, ‘I love America and I want to run for president — I think — as a centrist independent.’ Why aren’t we thanking him?” Schultz has been publicly exploring a candidacy for a handful of days and in that time hasn’t actually done anything to warrant gratitude from anybody, but that’s immaterial to pundits who see in him the independent centrist of their many-times-unrealized dreams.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Christie’s Awful Book Smacks Down Kushner, But Sucks Up To Trump

Christie’s Awful Book Smacks Down Kushner, But Sucks Up To Trump

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

Chris Christie, the scandal-plagued former governor of New Jersey who left office with historic disapproval ratings, has a new book coming out later this month detailing his life in politics. The book’s title, Let Me Finish, is a nod to the disgraced governor’s self-styled reputation as a combative brute who theatrically berated his constituents, and it accurately presumes that the only person who wants to hear Chris Christie speak at this point is Chris Christie.

Christie, who is now a contributor for ABC News, wrote this book mainly to settle some old scores. Early excerpts obtained by Axios and The Guardian detail Christie’s lengthy broadsides against Jared Kushner, son-in-law and top adviser to President Donald Trump. Christie was once considered a top candidate for a senior position in the Trump White House, but he writes that Kushner interceded and blocked his ascent as retaliation for Christie’s prosecution of Kushner’s father for tax evasion and witness tampering.

Christie’s beef with Kushner is sordid but generally uninteresting. His treatment of the president and his administration, however, is worth highlighting. Per Axios, Christie heaps invective on pretty much everyone in Trump’s immediate orbit, describing a “revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for.” According to The Guardian, however, “one central character escapes relatively unscathed: Trump himself. The president is utterly fearless and a unique communicator Christie writes – and his main flaw is that he speaks on impulse and surrounds himself with people he should not trust.”

This servile treatment of Trump previews a mythology we’re likely to see from right-wing figures seeking to rationalize an increasingly chaotic and disastrous presidency: Trump did not fail; he was failed by those around him.

It’s an appealing and useful fiction for figures like Christie who once adamantly opposed Trump before publicly debasing themselves to hop on the Trump bandwagon. When Christie endorsed Trump for the presidency in February 2016, his political future looked bleak: His own presidential campaign had foundered, his top aides were under indictment in the Bridgegate scandal, his approval rating at home was in the low thirties (on its way to bottoming out in the mid-teens), and the pundit class (once his most reliable constituency) was no longer marveling at the size of his shoulders. Getting behind Trump early was Christie’s longshot bid at staying politically relevant, and according to Christie, it would have paid off had Jared Kushner not sabotaged him.

Ever the striver and ingratiator, Christie’s response to the chaos of the Trump administration is to praise Trump’s vision while pushing responsibility for his failures a couple of rungs down the ladder. That way, Trump remains largely blameless and Christie gets to sidestep prickly questions about his own judgment. Trump, for his part, is a big fan of this blame-diffusing mentality.

The scenario Christie sketches is at war with itself. On the one hand, Trump is a bold and determined leader of unparalleled vision. On the other, he’s more or less a bystander to his own administration’s inner workings. The turmoil, grifting, and incompetence Christie describes at the highest levels of the administration can be corrected by precisely one person: the president. The decision to fill a White House with incompetent, untrustworthy senior staffers who violate the law can be made by precisely one person: the president. Trump’s responsibility for these failures is clear, but Christie is too much of a self-interested coward to say as much.

As the Trump presidency sinks deeper into scandal and corruption, we’re likely going to see more of this mythmaking take hold. The conservative movement and the Republican Party sold the Trump presidency as both a curative to establishment corruption and a needed exercise in bold, singular leadership — “I alone can fix it,” as Trump himself put it during his speech accepting the Republican nomination. Both claims were ludicrous; Donald Trump’s legacy to that point was defined by corruption and failure, and his reputation for business savvy was a concoction of reality TV.

But the right aligned itself behind Trump and built up these fictions as the core of Republican Party politics. Conservatives can’t abandon Trump, and they can’t acknowledge that the central promise of Trumpism was a massive scam. The only way to maintain the myth of Trump’s leadership as it crumbles under the weight of investigation and incompetence will be to slap together still more fictions. As Chris Christie’s example shows us, that means divorcing all responsibility from the president who boasted that he was the only person capable of fixing the country.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Ocasio-Cortez Exposes Our Warped Discourse On Taxation

Ocasio-Cortez Exposes Our Warped Discourse On Taxation

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

It’s been several days since CBS News tweeted out a clip of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) floating a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million to finance a Green New Deal program, and her comments are still generating news stories, commentary, and bluntly dishonest attacks from the right. It’s unusual to see such a media frenzy surrounding a proposal from a newly elected member of the House. But the glut of coverage has provided a needed lesson in how media discourse on taxes is heavily distorted by conservative policy priorities and right-wing political messaging.

For decades, we’ve been told that tax cuts of any stripe are good, popular, and a political winner. Tax hikes, on the other hand, are presumed to be a political non-starter and something to tiptoe around. The Republican Party obviously bears primary responsibility for this: Anti-tax extremism is a mainstream Republican position, and most GOP politicians will eagerly sign a pledge to never vote to raise taxes. The United States is a low-tax country both by historical and international standards, and yet we’re constantly told that taxes are too high and that economic prosperity can be realized only with still another round of tax cuts.

One consequence of this dynamic is a persistent double standard that treats Republican tax extremism as de rigueur while Democratic proposals to hike taxes on the rich are met with shock, incredulity, and the knee-jerk assumption of political radioactivity. Anderson Cooper’s immediate reaction to Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks was to call them “a radical agenda compared to the way politics is done right now.” Political analysts like CNN’s David Gregory said Ocasio-Cortez wants to “really soak the rich with the idea that that’s ultimately going to help the economy” and that “it’s out of sync with a lot of Americans.”

The assumption that any public discussion of tax increases is politically toxic for Democrats is baked in even though polling shows that strong majorities of Americans believe that the wealthy don’t pay enough in taxes. (The Republican position of slashing taxes for the rich and businesses, meanwhile, is deeply unpopular.) Jacked-up rates on the super wealthy is a historically moderate policy that would help reduce income inequality, which has ballooned since the Reagan era. In spite of all this, pundits and reporters default to treating tax rhetoric like Ocasio-Cortez’s as extreme and unpopular.

This mode of thinking is helped along in part by the fact that Democrats in general don’t aggressively make the case for sharply increasing taxes on America’s ultrarich. But mainly it is perpetuated by bad-faith conservatives who lie and deliberately misunderstand tax policy.

Ocasio-Cortez’s explanation of her thinking on tax policy included a breakdown of the basics of progressive taxation. “Your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be 10 percent or 15 percent, et cetera,” she said. “But once you get to, like, the tippy tops — on your 10 millionth dollar — sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.”

My guess is that she included this explanation as a means of inoculating herself against scurrilous accusations that she was proposing a 70 percent rate on all income. Either way, that’s exactly what happened.

Grover Norquist, anti-tax propagandist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, posted a deliberately obtuse tweet arguing that “slavery is when your owner takes 100% of your production” and “Ocasio-Cortez wants 70%.” Sean Hannity (who is very concerned that rich people be able to buy their luxury seacraft of choice) complained that Ocasio-Cortez “wants a 70 percent federal tax rate for the rich” and warned that “would mean no businesses, no wealthy individual would ever invest, spend money, create jobs in a place where they are taking $0.70 or $0.80 of every dollar.”

A top-ranking House Republican got in on the disinformation as well:

It feels safe to assume that all these people know how progressive taxation works and understand what a marginal tax rate is. Even if they don’t, the person they attacked spelled it out for them in basic terms. They’re all just pretending to be ignorant in order to whip up anti-tax sentiment.

The critical thing to understand about this poisonous dynamic is that it will persist so long as figures like Hannity and Norquist remain the loudest voices in the room and are given the space to dishonestly frame any talk of tax increases as extreme and politically damaging for the left. These cretins aren’t going to stop lying, which means if progressives want to change the media discourse on taxation then they’ll have to set ambitious policy goals and make unflinching, affirmative cases for them.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Why So Many ‘Exclusive’ Interviews Of Discredited Bannon?

