Coverage of Donald Trump wasn’t all positive, even back then. The Daily News took its share of shots at him over the years. Along with usual suspects such as the New York Times and the New York Post, the News didn’t hold back when he had some trouble in his casino ventures or when his net worth began falling in the 1990s. They mostly ran stories that were deeply sourced and included both sides of the argument when it was necessary. When the stories concerned him, Donald was always happy to be interviewed. Between 1980 and 2015, Trump graced the covers of thousands of newsmagazines and sold countless tabloids and broadsheets. There’s no telling how much money he made for the media back then—and the money he made for them back then doesn’t hold a candle to the money he’s made for them since he decided to run for president.
When CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker, who put Donald Trump on TV in the first place with The Apprentice on NBC, decided to air Trump campaign rallies from beginning to end, the cable network’s viewership skyrocketed. It was a sign of things to come. A few months into the election, online readership of the New York Times climbed above 1 million for the first time in history. In the first month of his presidency, the Times sold 132,000 new subscriptions.12 Two months after the election, the Washington Post added sixty new newsroom jobs and set records for digital traffic and advertising. Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines also set subscription records.13
Those news organizations called it “the Trump bump,” and without it many of them would be heading to the big recycling bin in the sky. But as soon as the Trump campaign began picking up steam in 2016, positive stories about the real Donald Trump became harder to find than one of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The news organizations no longer had any interest in telling the truth. Instead, they sold their collective soul to the conspiracy to take Donald Trump down. They knew that phony, negative stories would sell.
The Media’s 2016 About-Face
During the primary, Donald Trump provided the media with never-before-seen viewership. He drove home his policies while punching and counterpunching his opponents. With a blend of humor and name-calling, the ratings went through the roof. Then the unexpected happened. Trump won!
Suddenly the media shifted gears—it damned Donald Trump and crowned Hillary Clinton.
Coverage of the 2016 election became the most negative in the history of US politics, and coverage only got worse during President Trump’s first months in office. Every day, establishment hacks who’d weaseled their way into the White House would collect information, store it, then leak it to reporters to make themselves look and feel powerful. Those LEAKERS teamed up with LIARS and LIBERALS at newspapers and television stations on both coasts, all of whom were starving for negative information about the president.
In 2013, the New York Times reported that their readers’ number one concern was anonymous sources.14 Did the newspaper listen? Of course not. Pull out a copy of the Times tomorrow morning—swipe it from your dentist’s office if you can—and count the number of identified sources in stories about Donald Trump. I bet you’ll be able to count them on one hand.
In 1974, when Deep Throat brought down President Richard Nixon, no one doubted the veracity of the claims being made because the press was held in such high regard. Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and their peers took thorough steps to verify claims made by the anonymous source. They would not move a story forward without looking into it more closely. Watching Carl Bernstein today, as he predicts Trump’s imminent impeachment, you have to wonder if he’s forgotten everything that made him the quintessential investigative journalist.
What Donald Trump says about the media is true. If news organizations continue to make up sources, improperly fact-check, and knowingly lie, they should face major consequences, even if that means the person wronged has to threaten to take them to court, as Anthony Scaramucci did with CNN. Until then, news sites will continue to rely on anonymous sources to propagate their agenda.
Unfortunately, today, since there are no real consequences for journalists who lie, the press lies with impunity. That’s the business model—one lies, another swears to it, and then the rest pile on. If the lies are exposed, the Fake News Media just moves on to the next lie. They never cop to their falsehoods; they just spin the next false narrative, and on it goes.
The genius of Donald Trump was recognizing that Americans instinctively felt that the press was lying. He was the one who put the laser focus on the press and their lack of accountability, and America came along with him.
With just one phrase, “Fake News,” the president has deflected and defeated billions of negative words written about him. With the Fake News Awards, he raised exposure of dishonest media to an art form. When the president tweeted the link to the awards at GOP.com, the website was so inundated it crashed!
The awards were humorous. But they served to send a much larger, more important message to the American public: that the relationship between Donald Trump and the press—which had been long and healthy for years and beneficial to both parties—was over.
What changed?
Donald J. Trump certainly didn’t. Go back and look at video of his appearances on programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show in the late 1980s, or read some of his comments on trade and foreign policy in the newspapers. Nothing’s different. He’s been advocating for fairness in international trade, promoting his America First agenda, and denouncing political correctness for decades. You won’t find him switching positions like other politicians. That’s because Donald Trump has guiding principles, and one of his core principles is fairness.
“Fairness is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Candidate Trump elevated fairness as a core governing value in this country,” said Kellyanne Conway. “And he took fairness and used it as a thread. Fairness undergirds his policy on trade. He doesn’t say I’m going to rip up all the trade deals and walk away. He says ‘I want free trade. I want trade but I want it to be fair to America.’ Reciprocal and fair! It’s never fair to American interests, workers. It needs to be.
