Day 276: Trump Has Epic Meltdown a Day Earlier Than Expected
Donald Trump likes to save his rants for Sundays. His friends and family have largely been away from him for 36 hours at that point and he’s apt to spout about virtually anything: what he sees on the television shows that he claims he doesn’t watch, what’s in the mainstream newspapers that he claims he doesn’t read, or what he hears around the golf course that he claims he’s not at. But the rants are like clockwork: they come on Sundays.
This week, the clock must have been broken. The insane missives were lobbed on Saturday. (Not that the nation will be able to evade the ones that are certainly coming Sunday, of course.)
The dossier has not been discredited. While the veracity of its contents is presently not publicly known, it has been reported that special counsel Robert Mueller has taken keen note of it and allegedly interviewed its drafter. But discredited? Try again.
In this one, he seems to acknowledge the pervasive stories that money was spent by Russians on Facebook ads, though he attempts to undermine that bit of election meddling by calling the amount spent “tiny.”
Then, in a question that makes no sense, he compares those ads to “billions of dollars” worth of fake news on CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. Is he referring to value of airtime? Or is he implying that money was spent by another country against him on those networks? Or is he comparing mainstream media news to the Facebook ads and implying the latter wasn’t fake news at all, despite the fact that Facebook is where the large-scale “fake news” phenomenon began and continues to reside?
Ad hominem attack aside, Trump actually gets the first statement of this tweet correct: it’s verifiable that Hillary Clinton spent far more money on her campaign did than Trump did on his.
[Cue the confetti for Trump tweeting something true.]
But Trump then says Facebook was on Clinton’s side. Non-sequitur aside, that’s wildly inaccurate.
PC World looked at this issue last year and found that Trump supporters were bombarded with negative fake news bashing Clinton at a wildly higher rate than Clinton supporters were exposed to negative fake news about Trump.
It was only a few minutes after my imaginary Trump supporter “Todd White” began exploring Facebook that he learned filmmaker Michael Moore was staging a coup d’etat against president-elect Donald Trump. Todd also learned that Trump won the popular vote. And that there were people paid to protest at Trump rallies.
None of that is true, of course. That’s the sort of fake news that was disseminated by Facebook — bogus content that many believe was written by partisan groups to influence the election. That belief was apparently confirmed Thursday, as The Washington Post reported that Facebook had sold ads to Russian “troll farms,” presumably to influence the election. Previously, Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) had warned that potentially thousands of “trolls” had published posts to spread disinformation about Hillary Clinton.
Setting up an account for both a faux Trump supporter and faux Clinton supporter the study showed that for the faux Trump supporter, “over a little more than two days, we counted 10 such posts in his feed that were fake, most accusing Democrats or their supporters of illegal activity. In all, White was clearly exposed to more spin than his Democratic counterpart, Chris Smith, who saw exactly zero fake news stories.”
The Senate passed the first non-Obama budget in eight years just last week. So regarding the jobless claims being at their lowest in 44 years: thanks, Obama.
To wrap up the rant, Trump just started saying buzzwords that he wanted credit for, with virtually zero explanation.
Tax cuts might get done, but are still a big reach for an ideologically diverse Congress at this point. Health care reform has failed thrice, though Trump is actively trying to sabotage health care for millions of Americans via executive order.
But to say no administration has done more in nine months than Trump’s? Absurd.
The number of major pieces of legislation Trump has signed into law: zero, nada, zilch.
Trump claims victory for 50 “Legislative approvals,” whatever the hell that means. He just says “2nd Amendment” like it has somehow changed or its interpretation altered in the last nine months because of him. He throws in “ISIS” like it’s a bowl of cherry tomatoes in a word salad buffet.
Economic heights? See the whole budget thing above and virtually any economic graph since 2009. Thanks, Obama.
Trump is right, again, on one point though: in nine months there have been some historic moments: setting aside all the dysfunction and forced resignations for a moment, when was the last time a president had to promise staffers that he’d cover hundreds of thousands of dollars of their legal bills?
Truly historic.
276 days in, 1186 to go
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