Why So Many ‘Exclusive’ Interviews Of Discredited Bannon?

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

In late February, six months after he was unceremoniously fired from the White House, Steve Bannon sat down for a “wide-ranging and challenging conversation” with GQ, which wrote up the interview under the headline “Steve Bannon is hatching his comeback.” In early March, Bannon gave a “sprawling interview” to the New York Times about his “international mission” to “demolish [Europe’s] political establishment.” That same month he was a featured interviewee at a Financial Times Future of News conference.

On April 4, Bannon gave an interview to Reuters about tariffs. Less than a week later, he gave another interview to the New York Times, also about tariffs. A couple of days after that, Bannon talked to The Washington Post about the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. On May 22, Bannon talked to the Post again ahead of a debate in Prague. The next day, Bannon gave an “exclusive” interview to the BBC about the Russia investigation.

On June 1, he “spoke exclusively” to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria for a program the network hyped as “The Steve Bannon Interview.” Two weeks later, ABC’s Jon Karl went “one-on-one exclusively” with Bannon in what was billed as “his first Sunday morning show interview since leaving the White House.” Three days later, Bannon gave an interview to The National Interest. On July 8, he was interviewed by The Sunday Times. Ten days later, CNBC snagged an “exclusive interview” with Bannon. Two days after that, Bannon talked to The Daily Beast. A few days later, he talked to Reuters (again). Less than a week later, Politico interviewed Bannon about the Koch brothers.

August 10: New York magazine. August 12: “a wide-ranging interview” with The Sunday Times (again). August 15: The New York Times (again). August 15: Politico (again). August 16: Axios.

And tonight, Steve Bannon “will join anchor Ari Melber one-on-one for an exclusive television interview on MSNBC.”

That’s at least 22 interviews over the course of six months (it’s entirely possible that I missed a few Bannon interviews while compiling this list, since he will talk to literally anyone). By now it seems reasonable to ask what, if anything, we stand to learn from this many-times discredited former White House official who is hanging out with far-right European extremists and whose most recent foray into U.S. politics was his failed attempt to elevate an accused child molester to the U.S. Senate.

Back in March, I wrote that Bannon “is looking to prove once and for all that a whack job extremist — no matter how disgraced or putrefied by white supremacist politics — can still command the attention and respect of America’s elite.” Congrats, Steve: mission accomplished.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Sebastian Gorka, Scourge Of ‘The Swamp’, Cashes Out

Sebastian Gorka, Scourge Of ‘The Swamp’, Cashes Out

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

It’s been almost a year since off-brand James Bond supervillain Sebastian Gorka was fired or resigned(definitely fired) from his ill-defined job in Donald Trump’s White House, and Gorka is still finding ways to monetize his seven months of public pseudo service. He’s followed some well-worn D.C. insider tracks by signing on as a Fox News contributor and guest lecturer at the Heritage Foundation, but he’s also running a side hustle squeezing speaking fees and the occasional “honorarium” out of Republican congressional candidates.

Since last December, Gorka has pulled in nearly $18,000 from GOP candidates seeking federal office, according to Federal Election Commission filings. His $2,500 check from Virginia’s E.W. Jackson, $5,000 speaking fee from Nevada Republican Danny Tarkanian, and $5,240 payment from Arizona GOP Senate candidate Kelli Ward have been previously reported. But the FEC database recently added an additional $5,000 payment to Gorka from Ward’s campaign dated April 16 and tagged as “Event Cost – Speaker.”

In exchange for the thousands of dollars it costs to have Gorka speak on their behalf, these candidates get a full dose of the only commodity Gorka has to offer: his proximity to Trump.

Here’s one of the speeches Gorka gave on behalf of Kelli Ward — it largely consists of Gorka talking about how Trump is the greatest and oh by the way, he was once Gorka’s boss. “This is a woman who gets things done, just like somebody else I know. … I want to talk to you about my old boss, OK? … What’s he really like behind closed doors? What’s he like in the Oval? … We flew on Air Force One to Youngstown, Ohio.” In that same speech, in which he transformed his connections to the politically powerful into monetary gain for himself, Gorka railed against “the swamp.”

Obviously this is a good deal for Gorka; all he has to do is show up and ramble for a few minutes about the president and he gets a tidy little sum to finance his suede-vest-and-tourniquet lifestyle. But is it worth it for these campaigns to pay Gorka to hear him drone quite Britishly about the unblemished greatness of Donald Trump?

Yeah, probably … for now. Ever since the 2016 election, Republican politics has devolved into a grim and undignified competition over who can best communicate their slavish and self-debasing loyalty to the president. For as long as that dynamic lasts, having a Trump-adjacent minor celebrity like Gorka on hand to lend a bit of insider credibility doesn’t hurt, just so long as everyone agrees to overlook the fact that the transactional nature of the relationship is the very essence of the “swamp” they all claim to loathe.

Gorka’s sinecure at Fox News is also quite swampy. As I wrote when Gorka was first hired by the right-wing cable network as a “national security strategist,” Gorka had no actual national security role in the White House, and real security experts view him as a jumped-up charlatan. He’s functionally useless at the specific role Fox News hired him for, and Fox News apparently acknowledges as much.

The Daily Beast reported last week that the network has effectively banned Gorka from appearing on its supposed “hard news” programming and siloed him to its rabidly pro-Trump opinion shows: Hannity, Fox & Friends, etc. “Fox’s news division simply does not view Gorka as credible enough to regularly comment on subjects on which Gorka has branded himself a longtime expert, or to analyze the administration of which he was a member,” The Daily Beast reported. (Gorka is also apparently passing around fake Fox News business cards, just to add to the aura of sadness.)

Once again, Gorka’s only valuable contribution to Fox News is his relationship to Trump, who apparently loves watching Gorka’s cable hits. The network’s pro-Trump propagandists understand this, so they invite the nominal “national security strategist” to bark about whatever story they’re chasing on a given evening. Sometimes those stories are national security-related, but more often than not Gorka is brought on to inveigh against the media or the Russia investigation or “the cesspit, the cesspool that is Hollywood.” It’s a racket that’s made possible only by the president’s affection for Gorka’s brand of combative nonsense.

Gorka is a bleak manifestation of this rancid era in politics. Through dogged loyalty to a corrupt politician, he briefly rose to an official position that far exceeded his qualifications. Now he’s running tidy little scams wherever he can and eagerly invoicing whomever is willing to hear increasingly stale anecdotes about his undistinguished few months spent in service to Donald Trump.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

A Reckoning For Hannity And Fox News On Seth Rich Fraud?

A Reckoning For Hannity And Fox News On Seth Rich Fraud?

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

Earlier today the Department of Justice announced that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had secured indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Those indictments align with what intelligence agencies have long since concluded: The Russian government hacked these Democratic political groups and disseminated their internal correspondences.

The alternative, batshit-insane theory to how the DNC’s emails made it into the wild is that they were provided to WikiLeaks by DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was then murdered while walking home to his Washington, D.C., apartment as part of some sinister cover-up. This theory was, for a while, a favorite topic of Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who was heavily invested in portraying the deceased Rich as the source of the emails because, to his mind, that would debunk allegations that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia.

The whole disgusting conspiracy theory was powered by a since-retracted Fox News report that had been quickly debunked by Rich’s family. But Hannity kept pounding away at the false story and lashing out at anyone who criticized him for his abominable exploitation of a murder victim. It wasn’t until advertisers started fleeing his program that Hannity finally relented. On his May 30, 2017, show he said: “Out of respect for the family’s wishes, well, I decided for the time being not to discuss it unless there were further developments,” although he added, “I will not stop investigating.”

Since then, Fox News has been sued by Rich’s family for damages related to Hannity’s gross misconduct and similarly foul behavior from other Fox News hosts and contributors.