“For years, people, including Republicans, ran around and said, ‘What’s fair to the illegal immigrants? What more can we give them? Here’s a driver’s license, here’s housing, here are benefits.’ Donald Trump finally stood up and asked, ‘Hey, what’s fair to the American worker who’s competing with the illegal immigrant for that job? What’s fair to our local law enforcement who can’t keep up? What’s fair to the brave men and women border patrol agents? What’s fair to moms in the suburbs who are struggling with the drugs that are coming over the border and into their communities?”
Fairness is about school choice and charters, it’s about taxation. It’s not fair that some are able to hire a coterie of accountants and lawyers over the years to favor the wealthy and well-connected—while others pay high taxes. It’s not fair that in the US we pay a 35 percent corporate tax rate, and all these countries that used to have a higher rate, too, saw how foolish we were being and lowered theirs. It’s not fair you’ve got trillions of unpatriated dollars that are legally overseas. So fairness is very important to him. And if you listen to many female voters long enough, they’re talking about fairness.”
As the president’s son Don Jr. told me, the only thing that’s changed about Donald Trump is his tolerance for the nonsense going on around him. “Just watch him,” Don Jr. said. “You can see him on those shows, even then. You can tell he’s getting a little more fed up, a little more fed up, a little more fed up. And he’s not a man who won’t take action. He stepped up when it was time.”
That was the beginning of the end. Donald Trump, a longtime fixture of the tabloids and political newspapers, saw how the system worked and got sick of it. By the time he’d watched Barack Obama float from nowhere to the top of the American political class, carried along by fawning news coverage from virtually every media outlet in the country, he had finally had enough. So, while Obama was running America down on the world stage and caving
in to deals with our enemies in Iran, he decided to act. When it was time, he launched the most successful campaign in the history of US politics, not by going to war with the press or trying to play its game, but by going completely around it.
On Twitter, Donald Trump can reach more people than CNN, the New York Times, the Daily News, and the rest of the media combined. He reaches people those media outlets ignore. It seems the only time the “flyover states” show up in the pages of the New York Times is when factory workers lose their jobs. We see the victims of crooked trade deals staring out the dirty window of a diner. After the reporters get a few quotes and file their stories, they leave town and the newspaper quickly forgets all about the people in those diners. But Donald Trump sent a message: I’m listening to you, and I’m going to help.
For caring about those people and what happened to the country he loves, Donald Trump became a media target. Stirring up hate and conflict has always been an integral part of the Fake News business model.
According to the Pew Research Center, this is not unique to Donald Trump or to political coverage in general. Newspapers have been falling down this slippery slope for years, getting more and more negative with time. Ever heard the saying “If it bleeds, it leads”? It’s a common joke around newsrooms. It means that if you’ve got a story about a factory that’s been saved from shutting down by a shrewd policy move and another story about a bomb that went off and killed three people in a country no one’s ever heard of, you lead with the second one. The more negative, the better. The more sex, violence, and palace intrigue, the better.
Trust me, I know.
As an assistant district attorney, I prosecuted domestic violence cases for years before they ever got coverage in the media. So, when did the media start covering me? During the O. J. Simpson case. A professional football player is accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in cold blood. That was what it took for people to start paying attention to domestic violence.
Suddenly I was all over Larry King Live, even hosting the show, breaking down details of the case for Larry’s viewers. I was again under the glare of TV lights when I reopened the investigation against accused murderer Robert Durst. Fake News survives on the sensational with no regard for substance. According to a study by the International Journal of Press/Politics, negative news has been increasing steadily since the early twentieth century. When a newspaper runs a headline bashing someone its readers don’t like, it has a 33 percent chance of selling more newspapers that day. Bad news happens quickly, and it’s easy to report on. The media just have to find a body or a victim, interview some people who saw the crime occur, and print the story. Progress, on the other hand, takes time. Stories about accomplishments in foreign policy or immigration are made up of slow events and small decisions, which the press has no interest in covering.
That’s not even mentioning the negative coverage of Trump himself. If the trend toward negative news was bad, it got much worse when he took office. A study by the Pew Research Center found that of all newspaper and network stories about Trump, 62 percent were negative.15 That’s compared to just 20 percent for Barack Obama and 28 percent for George W. Bush. Our current president is a man who used to appear frequently in the pages of those same news outlets and enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with them for years.
The minute Donald Trump announced his presidential run, on a platform that didn’t politely acquiesce to their progressive, globalist agenda, they turned on him like a pack of feral dogs. As expected, they’re alienating a large percentage of their audience by doing so. As Eric Trump put it, “I learned that these people do not understand the sentiment of this country. You have certain individuals from the mainstream media, who sit in their ivory towers, their fancy offices and multimillion-dollar apartments. They have never spent 18 months in America’s heartland, they never saw shuttered factories, hardworking farmers, struggling families, ill-cared for veterans and tens of millions of people who feel that they have been forgotten by their own government. Candidly, despite what you saw on TV, when I was in those states, I saw significantly more ‘Hillary for Prison’ signs than I did signs with her first logo “I’m with Her.” (After intense criticism, her logo changed to “I’m with you.”) There is a major disconnect between the elitist media and the patriots in this country and that is missed every single day.”
