“Fake news.” nnHow many times? How often has Donald Trump used that throw-away slur to deflect news coverage he doesn’t like? Hundreds? Thousands?
It’s an effective dodge for questions from actual reporters for actual newsrooms for whom credibility and accuracy are their coin of existence.
“Fake news.”
For the right audience, it has a “Seig, heil” intonation. Raise that right hand. Puff out that chest. Point threateningly at truth-seekers with press badges.
So, here’s this guy, a media creation unto himself: He goes around denouncing the news media at every turn, and it turns out that he’s involved in a pseudo-contractual agreement with a veritable, certifiable, undeniable factory of fake news. He and his sleaze-merchant buddy: partners in crapola and cover-ups
“I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer,” said Trump in 2016 when the tabloid concocted a tale linking Ted Cruz’s father somehow to John Kennedy’s assassination.
No, nothing at all — except what former Enquirer CEO David Pecker testifies now. He told Trump he’d buy and bury incriminating stories about him. He’d also fabricate screaming front pages to harm political opponents. The better to draw eyes in America’s check-out counters.
“Hillary is dying!” “Biden’s secret breakdown!” “FBI plot to impeach Trump!”
This is the nation-harming result of what Pecker acknowledges to be “checkbook journalism” (insulting anyone who actually does journalism).
“Catch and kill.”
We don’t know if Trump actually fathered a “love child” as alleged to the Enquirer by a Trump Tower doorman. We do know the magazine paid the doorman $30,000 for the story, then sat on it.
Trump says he didn’t have affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and cover-girl Karen McDougal. Testimony in this trial lays waste to that lie.
Nothing illegal about those dalliances. Nothing illegal to lie about them.
[Editor’s Note: Adultery was, and remains, a misdemeanor in New York.]
What’s illegal is business fraud – papering over the hush money, a shell company created for the ruse.
Making it a felony: Pecker admitted on the stand that the arrangement was an illegal campaign contribution.
No, it’s not just about sleeping around. It’s not just about records askew. It’s about the 2016 presidential campaign.
Sorry, MAGA; when your guy runs to govern us all, all of us are in on, or should be in on, on his machinations to gain favor and finances.
To those who seek to downplay this: Where were you when Michael Cohen went to prison for helping facilitate all that Trump wanted regarding his sexcapades?
That Cohen broke the law, while “the boss,” a.k.a. “Individual 1” remained in charge of enforcing our laws, is a monumental scandal.
Later, Cohen would tell Congress about the illegal things he knew of or helped facilitate for Trump – including inflating property values for better loans and deflating them for tax and insurances purposes.
Congress should have begun impeachment proceedings right then and there.
Instead, it took a politically motivated extortion effort – Trump’s bid to get Ukraine’s president to make a fake statement that a fake investigation had been launched based on fake allegations about Joe Biden – to impeach Trump.
The truth is out there. An indictment in Manhattan is helping put the lie to he who every day runs from the truth.
Whatever Trump might say about his inquisitors, the truth is succinctly stated by former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman:
Trump’s relationship with a reprehensible tabloid is “the ground zero of fake news.”
Now we know exactly why Trump calls the news media “the enemy of the people.” He detests reporters who can’t be bought or cowed by him.
In his transactional world, he just can’t handle the fact that reporters would be independent and inquiring, not fawning and Enquire-ing.
John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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