Now that Mueller’s office has laid out the evidence that Russian government officials were responsible for leaking the DNC’s emails, it feels like a good time for Hannity and Fox News to make their long-overdue apologies and explanations for promulgating this trash conspiracy theory.

But that’s clearly not going to happen; if you’re enough of a monstrous goon to slur the reputation of a murdered Democratic staffer and inflict emotional trauma on his family in order to protect Trump’s political standing, then you’re not really the apologizing type.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

How The False Equivalence Of ‘Civility’ Bolsters Trump

How The False Equivalence Of ‘Civility’ Bolsters Trump

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was politely asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA, this past weekend because the owner was unwilling to serve a senior Trump administration official who defends (among other things) the cruel and inhumane separation of migrant families and internment of immigrant children. This act of protest — the most recent example of a senior Trump official being heckled or protested over the family-separation policy — galvanized certain pundits who voiced a moral objection to what they viewed as a grave injustice: “uncivil” behavior by ordinary people toward perpetrators of a despicable government policy.

This ridiculous crusade was led by the Washington Post editorial board, which published a profoundly silly piece urging all of America to “Let the Trump team eat in peace.” Per the Post:

OVER THE WEEKEND there was a fair bit of argument about the decision by a small restaurant in Lexington, Va., not to serve dinner to President Trump’s press secretary. It wasn’t the first time recently that strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere. We understand the strength of the feelings, but we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.

I agree completely with The Week’s Ryan Cooper, who writes that this reaction is counterproductive and morally backward: “If there is any main wellspring of ‘incivility’ … it comes from the monstrously evil actions of the Trump regime.” Diverting the focus from the evils of the White House to the “uncivil” protest actions they inspire does the evildoers a tremendous favor.

The civility game does nothing but privilege the people whose views and actions are horrific. When the president does contemptible, anti-democratic things like ordering the separation of migrant mothers from infants and demanding that due process be eliminated, he and his lackeys follow a poisonous process in which the White House enthusiastically demonizes its adversaries — Democrats, immigrants, journalists, anyone who objects to toddler internment — while rigorously and woundedly demanding that everyone else follow the rules of polite discourse. The idea is that the president and his cronies deserve respect and deference no matter what they say or do simply because of the offices they hold.

This cynical posturing gets helped along by journalists and pundits who acknowledge that the president’s policies and beliefs are abhorrent but nonetheless self-righteously cluck their tongues at the “incivility” of the White House’s critics. The Washington Post editorial board writes that the Red Hen’s defenders are correct on the merits when they say that the child internment scandal is “no ordinary policy dispute” and that President Donald Trump “has ordered terrible violations of human rights at the border.” But even in the face of what the paper recognizes as a uniquely appalling violation of rights and norms, the Post still takes a swipe at those who are “justifying incivility” and asks us to imagine a world in which abortion rights advocates are harassed for their (constitutionally protected) views — something that happens literally all the time and too often has deadly consequences.

This vapid argument was perfectly crystallized in a chiding tweet from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius:

“However troubling her views.” Her “troubling” views are the story! The despicable arguments and actions of the administration are driving this public backlash against senior officials. But elite members of the media are busily doing the White House a favor by prioritizing “civility” over accountability — forget about the fact that she’s the mouthpiece for an administration perpetrating a deliberate evil against a vulnerable population; this senior government official deserves respect and steak tartare.

The endurance of this worldview in the face of broadly recognized illegal and immoral behavior does not portend well for the immediate post-Trump era. The end of Trump’s administration should be met with a vigorous and thorough accounting of all its misdeeds and criminality. Standing athwart that effort will be a coalition of bad-faith Republicans, badly misguided pundits, and calculatedly centrist Democrats who will argue that any attempt to investigate Trump abuses will be too “political” and contrary to the more important task of “healing” or “bringing Americans together” or some other nonsense. That was the mindset that helped shield the people responsible for the George W. Bush-era torture program from any sort of official accountability; in 2009, the same David Ignatius snidely dismissed people who backed “retrospective investigations of wrongdoing by the CIA” as “liberal score-settlers.”

The Trump administration’s aberrant and illegal behaviors are driven in part by the faith that the political and media establishment will be too cowardly and too self-absorbed to impose any real accountability. Given that official Washington can’t stomach an act of “uncivil” protest by a local eatery, it’s hard to argue that the White House’s faith is misplaced.

Header image by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons; art by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Fox ‘Judge’ Pirro Wants Sessions Out — So She Can Take His Job

Fox ‘Judge’ Pirro Wants Sessions Out — So She Can Take His Job

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

The key to understanding how Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro operates is to realize that she is single-minded in her personal ambition while completely unencumbered by anything resembling shame, dignity, or professional integrity. As it stands, Pirro is one of the more influential pundits in the country by virtue of her close relationship with President Donald Trump. She uses her awful Fox News program, Justice with Judge Jeanine, to propagandize on Trump’s behalf, for which she is granted access to the president, interviews with key administration officials, etc.

But that’s not enough for Pirro, who turned to televised punditry only after her once-promising political and legal career was left in smoldering ruin by her personal scandals and widely mocked campaign ineptitude. According to Politico, Pirro aspires to the lofty office of attorney general of the United States and has been telling the president’s advisers that “she’s interested in taking over as the nation’s top law enforcement official.”

Ordinarily, it would seem ridiculous that a cable pundit would have any chance of serving as attorney general, but that was before the reality TV star president tapped two cable pundits to be his chief economic and national security advisers and nominated his doctor to run the Department of Veterans Affairs because he gave a good press conference.

There are, however, some major obstacles to Pirro landing her dream job: chief among them, the guy currently holding it. She can’t be attorney general while Jeff Sessions is still in office. So Pirro is taking matters into her own hands and using her cable news program to undermine her supposed rival and publicly call for his resignation (or ouster).

Here’s Pirro on June 2 saying, “If Jeff Sessions can’t do his job because he’s too scared or recusing himself, maybe he ought to resign himself. But that’s just me.”

And here she is one week before that calling Sessions an “absentee attorney general” and asking White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Isn’t it time to get a working attorney general on staff?”

And here she is one week before that calling Sessions “the most dangerous man in America” because he refuses to use the awesome powers of his office to protect Donald Trump and arrest the senior staff of the Justice Department (seriously):

This is all quite insane and grotesquely unethical and fatally shot through with toxic self-interest. All those characteristics should, under normal circumstances, prevent Pirro from having her name even briefly considered for any government position, let alone attorney general. But these are strange times in which a televised authoritarian harangue in support of turning the Justice Department into a weapon against the president’s political enemies can win you plaudits in the Oval Office. “Attorney general nominee Jeanine Pirro” would be a sad, surreal joke, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that it won’t happen.

The Staggering Corruption Of Dinesh D’Souza’s Pardon

The Staggering Corruption Of Dinesh D’Souza’s Pardon

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

Dinesh D’Souza got off easy. Back in 2014, the right-wing crank was indicted for committing campaign finance fraud, and he pleaded guilty to illegally reimbursing “straw donors” to the Senate campaign of Wendy Long, his friend from college. Prosecutors wanted to throw D’Souza in prison for 10 to 16 months, arguing that the contrition he claimed to feel for his crime was belied by his many cable news appearances in which he said he was a victim of political persecution by the Obama administration. At his sentencing, the judge told D’Souzathat “it is still hard for me to discern any personal acceptance of responsibility in this case.”

The judge nonetheless showed leniency and gave D’Souza five years of probation, eight months in a “community confinement center,” plus community service. At the time, D’Souza said he was “relieved” and thanked the judge “for imposing a fair sentence.”

Since then, D’Souza has tried to turn himself into a martyr. With the eager assistance of his friends in conservative media, he’s spun his conviction (he pleaded guilty, remember) and light sentencing as proof that Barack Obama’s administration pursued a vendetta to silence one of its conservative critics. That theory is based on precisely zero evidence.

But it was good enough for President Donald Trump, who announced earlier today via Twitter that D’Souza (a vocal supporter of the president) will be receiving a full pardon.

