The last twenty hours or so have been among the most bizarre and confusing of this already unprecedentedly strange post-Trump era. However, the bottom line is that, Donald Trump, the master media manipulator, has won yet another round against a pathetically impotent news media, even though the facts might have effectively brought down a different president in a simpler era.
Before I explain how and why I think Trump is, at least for now, the victor in this latest battle, let me provide some observations on the many remarkable developments of the last day.
– The CNN report, though it has seemingly been contradicted by an ensuing NBC story, that Trump and President Obama were briefed on intelligence information indicating that Russia may have obtained compromising information on the President-elect, appears to be solid and makes total sense in the larger scheme of what we know about how the campaign went down.
– The full memo/report released by Buzzfeed is obviously unsubstantiated, already at least partly discredited, and is so over the top that it seems (hopefully) impossible for it not to be at least mostly false. However, if it is indeed true that the memo was shown to both Trump and Obama, then I think it was not totally illegitimate for Buzzfeed to publish it, though they probably should have emphasized the total lack of evidence corroborating it, or at least debunked the “Michael Cohen Prague Meeting” angle which seemed easy enough to do.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member