Today, funded by deep pocket LIBERALS such as Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and supplied by LEAKERS from the Deep State, the Fake News LIARS have the means and the motive to help perpetuate what amounts to a coup d’état: the attempt to remove a sitting president based on a completely fabricated story.
Sloppy Steve’s Ghostwriter and His Work of Fiction
A yet unidentified LEAKER told the New York Times this book would largely be a refutation of that dime novel, Fire and Fury. Leave it to the Gray, Failing Lady to get the story wrong even when they cheat. By the time you read this, you may have trouble even remembering who Michael Wolff is. But I would be remiss if I didn’t commit a few lines to his work of fiction.
Not since the days when I was the district attorney—when it was my job to prosecute and convict society’s worst dirtbags—have I seen a story this separated from reality. It would have been thrown out of any court had he tried to read it into the record. Yet, somehow, he got a major publishing house to print it.
For a few weeks, self-admitted LIAR Michael Wolff, the counterfeit king of fabrication, floated on a sea of cash and liberal adulation. There was a time in journalism when hacks like him were publicly shamed rather than applauded and rewarded with millions of dollars. But last January, liberals waited in line to get their hands on his work of “bargain basement fiction,” as a spokesperson for First Lady Melania Trump so aptly described it.
It’s hard to understand why anyone would believe what this guy has to say when he boldly admits his dishonesty. He told Savannah Guthrie he had “certainly said whatever was necessary to get the story.” He sure did. He misled the president and his staff about the book to get into the West Wing, then used his minimal access as cover to write a hit piece on the administration that has been largely refuted by the people he wrote about.
He also created scenes out of whole cloth, and not artfully, either, often portraying events he orchestrated as if he were only an observer.
For example, he begins his book with a dinner arranged by “mutual friends in a Greenwich Village town house.” It reads as though he had no hand in setting up the intimate gathering, and that the late Roger Ailes, a former CEO of Fox News, and LEAKER Steve Bannon just happened to wander in. But the dinner occurred in Wolff’s own town house! Wolff set the whole thing up and made the attendees believe that they were all pals and everything they said was off the record. Not publishing comments made off the record is a time-honored code among journalists. But Wolff abides by no journalistic principles or moral code.
So, just how did he remember so many intimate details of what was said that night? He says he has audiotapes. Did he have the room bugged? I doubt he had a tape recorder sitting on the dinner table for everyone to see. Was he relying on his flawless memory? The same memory that couldn’t distinguish between lobbyist Mike Berman and Washington Post reporter Mark Berman?
Or, maybe his memory has nothing to do with anything he writes. Maybe he just makes it up as he goes along.
Case in point: In chapter one, he writes that Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, sat in Trump Tower on Election Day in a “remarkably buoyant mood” because she was convinced Trump would lose a close election, which would put her into an ideal spot to get her dream job on television.
What crap. Kellyanne is too smart to have believed any such thing. Not only is she admitted to practice law in four jurisdictions (Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia), she studied at Oxford. Her forte is polling. A pollster for twenty-two years, she’s worked with just about everyone who’s anyone in the business, including Richard Wi
rthlin, Ronald Reagan’s pollster and strategist, and Frank Luntz, Newt Gingrich’s pollster during the Contract with America. No one knows how to read the political winds better.
Kellyanne was on the road with candidate Trump and saw firsthand the energy he created. She was by his side from the moment she joined the campaign, except when she was needed to help coordinate headquarters. She knew lightning was about to strike, probably better than anyone but Donald Trump himself.
Before the sun came up on Election Day morning, just two hours after being with the candidate in Grand Rapids, Michigan—while most of the men who worked on the campaign were asleep on their couches—she was on the morning shows in New York touting the president’s path to victory. Does that seem like someone who thought Trump would lose?
“He always wins!” his son, Don Jr., told me. “Doesn’t matter if it’s real estate. He did it with entertainment. Politics was just the next step. He understands people. He’s an amazing guy. He sees things that other people don’t see. And people don’t give him any credit for that. Against all odds.”
Anyone who’s read any of Wolff’s previous books knows his dishonesty is nothing new. He’s been inventing stories out of thin air for years, stringing together bits of rumor and gossip into narratives and passing the results off as “reporting.” Thanks to the public’s appetite for cheap gossip, he’s made a living on the fringes of journalism.
Michael Wolff’s whole career reads like a joke, in very bad taste. Here’s a loser who couldn’t keep an online blog up and running during the Internet bubble writing a hit piece on Donald Trump, who built a real estate empire, had a multi-Emmy-winning, top-rated show on television for eleven seasons, and got himself elected President of the United States. Meanwhile, Wolff was begging his rich buddies, including accused serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, for startup cash. And we’re supposed to take his pronouncements on President Trump’s competence or morality seriously?
Liars, Leakers, and Liberals_The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy Page 3