This is an obvious abuse of the president’s pardoning power and it follows a pattern of corrupt pardons. Trump pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff (and current Republican Senate candidate) Joe Arpaio last year after he was convicted of criminal contempt of court for refusing to obey judicial orders to halt his department’s racial profiling of Latinos. Former Dick Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted of lying to federal prosecutors in the Valerie Plame affair, got a pardon after his Trump-loving attorney pleaded his case to the White House.

In all these cases, there are two common and related themes: Trump using his pardoning power to bestow favors on his cronies, and the insistence that the pardoned person was “treated unfairly.” Trump said Arpaio was “treated unbelievably unfairly,” his statement on Libby’s pardon said that “for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly,” and his tweet announcing D’Souza’s pardon said he “was treated very unfairly by our government.” What’s clear in all these instances is that “treated unfairly” means that the convicted person did not receive the sort of preferential legal treatment that the president feels his allies should enjoy.

D’Souza’s pardon is also an expression of the corruption rotting away at conservative politics and the right-wing media. A healthy political movement would have long ago ostracized a bigot and fraud like D’Souza. He is a racist troll and inveterate conspiracy theorist who spends his days mocking school shooting survivors on Twitter. Leading up to the 2012 election he wrote a lie-filled book and produced a howlingly mendacious“documentary” arguing that Obama inherited a “Third World, anti-American” ethos from his absentee father. He wrote a book arguing that the “cultural left” was to blame for the September 11 attacks, and another book insisting that “the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”

Rather than booting this extremist to the fringes, conservative media turned D’Souza into a cause célèbre. He was a fixture on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program during his campaign finance fraud trial, where he was given an open platform to assert his persecution at the hands of Obama. His idiotic conspiracy theories about Obama’s father garnered an enthusiastic endorsement from Newt Gingrich, who argued that you can understand the first black U.S. president only “if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” D’Souza is a regular guest on conservative talk radio and routinely hits the lecture circuit with the backing of right-wing activist groups.

Now this racist, conspiratorial fraud has been pardoned by another racist, conspiratorial fraud, and this long-simmering corruption is being lauded within the Republican Party — Trump’s pardon of D’Souza was quickly celebrated by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who called D’Souza a “powerful voice for freedom.”

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Debunking Trump’s Litany Of Phony Conspiracies

Debunking Trump’s Litany Of Phony Conspiracies

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

President Donald Trump has moved beyond Twitter griping and is using the powers of his office to try to discredit the Russia investigation. This past weekend, Trump demanded that the Department of Justice “look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration.” He met with top DOJ officials on Monday to pressure them to start an investigation into their own department’s investigation of Trump’s campaign.

To observers outside the conservative media bubble, Trump’s directive was a critical moment of this presidency. “The president has now crossed one of the brightest red lines in the American rule of law: demanding the Department of Justice open a politically motivated investigation designed to sabotage the criminal and counterintelligence probe into the president’s own campaign,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said on his show Monday. Charlie Savage of The New York Times wrote that Trump “inched further toward breaching an established constraint on executive power: The White House does not make decisions about individual law enforcement investigations.”

The significance of Trump’s action is compounded by the fact that even the president and his subordinates acknowledge that this notion that the Obama administration acted inappropriately is just speculation. But it would be extremely convenient for Trump and his defenders if it were true — or perceived to be true — which is why he’s ordered this investigation.

It’s crucial to view this attempt by the White House to assert the existence of an anti-Trump cabal within the government in context: It’s the latest in a series of fraudulent and debunked attempts to push such a claim. Trump’s demand that his investigators be investigated rests on a foundation of lies that was built with the critical assistance of a credulous and complicit right-wing media.

Let’s run through all the major conspiracy theories that brought us to this point.

Wiretapping 

The effort by Trump and his defenders to deflect attention from the Russia investigation onto the previous administration started with this early-morning tweet from March 2017:

It was a deathly serious allegation for the president to make, and it was completely false. Top Justice Department officials denied the allegation, a DOJ court filing affirmed that there are “no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets,” and the president has not produced any evidence to back up his accusation.

Nonetheless, Trump’s defenders in the conservative media contorted themselves to try to prove Trump was right, especially following House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes’ March 22, 2017, press conference (which Nunes secretly coordinated with the White House) announcing that “surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.”

Unmasking

Speaking of Nunes, he became the driving force behind the allegation that Obama administration officials had improperly unmasked the identities of Trump associates whose conversations were incidentally captured by intelligence agencies. Once again acting on information provided by the Trump White House, Nunes accused former national security adviser Susan Rice and other Obama officials of abusing the unmasking process. Rice acknowledged that she had requested certain identities, but congressional investigators from both parties said she’d done nothing wrong.

The “unmasking” nonsense permeated conservative media and was presented as evidence of an Obama-led conspiracy to undermine Trump as president-elect. Trump himself told The New York Times that he believed Rice had committed a crime.

“Secret society”

This was an especially stupid fiasco kicked up by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX). The pair went on Fox News to reveal the existence of a text message exchange between two FBI agents sent the day after the 2016 election that referenced a “secret society” supposedly populated by anti-Trump law enforcement officials. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, seized on the message to allege “corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.” Conservative media went absolutely crazy with the “secret society” allegation, holding it up as proof of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump.

The “secret society” turned out to be nothing more than an inside joke between the two agents.

Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing”

The White House’s deflection strategy rests on the idea that Barack Obama corrupted law enforcement agencies by directing them to investigate Donald Trump’s campaign as a way of undermining his candidacy. To that end, Republicans and conservatives are invested in demonstrating that Obama actively meddled in politically sensitive law enforcement business, such as the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In February, Johnson’s committee released a report alleging that a text message from an FBI agent stating that Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing” raised “questions about the type and extent of President Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email scandal and the FBI investigation of it.”

Once again, conservative media was driven to a frenzy, fueled partially by Trump’s tweet that the “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” And, once again, it all turned out to be false — the text in question referred to presidential briefing materials regarding the investigation into Russian election interference, not Clinton.

FBI hid info from the FISA court 

In February, Nunes’ committee released a memo that, according to the frantic hype that preceded its release, would reveal rampant surveillance abuses committed by intelligence agencies against the Trump campaign. Chief among the alleged abuses was the accusation that the FBI had illicitly obtained a warrant to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page by concealing from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the political origin of some of the evidence it cited in its application.

Right-wing media figures like Sean Hannity called this “Watergate times a thousand” and said the FBI “lie[d] to a foreign intelligence surveillance court.” Trump tweeted that the memo “totally vindicates” him and showed the Russia investigation to be “an American disgrace.”

It was a lie — the political origin of the evidence was indeed disclosed in the FBI application — and Nunes and his Republican colleagues admitted as much in the days following the memo’s release.

What emerges from all this is a damning picture of a Republican political operation — involving the White House and key members of Congress — to concoct blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and a conservative media apparatus that readily absorbs and rebroadcasts that propaganda. At a certain level, behavior like this is to be expected — these same characters spent all eight years of the Obama administration cobbling together ridiculous conspiracy theories about Benghazi, the former president’s birthplace, and a secret military invasion of Texas.

There is a key difference, however, in all the lying about the Russia investigation. These conspiracy theories are defensive. Most conservative pundits will describe the Russia investigation as a threat to the very fabric of American government; they recognize the extreme danger it poses to Trump’s presidency. Trump himself has no discernible legal strategy. Instead, he’s fighting a public relations campaign and casting himself as the victim of a “witch hunt.”

These attacks on the legitimacy of the investigation are the only weapon they have against it. And as the investigation exposes Trump to more and more legal and political peril, the conspiratorial attacks on the Justice Department and the Obama administration become more strident. Trump used to be content to vent on Twitter about the Russia investigation, but now he’s using the weight of his office to give life to an evidence-free accusation of political persecution.

