The exigencies of TrumpWorld are often
disorienting. However, that’s just the way things work in/with the current
administration. Or, as the Washington Post framed it this past weekend: “Scoop.
Denial. Scoop confirmed. That’s business as usual for writers covering the
Trump White House.”
As America zips like an unpredictably wayward shooting
star, from one Trump inspired saga to the next, to whatever follows, we are
challenged to maintain some fundamental sense of social equilibrium. The man
most recently elected President of the United States, Donald J; Trump, has
cultivated and highly refined a knack for what I like to call establishing a
false flag narrative. For example, he vociferously declares a premise to be
fake news one day, then subsequently, whether a day, a week, or some other
undetermined later timeframe, reverses course. That’s pretty much the general idea.
According to the New York Times, the paper had a big scoop earlier this month. Based upon its
sources, the paper reported that President Trump was considering re-staffing
the legal team serving as his counsel in the investigation conducted by special
counsel Robert Mueller, regarding whether Russia interfered with our 2016
election.
But
wait! Enter the predictably unpredictable wayward shooting star, D.J. Trump.
Within hours of the story’s release, Mr. Trump challenged the veracity of the
story. He tweeted:
“The Failing New York
Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal
team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong.
I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are
doing a great job. . . . The writer of the story, Maggie Haberman, a Hillary
flunky, knows nothing about me and is not given access.”
Classic Trump. Classic false flag narrative. As it turned out,
this story, and a second one earlier this week (Last week now) updating Trump’s legal search turned out
to be, shall we say, in a word, accurate. Last Thursday, Trump’s lead attorney, John Dowd, resigned three days after
Trump added Joseph diGenova, a former federal prosecutor
and sometimes Fox News commentator, to his legal team.
During
the previous week, the Washington Post broke some news about a pending shakeup among
White House advisers. Sources held that Trump had decided to remove national
security adviser H.R. McMaster. A few hours later, White House press secretary
Sarah Huckabee Sanders flatly rejected the very idea.
“Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster – contrary to
reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes” at the
National Security Council,” she tweeted.
That denial
stood up for a week, until last Thursday when the White House announced McMaster’s departure
and the President named his replacement in the name of former U.N. ambassador
John Bolton, not surprisingly, also a periodic Fox News commentator. Fox News
is trending as a major supplier of staff to the Trump administration. Who knew
they had such hefty HR chops?
Of course the
White House has it’s own rationalization. Officials contend it’s possible for
events to change quickly, and a denial at one moment is, in fact, an accurate
and truthful reflection of the immediate state of play. Until the president
actually makes a decision, they say, a news story projecting the course of
events can be speculative and even inaccurate. They add it is particularly true
of personnel decisions because new events can intervene, undermining the
President’s previous confidence in a top aide.
To
make that point, one administration official alluded to President Obama’s expression of confidence in his embattled
veterans affairs secretary, Eric K Shinseki, in May 2014. However, later in the
same month, under mounting pressure and criticism of Shinseki from Congress,
President Obama reversed course and accepted Shinseki’s
resignation.
Also
in support of the administration’s position, former White House press secretary
Sean Spicer said in an interview that reporters have their own form of denial –
by speculating about events and then never correcting the record when things
don’t pan out, as they were first described. He added:
“I’ve seen plenty of reports saying
so-and-so is going to be out by the end of the week, and then so-and-so is
still there a few months later. No one admits they got it wrong.”
The
arguments in favor of the administration notwithstanding, last weeks stories
from The NYT and WP suggest that Trump’s penchant for claiming fake news just
don’t hold water. Frequently, the news isn’t fake, just inconvenient, and ill
timed from the White House’s point of view.
As
a result, some White House reporters view the administration’s denials of
otherwise well-sourced information with healthy skepticism.
Peter
Baker, a veteran NYT reporter viewed it this way:
“Unfortunately, this happens often
enough that reporters have learned that we can’t trust the denials. It doesn’t
help anyone when reporters have to assume that what the White House tells us
may not be true or that a White House statement will prove inoperative just
days or even hours later.”
Maggie
Haberman, who with Mr. Baker, co-wrote the stories about Trump’s legal team,
reacted to Trump’s denials with what amounted to the verbal equivalent of a
sigh.
“He denied (the two stories) both
times,” she tweeted on Thursday. “It all stems from
him. People can focus on staff and I certainly have, but at the end of the day
it’s the president who runs things this way and makes the choices to deny true
stories and attempt to confuse people.”
The
denial tactic is an enduring staple of the Trump administration. As the
post-election transition ensued, a spokesman denied a Washington Post report
that General Jim Mattis would be his nominee for secretary of defense; Trump
confirmed it within hours at a public appearance. In October, the White House
denied a Post story that Trump would decertify the Iran nuclear agreement as not in
the national interest. Surprise…he ended up doing so.
Some
have speculated that all this could just be Trump’s mechanism for confusing an
issue and playing to his eager-to-believe-anything-he-says-base. Reporters have
surmised that Trump sometimes employs denials to maintain an orderly calm until
it’s no longer possible to do so. In fact, some
outlets reported Thursday that Trump was angry that Bolton walked through the
White House’s front gate and was spotted by reporters, thereby spoiling a big
“reveal.”
The
mere introduction of something that turns out to be false into our information
system means that it’s out there, and the vast majority of people will never
hear the correction. Nikki Usher, an associate
professor in the school of media and public affairs at George Washington
University said:
“Even
introducing something that turns out to be false into our information system
means that it’s out there, and the vast majority of people will never hear the
correction. Or if they do hear the correction and acknowledge it to be
factually accurate, we now know this doesn’t even matter because their enduring
partisanship remains. It is the best tactic, actually, to introduce false
information into the news ecosystem because most people will never notice that
it has been corrected. If they do, they’ll find reasons to dismiss the
correction as insignificant, leaving their underlying support intact.”
When all is said and done, don’t be discouraged when Trump cries
fake news; relax, exhale, and before you know it, it will simply be news. “FakeNews: Oops, Just Make That News!”
I’m done; holla back!
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