Day -6: Donald Trump Attacks Civil Rights Hero on MLK Weekend, Defends Crazy Right Wing News Story
Donald Trump has had a very busy Saturday morning: attacking Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who fought for and has championed civil rights for decades. He has also pretended that the Buzzfeed-published dossier has been debunked as fiction.
First, attacking Lewis on Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend is especially tone deaf, even for Trump. Trump clearly didn’t like Lewis saying — in light of hacking allegations — that he didn’t believe Trump won the presidency legitimately. Trump in turn tweeted demands for Lewis to fix his “horrible” and “crime infested” district. Trump ended his rant with his patented, pathetically, “Sad!”
Don’t look for many congressional Republicans to jump down this hole with Trump. Trump, previously fined for engaging in racial housing practices for years and accused of other racial biases, is unlikely to find friends alongside him yelling at the black man to stop talking.
This, however, like most Trump news, will likely pass and be forgotten.
Then, Trump, citing something called One America News Network proclaimed that the dossier that he and President Obama were briefed on and Buzzfeed published has been debunked.
Perhaps the Caps Lock was stuck?
OANN just so happened to hire Corey Lewandowski earlier this week. Lewandowski is the former Trump campaign manager and forever Trump surrogate. OANN leans extremely far to the right and has virtually zero credibility. It appears their number one motivation is yelling hyperbolic nothings in an effort to get eyeballs and page views.
Remember, Trump blasted the media for reporting on the dossiers, or any leaked information. This was especially rich considering Trump asked for more leaks of Hillary Clinton emails during the campaign.
But, it appears that when OANN or any conservative news organization runs with something that unnamed intelligence officers are saying, that’s acceptable to Trump.
This is how propaganda works: discredit news and organizations that publish anything negative, and prop up news and organizations that publish anything positive, regardless of the source.
More importantly — and this should be unequivocal— the dossier is still considered unverified.
There is a zero percent chance that the dossier has been debunked entirely at this stage, considering the briefings of Obama and Trump earlier this week. It would actually be impossible to debunk it in just a few days.
What we can assume is that top flight investigators and analysts — not talking heads at Fox News or OANN — from certain three-letter government organizations are poring over data and information to determine the veracity of these claims. But, by briefing Obama and Trump, it’s apparent that they believe them to contain at least some information above unreliable.
Trump’s busy weekend — his last before he is sworn in — has begun with slandering of a civil rights hero and drumming up propaganda.
Standard Trump Saturday.
-6 days in, 1467 to go
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