Trump relies on the conservative media’s unthinking support as he wages this increasingly unhinged campaign. He needs to hear the hosts of Fox & Friends chirp every morning about how each new phony “bombshell” about the Russia investigation vindicates him. He needs to chat with Sean Hannity every night before bedtime about how Robert Mueller is out to get him. But Trump is only going to get more frustrated as each increasingly elaborate falsehood fails to produce the desired outcome, and that means the coordinated lying and conspiracy-mongering are only going to get worse as the investigation moves forward.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Gingrich’s Latest Grift Is A Bogus ‘History’ Course

Gingrich’s Latest Grift Is A Bogus ‘History’ Course

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

How much money would you spend to defend America? Before you answer, remember that we’re talking about America here. The America. It’s in need of defense, and good soldiers like you and me must heed the call and quite literally pay our dues. So how much cash would you lay down? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Can you even put a price on something so vital and necessary as the defense of America?

Even if you can’t, Newt Gingrich certainly can. For just $50 you can sign up for Newt’s online course called “Defending America,” which consists of six video lectures delivered by Gingrich himself that “provide patriotic Americans like you with the historical facts and arguments you need to debunk the Left’s agenda in your own community.” Newt’s been all over Fox News of late reminding its viewers that “Defending America” is something that they, as patriots, can spend their money on.

As a patriotic American who loves historical facts, I convinced my bosses (suckers) to hand over the company credit card so I could spend $50 on America Defense lessons from Newt Gingrich.

Here’s what I learned.

Newt just wants to eat baklava

“The left didn’t like the concept of a singular civilization called America,” Gingrich declares in his lesson on the evils of multiculturalism. And as part of its war on the American cultural monolith, “the left” is making it impossible for good patriots to eat the pastries of their choice.

“Think about the problem this gives you with baklava,” Newt says as part of a determinedly obtuse harangue about cultural appropriation. “Can you only eat baklava if you’re Greek or if you’re Turkish? Or if you’re Greek, do you eat Greek baklava but not Turkish baklava? And if you’re not Greek or Turkish, why are you even allowed to have baklava?”

But it’s not just about the freedom to cram one’s maw with endless varieties of honeyed pastry, Newt explains. The key question of who can eat which type of baklava goes right to the very heart of the leftist conspiracy to destroy America. “While I’m making fun of it, this is not funny,” Newt says. “This is at the center of the intellectual corruption of the American academic community, and the news media, and the American entertainment communities that grow out of and draw from the academic community.”

“The left” is mainly student activists and professors at West Coast colleges

The conceit behind “Defending America” is that there exists “a deliberate strategy by the left to instill anti-American values to fundamentally change this country.” The primary movers in the nefarious, country-ending cabal, at least according to Newt’s estimation, are campus activist groups and academics who write op-eds. And as the baklava example makes clear, Newt’s shtick involves tweezing out what he believes are the most extreme examples of their behavior and presenting them as what “the left” writ large stands for.

Newt’s “lessons” on “Defending America from the Multicultural Disaster” and “Defending Free Speech from Left-wing Censors and Thought Police” focus almost exclusively on various perceived outrages committed by student groups and the occasional professor. “Universities are increasingly becoming havens of resegregation and reverse racism,” he declares in his lesson on the evils of multiculturalism. “There’s a school in Washington state that wants to kick all white people off the campus for a day.”

The school in question, Evergreen State, became a brief focus of national controversy when a faculty member proposed that, as part of a longstanding annual “Day of Absence” protest for minority rights, white students who chose to participate in the protest leave campus for the day as a show of “solidarity.” After a biology professor objected to the idea, student protests erupted. Conservative media seized on the story, threats were made against the school, the biology professor resigned, the faculty member who proposed the idea resigned, and the school canceled the “Day of Absence” protest in the face of dwindling enrollment numbers.

From this and a handful of other cherry-picked examples of campus activism, Newt concludes that there is “a psychosis across our entire academic, news media, and entertainment world, which is a mass hysteria involving people who believe things that are crazy because all their friends believe the things that are crazy, and they need to be crazy together or they’d be alone, and then their friends wouldn’t like them.”

“The left” is both a ridiculous joke and an urgent threat to America’s existence

“There is no better evidence of the weakness of the left than the fact that they can’t debate,” Gingrich says at the beginning of Lesson Four. “They can’t defend their positions. Part of it is because they don’t know anything,” he adds with a mocking smirk. “There is no capacity on the left to have a serious debate about their values, and so they scream.” This is a running theme of all the lessons: “The left” is full of ignorant dopes whose whacked-out positions are worthy only of mockery and sneering disdain. “We have these college campuses that are totally subsidized, with people there full time who don’t teach very much, don’t learn very much, and don’t do very much,” Newt explains, “and so they’ve been gradually vegetating into weirder and weirder positions.”

Somehow, though, these same indolent pontificators and mock-worthy extremists are simultaneously a nefarious and altogether implacable force for American destruction whose influence drives the highest levels of politics and entertainment. Newt wants to have it both ways: The left is a feeble joke, and the left is also an existential threat to the country.

Not surprisingly, this lazy thinking leads Newt into mistakenly dismissing genuine threats to conservative political power as little more than leftist tantruming. The 2017 Women’s March stands out as one of the most important moments for left-wing activism and candidate recruitment in the era of Donald Trump. But Gingrich dismisses it as “a collection of nutcakes, gathered together, made important because The New York Times and The Washington Post covered them. Otherwise it would just be, sort of, a gathering of random weird people, sort of like a family reunion on the Mall.”

This isn’t so much education as it is marketing. Newt wants his “students” to feel that they’re standing up against a dangerous enemy, but also that the enemy can be easily vanquished. It’s a message that’s tailor-made for someone who is already apt to believe that “the left” can be defeated with fifty bucks and a few Ben Franklin quotes.

“The left” can be defeated with fifty bucks a few Ben Franklin quotes (or “quotes”)

The key to dismantling the anti-Americanism of “the left,” per Gingrich, is rote repetition of a carefully curated suite of quotes from the Founding Fathers. Over the course of the six lessons, Newt laboriously sifts through the collected utterances of America’s founding statesmen (and other historical figures) to demonstrate that the United States is supposed to be a land of unrestricted gun access with no separation of church and state and a functionally useless social safety net.

Newt isn’t breaking any new ground here; cherry-picking the Founding Fathers is a grand tradition of conservative “intellectuals” who grasp for historical gravitas in their quest to choke off public assistance for the poor. What Newt brings to the affair is the laziness and basic errors of scholarship that you’d expect from a $50 scam history course.

“Benjamin Franklin said it perfectly,” Newt proclaims in his lesson on free speech, attributing to Franklin the following quote, which appears on the screen like so as he reads it:

“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it he does not hurt and controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know. This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech, always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of speech.”

That’s great quote! But it’s not Benjamin Franklin’s. It belongs to English essayists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who wrote under the nom-de-plume “Cato.” Franklin quoted this passage in an essay he published in The New England Courant under his own pseudonym, Silence Dogood.

Newt doesn’t actually read anyone on the left

Given that the purpose of “Defending America” is ostensibly to instruct conservatives on how to effectively neutralize “the left,” it would be reasonable to expect that the person doing the instructing would be an expert and learned authority on what the left believes and how it operates. But, by his own admission, Newt Gingrich is not that expert.

As part of a live Q&A session posted as part of the course last October, Gingrich was asked if there were “any liberal writers, any left-wing writers you would recommend reading to understand them.” After a moment’s pause, Gingrich responded: “No.”

He went on to explain that he used to read liberal writers back when he was in grad school, but “the modern left is almost like a cancer that has metastasized” and has only “grown weirder and weirder and weirder, and so I think it’s really hard to look to the left to explain itself.” Instead, Newt recommended reading conservative pundits like Ben Domenech and Andrew McCarthy to understand what “the left” is all about.

Newt wants to sell you other products by Newt Gingrich

As a good American patriot, I paid my bosses’ $50 to Newt so he could teach me the secrets of how to Defend America. I assumed that would be the end of our financial relationship, but I was wrong — embedded within these lessons for the preservation of American democracy were further opportunities for me to purchase additional products from Newt Gingrich.

“I would urge you, if you come to Washington, take Rediscovering God in America, walk around to every single monument,” Newt says, hocking his 2009 book during the lesson on “Defending Faith-Based America from Secular Tyranny.” He also works in a plug for Five Principles for a Successful Life, which he co-wrote with his daughter, during the lesson on work and opportunity. “We developed the five principles and went out and talked to a number of people, a really wide range — I mean, Gen. David Petraeus was one, Whoopi Goldberg was another.”

A fulsome defense of America requires sending Newt Gingrich lots of money.

Nothing

Honestly there’s nothing that “Defending America” can teach you because it’s not actually meant to teach anything. It’s part of a scam that Newt Gingrich has perfected in order to make himself very rich. Like many other enterprising hucksters on the right, Newt understands that he can wring large sums of cash from conservative marks by nurturing and exploiting their senses of grievance and victimization.

At no point throughout “Defending America” would you have any inkling that Republicans and conservatives have firm grips on the levers of power in this country. All the carping Newt indulges in about multiculturalism and attacks on “traditional” values pay no heed to the fact that the federal government (controlled by his ideological allies) is busily ramping up deportations, installing right-wing judges on courts, sabotaging social programs, and recklessly pursuing a hard-line conservative agenda. Rather, you’re made to believe that college professors and Hollywood are the real power in the country and are threateningly close to transforming America into a socialist dystopia.

Newt evangelizes this fiction with the shamelessness of a man who has full confidence in the strength of his grift. Lesson Six of “Defending America” is titled “Defending ‘We the People’ From the Washington Swamp” — a hilarious description given that Gingrich himself is the quintessential “swamp” denizen.

“You have bureaucrats who are liberal,” Newt complains, “you have to lobbyists and lawyers who are liberal, and you have the reporters who are liberal. That’s your national capital.” Newt has made a lucrative career in this supposed hellhole of swampy liberalism by monetizing his connections to lawmakers and collecting fees as an unregistered lobbyist. There are few people on this planet with less standing to rail against the corruption and “swampiness” of Washington, D.C., than Newt Gingrich, but here he is doing exactly that for $50 a pop.

 

Dick Cheney: Liar And Proud Torture Advocate

Dick Cheney: Liar And Proud Torture Advocate

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

The torture program set up by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was a brutal, illegal, and slipshod travesty for which there has been no reckoning. All of the people who designed, implemented, and justified the brutal and useless interrogations of terrorism detainees have successfully ducked accountability for a variety of reasons: Republicans actively support torture, Democrats voluntarily abandoned their opportunity to impose accountability for the program, and both parties are apt to excuse flagrant abuses committed in the name of “national security.”

This is why we have the grim spectacle of President Donald Trump (whose stated position on torture is that it should be used as sadistic punishment) nominating as CIA director Gina Haspel, who oversaw the torture of detainees and later led the effort to destroy videotaped evidence of interrogations. It’s also why former Vice President Dick Cheney can go on cable news and give lie-filled defenses of the horrific interrogation program he shepherded into existence.

Cheney sat down with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo this week and oozed out a series of falsehoods about his torture program — lies that elicited precisely zero challenges from Bartiromo. Let’s run through the many misleading claims and outright bullshit Cheney spewed in defense of his shameful legacy.

“It [the torture program] was set up in a way that what we did was, in fact, consistent with our fundamental statutes and agreements that were in place.”

The legal basis of the torture program was a dishonest and contradictory memo, drafted and acted upon in complete secrecy, that put the United States in direct conflict with the Geneva Conventions and served primarily to protect the people who wanted to make torture the policy of the United States. To protect CIA officials and political appointees from prosecution under the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Bush administration pushed legislation to redefine which acts constituted a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Cheney and crew did not act within existing law — they concocted bizarre secret legal rationales and sought to change laws where necessary to protect themselves.

“And it [torture] worked. We were able — waterboarding was applied, actually, to only three individuals. One of those was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.”

Torture did not work. Torture does not work.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the Bush torture program found that it was ineffective at obtaining intelligence. The CIA officials who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed quickly determined that the technique had “proven ineffective,” that they’d “lost ground” with Mohammed’s interrogation, and that “the potential for physical harm is far greater with the waterboard than with the other techniques, bringing into question the issue of risk vs. gain.” In the end, “no information provided by Mohammed led directly to the capture of a terrorist or the disruption of a terrorist plot,” per The New Yorker.

And Cheney would like everyone to focus on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because he is genuinely evil and a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist — someone who, per Cheney’s obvious implication, deserved to be tortured. He’d be less enthusiastic to talk about Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times and nearly drowned because the U.S. government believed he was a top-level Al Qaeda operative. He wasn’t, and the government has since acknowledged as much.

That’s to say nothing of detainees who were tortured and died while in U.S. custody. And let’s not forget the innocent people who were swept up by the government, like the Afghani man who was tortured so brutally that he begged his CIA interrogators to kill him, or the pregnant woman who was beaten in the abdomen and chained to a wall.

“He’s [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] the guy who got waterboarded more than anybody else. I think what we did helped ultimately produce the intelligence we needed to be able to get [Osama] bin Laden.”

Nope. The Senate torture report debunked this claim, noting that “the most critical — or the most valuable” information that led to bin Laden’s death “was not related to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” that the CIA was targeting the courier who ultimately led U.S. forces to bin Laden before any of its detainees provided information on him, and that “CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques withheld and fabricated information about” the courier.

“If it were my call, I would not discontinue those [torture] programs. I’d have them active and ready to go. And I’d go back and study them and learn.”

This is an interesting comment in that Cheney’s desire to go back and “study” the torture sessions “and learn” from them at least sort of recognizes that they were a beastly disaster. Unfortunately, the current nominee for CIA director led the agency’s internal effort to destroy videotaped evidence of its torture sessions, which makes it more difficult to “learn” from the abuses it committed.

“If you know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the mastermind behind all of this, if you know he is number two to bin Laden in terms of the attack, if you know he’s probably the guy who knows more than anybody else except bin Laden what’s next, what’s their next target, how many people are they going to kill and how they are going to do it, and then you tell me that the only method we have is ‘please please pretty please tell us what you know.’ Well, I don’t buy that.”

This is Dick Cheney, a liar and a villain, falsely arguing that the only options available to interrogators were a) asking nicely and b) torture. If those were, in fact, the only options, then the case for torture would seem more plausible. But the Army Field Manual lays out a whole range of permissible interrogation techniques and details how to effectively use them. Right now, all military and intelligence personnel are legally bound to follow the Army Field Manual when conducting interrogations. And, as has already been established, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s interrogators quickly determined that torturing him wasn’t productive.

“I think the techniques we used were not torture.”

They were.

“A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time.”

It was.

“The techniques we used are techniques we use on our own people in training. We didn’t go and make them up someplace.”

Cheney is referring here to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training. And he is correct that the torture program was based on SERE training techniques, which are used to prepare American military personnel should they be captured and … you guessed it … tortured. To that point, the SERE program was developed based on interrogation methods used by the Chinese military which were designed not to extract information, but to elicit false confessions.

“The president signed off, I signed off, the National Security Council signed off. They did a good job, they got the intelligence they needed, and we were safe from any further mass-casualty attacks in the seven and a half years on our watch. Now people want to go back and try to rewrite history. But if it were my call, I’d do it again.”

It’s an amazing thing that the former vice president of the United States can go on TV and declare — proudly — that he and the president he served with made torture the official policy of the United States. It’s a howling outrage that a statement like this isn’t viewed as a confession of culpability in grotesque human rights violations. But that’s what happens when no accountability is imposed for one of the most shameful chapters in the war on terror.

Springtime For Steve: Bannon Plots His Comeback

Springtime For Steve: Bannon Plots His Comeback

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

The past several months have been difficult for Steve Bannon, the disheveled, wannabe Machiavelli of American politics. Late last summer he was unceremoniously fired from his senior post in the Trump White House, then the candidate he backed in the Alabama special Senate election suffered a historic defeat under the weight of credible reports of sexual assault, and then he was evicted from his chairmanship of Breitbart News. All throughout the long, dark winter he was relentlessly mocked and jabbed by opponents and erstwhile allies alike, including President Donald Trump, who rechristened him “Sloppy Steve” and blamed him for the Senate loss in Alabama.

But now it’s springtime for Bannon, and he’s plotting a comeback. Undaunted by his manifold defeats and humiliations, Bannon is looking to prove once and for all that a whack job extremist — no matter how disgraced or putrefied by white supremacist politics — can still command the attention and respect of America’s elite.

Next week, Bannon will be one of the keynote interviewees at a Financial Times forum on “Trust, Technology and Transformation in an Age of Upheaval.” He’ll be appearing alongside some of the biggest names in news media: New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, CNN President Jeff Zucker, HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen, and others. Per the Financial Times’ description of the event, lucky attendees will get to “hear insights from owners/editors of traditional media on how they are dealing with digital disruption.”

Earlier this month, the very same Steve Bannon was in the middle of a goodwill tour of Europe’s repugnant far-right political parties. Having stumbled in his efforts to lead an American political movement devoted to white resentment and xenophobia, Bannon hopped across the Atlantic to have a spirited wallow in the rising bog of European ethnonationalism.

In Italy, Bannon showed up just ahead of the country’s latest round of elections reportedly to support the far-right League party and its leader, Matteo Salvini. The League and Salvini are noxiously anti-immigrant and often openly bigoted — Salvini campaigned on mass deportation of African migrants, advocates the “controlled ethnic cleansing” of Italian cities, and has called for segregation of public transportation. During a speechin France on March 10, Bannon referred to him as “Brother Salvini.”

That speech was delivered before a gathering of the National Front, France’s premier far-right, xenophobic political party. The National Front has been trying to worm into the mainstream of French politics by carefully distancing itself from the blunt racism and winking Holocaust denial of its founders. The modern National Front employs more guarded language and PR savvy while blending aggressive nationalism with hostility toward immigrants, Islamic immigrants in particular. Party leader Marine Le Pen, who has masterminded the reformation of the National Front’s image, still sometimes lets the mask slip, like when she compared public demonstrations of faith by Muslims to the Nazi occupation of France. Bannon was happily at home among the party faithful, telling them to embrace accusations of racism and xenophobia as “a badge of honor.”

This is who Steve Bannon is hanging out with these days, and these are the people whose influence he’s trying to borrow in order to mount some sort of comeback. And he, of course, has every right to choose “hero of European racists” as his next career move, although one could argue that it’s really the only place he has left to go after being excommunicated by Trump and Breitbart following the Alabama fiasco.

But it’s scummy and gross that Bannon, after declaring common cause with bigoted political movements in Europe, can head back to the United States and have the welcome mat laid out for him by the country’s media elite. I’m not even sure what insights the Financial Times forum expects to glean from Bannon. As a media executive he was a fraud and a failure — when he wasn’t using Breitbart.com as his personal PR service, he deployed its resources to (ineptly) bolster the sagging fortunes of the lunatic candidates he picked as the vanguard for his political movement. He vilifies all media outlets that aren’t servile to the president, and he spins wild conspiracy theories about secret plots between journalists and politicians to sabotage his preferred candidates.

Steve Bannon is drifting deeper into the fringes as he grasps for relevance. He has done seemingly everything in his power to forfeit his credibility and render himself toxic, and he’s still afforded elite deference despite being an extremist crank.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Trump’s Wacky Right-Wing ‘Blue Apron’ Scheme

Trump’s Wacky Right-Wing ‘Blue Apron’ Scheme

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

The Trump White House’s newly proposed budget is (like all White House budget proposals) more of a political document than anything else. It has no actual bearing on how the government will spend its money, and Congress will almost certainly ignore it. But that’s not to say it is entirely devoid of value — the White House uses the annual budget proposal to act out its fantasies and give us a little glimpse at the ideologies motivating the administration’s policy preferences.

One of those ideologies, as conveyed by the White House’s vision for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, expresses insane and horrifying contempt for low-income Americans. And while the policy the administration has proposed is extreme, it fits in squarely with longstanding conservative efforts to stigmatize and shame recipients of government assistance.

One of the administration’s supposed cost-saving measures is “a bold new approach to administering SNAP.” The way the program currently works, SNAP-eligible households are provided a monthly benefit based on income level in the form of a debit card, which can be used to purchase grocery items. Some restrictions apply (no alcohol, tobacco, or pet food, for example), but SNAP recipients have wide latitude in what foods they can purchase and where they can shop.

The Trump administration wants to change all of this by forcing most SNAP recipients to receive half their monthly benefit in the form of “a USDA Foods package, which would include items such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish.” The Republican White House wants to choose which foods SNAP recipients eat, and it wants to control how they receive their food each month — so much for “small government” conservatism abolishing the “nanny state.” Through means left utterly unexplained, the Trump administration argues that this new system (which will require massive bureaucratic build-up alongside the establishment of food-delivery infrastructure) will somehow be cheaper and more efficient than simply transferring money to a debit card. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney laughably spun this proposal to send low-income Americans a monthly box of canned goods and peanut butter as “a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash.”

This idea is so absurd, impractical, and wildly paternalistic that people can’t really believe that the White House is actually proposing it. Politico reports this morning that “the idea that USDA would provide millions of low-income people packages of food on a national scale has not been floated by conservative think tanks, promoted by industry, or sought by previous administrations.” It was “so out of left field,” Politico notes, “that some anti-hunger advocates initially thought it was a joke.”

The proposal didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It’s an escalation of existing right-wing efforts to use SNAP as a means to control the behavior of its recipients. These efforts are rooted in a mythology — eagerly promoted and disseminated by conservative media — that SNAP is rife with fraud and that SNAP beneficiaries, by virtue of their status as welfare recipients, lack the moral character to make good decisions on their own.

Right-wing demonization of welfare recipients stretches back decades, from Newt Gingrich’s high-profile efforts in the 1990s to shame low-income teen mothers to Ronald Reagan popularizing the “welfare queen” slur back in 1976. The running theme of these attacks on the poor is that there exists an epidemic of undeserving welfare recipients who abuse their benefits. That’s a myth, but it carries a potent political message that blends racial and economic resentment with small-government agitation.

When it comes to SNAP, the most common complaint made by conservatives is that recipients are using their benefit to purchase inappropriate foods: “luxury” comestibles like seafood and steak, or junk food like candy bars and energy drinks. This line of attack got a huge boost in 2013 when Fox News put together a special news report called “The Great Food Stamp Binge.” The program — hosted by Special Report anchor Bret Baier — spotlighted an unemployed surfer in California who proudly used his SNAP benefit to buy sushi and lobster. Baier dubbed him “the new face of food stamps,” and the program pointedly asked why there isn’t “at least some stigma” attached to SNAP recipients, who used to be called “losers.”

It was a farcical piece of propaganda that actively shunned any sort of data or reporting in order to create a caricature of SNAP recipients as lazy, undeserving parasites on the public. SNAP actually has extremely low rates of fraud and abuse, and “the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The news program was wildly popular with Republicans. Fox News distributed tapes of the “The Great Food Stamp Binge” on Capitol Hill, and the SNAP-abusing unemployed surfer became the mascot for the congressional GOP’s efforts to gut funding for nutritional assistance programs. Since then, various state governments have taken up measures intended to restrict which foods SNAP recipients can purchase.

In 2015, Wisconsin Republicans passed a bill banning SNAP recipients from purchasing crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish, citing “anecdotal and perceived abuses.” A Republican state senator from New York proposed legislation to cut off SNAP users from “luxury food items” like lobster and steak, while the Missouri GOP sought to ban “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.” The reality that all of these proposals ignore is that SNAP recipients are not blowing their benefits on “luxury” foods.

The Trump administration’s proposal derives from the same idea that SNAP recipients can’t be trusted and will necessarily misuse their benefit. Rather than banning certain foods, the White House is proposing to force SNAP beneficiaries to eat an approved list of low-cost foods while simultaneously limiting the amount of benefit they have to spend. It’s gross paternalism lightly disguised with absurd promises about efficiency and cost-savings. And it fits right in with the broader right-wing argument that receipt of government assistance is morally suspect and recipients should be penalized through stigma and controlled through loss of choice.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

That Heavily Hyped Memo Is Utterly Underwhelming — But Still It Makes Noise

That Heavily Hyped Memo Is Utterly Underwhelming — But Still It Makes Noise

After far more drama and tension than should have been necessary, the infamous House intelligence committee memo on alleged surveillance abuses by the FBI against President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was released. And it was, predictably, a hilarious and self-defeating flop, but that fact won’t discourage Trump’s most slavish acolytes from claiming the Russia “hoax” has been exposed.

This was actually a bit sad for me. I was holding out an irrational hope that House intelligence chair Rep. Devin Nunes, in the course of his day-to-day duties of abusing the committee’s oversight role to shield the president from political damage, might have accidentally stumbled into some real FBI malfeasance. After all, the government has granted itself vast surveillance powers and shielded itself from public accountability through secrecy and classification, making it extraordinarily difficult to know if and when abuses of those powers occur.

But, alas, the memo was a bust. It didn’t really tell us anything that hadn’t already been leaked or guessed, and it actually undermined a critical point Donald Trump and his defenders hoped the memo would bolster.

Nunes’ document alleges that FBI investigators relied in part on a dossier compiled by ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele to obtain a FISA warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and that the government failed to “accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts” about the dossier when applying for and reauthorizing the warrant. Those “relevant facts” do not have anything to do with the accuracy of the information contained within the dossier, which Nunes’ memo doesn’t address.

Rather, the memo complains that the government did not disclose the “political origins” of the dossier — specifically the fact that Democratic groups helped fund it and that Steele himself showed “clear evidence” of bias against Trump — when presenting its case before a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge. The memo doesn’t actually make any allegations, but it strongly implies that Justice Department officials deliberately withheld this information to illicitly obtain and reauthorize surveillance of Page.

None of us has any way of knowing how legally significant these claims of bias would have been, however, because Nunes’ memo doesn’t lay out the government’s case against Page in any detail. Nor does it provide the name of the FISC judge who heard the evidence. In fact, it doesn’t provide any information one would needto gauge the validity of its implications. Instead, the memo strongly suggests that the Steele dossier was the critical component to the case against Page (while it conveniently omits the fact that he was on the radar of counterintelligence officials as far back as 2013).

This is important because Trump and his defenders are heavily invested in the notion that the whole Russia investigation originated from the Steele dossier, which they loudly insist is discredited and total bunk. The memo, however, accidentally disproves that allegation. In a sloppy attempt to gild what is already an unimpressive lily, Nunes’ memo vaguely alleges bias by noting that investigators mentioned a different Trump associate, George Papadopoulos, in its warrant application for Page. “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” the memo notes, thus corroborating a New York Times report that the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia contacts began with Papadopoulos, not the Steele dossier.

But all of this is immaterial to the people who had already decided what the memo would say before they even saw it. Nunes, with allies in the conservative media, mounted an effective PR campaign around this document while it was still under wraps and advertised it as an earth-shaking and world-historic revelation of anti-Trump corruption and bias at the highest levels of government. Sean Hannity (who is denying reports that he advised Trump to approve the memo’s release) hyped the memo earlier this week by saying “this makes Watergate like stealing a Snickers bar from a drug store.” Former Trump White House official Sebastian Gorka grandiloquently declared that the memo’s revelations would be “100 times bigger” than the abuses that precipitated the American Revolution.

The memo, of course, comes nowhere close to matching that absurd hyperbole; it’s impossible to assert that the memo even points to a minor scandal at this point. So, now, these same Trump lackeys will set about to loudly exaggerating or flat-out lying about the memo’s contents so that it fits their pre-formed conclusion. It’s already happening: right-wing pundits are saying the “devastating” memo undermines special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump. The same people who spent weeks loudly demanding that the memo be released won’t be bothered by what the memo actually says. All they’re interested in his how they can use it to discredit the intensifying federal investigation into the president and his associates.

Just Ignore Trump’s Media “Awards”

Just Ignore Trump’s Media “Awards”

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

A little less than a week ago, the president of the United States announced during one of his characteristic fits of Twitter pique that he would be putting on his very own awards show. “I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR,” Donald Trump tweeted on January 2. He scheduled the big announcement for Monday, January 8 — today — at 5 p.m.

No one really knew what the hell to make of all this, given that the whole concept came out of nowhere — it capped a busy Twitter afternoon for the president in which he lashed out at the Pakistanis and the Palestinians and also threatened nuclear war with North Korea. The most likely explanation for this cockamamie “awards” presentation is that Trump got mad at something he saw during his many hours of TV watching, came up with this idea on the spot, and tweeted it out before anyone on his staff had a chance to tell him not to.

The obvious slapdash nature of Trump’s “awards” idea, combined with the short timeframe and the president’s well-established habit of not following through on his own announcements, meant that there was a strong chance it wouldn’t actually happen. And, sure enough, yesterday afternoon Trump pushed back the date of the “awards” from today to next Wednesday, January 17.

Regardless of whether the president actually meets his new deadline, I have a simple suggestion for how press outlets should cover Trump’s dumb “awards” presentation going forward: don’t.

Give it zero coverage. Just ignore him completely.

I realize I’m fighting a losing battle here, but there is no compelling reason for any news organization to devote a single moment of attention to this massively cynical stunt by the president. First of all, there is no actual “news” to be had. The overarching story — Donald Trump hates the media — is already well-worn and doesn’t carry any new policy or political significance. Trump singles out specific media personalities for criticism all the time, and it’s all-but guaranteed that the “winners” are going to be people that the White House has already attacked and/or demanded be fired.

Viewers and readers will be missing out on literally nothing if they’re not told which reporter Trump thinks is the biggest liar. The contrived “awards show” branding is the only new angle to this nonsense, and its sole purpose is to draw press attention to the president.

That brings us to the second reason why media outlets should determinedly ignore this farce: Trump is using you and he’s not being at all coy about it. There is no good faith to be found here, and the president has no interest in the media outside of how he can use it to promote himself. In this case, he’s taking a gratuitous kick at the industry over some of its failures to nurture his own sense of victimhood. There’s no reason why anyone in the press has to play along with this foolishness that he whipped together while rage-tweeting on a lazy afternoon.

What Trump is counting on is that the media won’t be able to resist a story about the media, and his cynicism in that regard is justified given the vanity and navel-gazing instincts of the political press. The immediate reaction from reporters and pundits to Trump’s “awards” was a round of thirsty joking about how they hope they get picked. The as-yet nonexistent “awards” have already become something of a status symbol, with celebrity D.C. chef Jose Andres offering a free lunch to the “winners.” There seems to be a general understanding that this is a dumb game that accomplishes nothing beyond reinforcing existing animosities and perpetuating the perverse relationship that exists between Trump and the press, but no one seems to want to change it.

The arguments for ignoring Trump completely are many and good. The first is that it’s the precise opposite of what he wants. Trump is angling to pick a fight and he thinks he can do it with nothing more than a few angry tweets. For news outlets that are struggling to find the balance between adversarial coverage of the president and outright hostility, this is a lay-up: just don’t cover this one inconsequential thing that he really wants covered. Also, resolute silence from the people he’s needlessly attacking will drive Trump nuts. The “winners” in particular should say absolutely nothing about it — just let the president bark all he wants and get on about your business.

There’s also an element of dignity and self-respect in not indulging this insane freakshow. There were a lot of high-profile errors and mistakes from reporters this year, but the industry can and should address that on its own terms and not give any hint of deference to the bad-faith, self-interested howling of Donald Trump.

The best, easiest thing the press could do in response to Trump’s “corrupt media awards” provocation is nothing. Trump’s stunt only works if it gets attention, so don’t give it the attention it hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters