President Trump: Part II

[Minoosh]

Well you took it out of context (which I added back in).

Sorry about the snip.

I worked at a newspaper for 29 years and wrote and edited thousands of articles. I don't think I ever saw someone labeled a liar (by the newspaper itself). It was part of the "show, don't tell" esthetic. And I don't see, "The President maintains, however ..." as ceding anything to Trump. It's just allowing for a response from him, which is normal practice.

My approach would be to let him have his say, then surgically eviscerate his claim. I think there's a danger in calling him a liar. There's no need for the label, IMO. In fact I think the labeling undermines The Post (or CNN) credibility. IMO, people do not want news stories telling them what to think. But if you write straight headlines saying "Trump's estimate conflicts with that of (credible source). Play it absolutely straight. People will get it.

Show don't tell, in this case very literally with the photographs. Then just leave Trump twisting in the wind and clutching his alternative facts with his tiny little hands. It would be more effective news strategy, IMO, because Trump will contradict every credible source in the known universe.

I haven't been able to sort out those inauguration pictures. I don't know where on the Mall it happens, or if perhaps security measures include a headcount. I'm not saying that Trump isn't lying (though if he believes it, what then?); I have just found the pictures disorienting.

Picking a fight with the media won't hurt him. Picking fights with career federal bureaucrats might.

 

[Darat]

It should be easy enough to do:

President Trump claims that there were X people at his inauguration, fact checking that claim we find that Y people were at his inauguration.

 

[wareyin]

IMO, people do not want news stories telling them what to think.

Have you ever heard of a tiny news outlet called "Fox News"? You should try watching them sometimes. They very clearly and plainly tell people what to think.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Actually I think that is another factor. People like Trump (and Farage in the UK) have realised there's a substantial idiot* vote out there that normally can't be bothered to vote but if you can push their buttons and mobilise them it brings a new factor into play that can tip the balance.

*To be clear I'm not saying everyone who voted Trump / Brexit was an idiot** but that tapping into that undereducated, politically naive and usually non-active pool*** added enough to tip the balance.
**Though it's hard not to come to that conclusion with Trump.
***Stagnant pond in the case of Brexiteers where I live - bar a handful who had considered reasons for voting leave, the vast majority cited 'foreigners nicking our jobs' in an area with the lowest levels of immigration in the country and the highest European aid!

People keep suggesting Trump consciously courted certain voters, eg the "idiots" you note. I say he courted people who believe the crazy stuff he believes. There's no evil genius inside Trump, what you see is who he is. You can look back at the man long before he ran for office and you'll see the same person.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Is not a review of how she lost the general election by necessity an exercise in hindsight?

Yes but an honest, broad view in hindsight, not the confirmation biased readily accepted claim by Clinton critics that she failed the blue collar white community.

No, she didn't. She won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. That is a huge margin, not the piddly 70,000 Trump won those three states by.

Where did she fail? A number of campaign decisions could have made the difference. Claiming she lost because she failed some entire population of blue collar whites is simply a false narrative.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Yes, and that wouldn't have changed my vote.

This election says a lot about the people who choose some idealistic vote. Just like Nader tries to blame Gore, it doesn't matter. We got Bush, Nader taking FL votes mattered and we got 1,000+ preventable deaths following Katrina, we got the Iraq war and its disastrous consequences, and if you read Richard A. Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, you might even question whether or not Bush missed many opportunities to stop 9/11. Not that he could have, but the PDB that Bin Laden was determined to attack inside the US was not the only intelligence the Bush admin ignored.

So now you get Trump. Maybe you were in a solid blue or red state, allowing you the luxury of voting your ideals. But if you vote your ideals and you were in a state with a close vote count, you defeated your own idealism by claiming you weren't one of the responsible people that gave us Trump.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

... This time around the economy is performing decently, American kids aren't coming home in body bags, so people decided to indulge themselves. ...

I think it's more about the Democrats not countering the negative messaging about Obama's term.

The GOP has been hammering the message for 8 years that the economy was bad, blaming Obama and not things like the minimum wage being too low. Claiming the job gains were not good jobs. Claiming falsely that regulations and taxes on corporations were the problem when anyone who has taken Economy 101 should have been able to see the problem was not enough demand. You don't solve a demand problem by feeding the suppliers.
Look at the ACA, pounding pounding pounding how horrible the legislation is. And now when their bluff has been called, low and behold they have nothing better.

The Democrats should have been putting out a coordinated relentless counter message. The GOP has all that money behind it, from the Kochs to Corporate support. It can be countered, but it wasn't.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

It was more about jobs in the rust belt and also some central red states. Hillary did not even address the issue. Bernie sort of did, with free college to retrain.

And you know this, how? Because you heard it somewhere?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The Comey letter certainly didn't help. I don't know if it hurt her more or less than the deplorable comment, there is no way to tell. It may have hurt worse than Trump's slurs against various minority groups because it was aimed so broadly, 25% of the population if you were paying attention, but if you weren't you may have thought it was half.

You have yet to address how disenfranchising Trump voters with the deplorables comment somehow lost Clinton votes.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

This is the problem with the press that has been bugging me for ages. Its the myth of balance. To appear neutral they simply report both sides of the argument. Its not journalism of any form that I recognise.

Part of the problem is the business model that claims neutrality when the equivalence is false.

But there is also the element of the business model which says, controversy (among other things) sells.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Sorry about the snip.

I worked at a newspaper for 29 years and wrote and edited thousands of articles. I don't think I ever saw someone labeled a liar (by the newspaper itself). It was part of the "show, don't tell" esthetic. And I don't see, "The President maintains, however ..." as ceding anything to Trump. It's just allowing for a response from him, which is normal practice.

My approach would be to let him have his say, then surgically eviscerate his claim. I think there's a danger in calling him a liar. There's no need for the label, IMO. In fact I think the labeling undermines The Post (or CNN) credibility. IMO, people do not want news stories telling them what to think. But if you write straight headlines saying "Trump's estimate conflicts with that of (credible source). Play it absolutely straight. People will get it.

...

Yes, and the GOP comeback is to detract from the lie by directing the focus to the disrespect being shown Trump calling lies, lies. They seek to change the story to the fact the word, 'lie' was not used with other politicians.

The news media might do better to either stay away from the word, lie, or, to point out Trump's alternate reality is the exception not the rule and his claims reach the level of 'lies'. I like the latter approach but perhaps the former is more acceptable to more people.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Sorry about the snip.

I worked at a newspaper for 29 years and wrote and edited thousands of articles. I don't think I ever saw someone labeled a liar (by the newspaper itself). It was part of the "show, don't tell" esthetic. And I don't see, "The President maintains, however ..." as ceding anything to Trump. It's just allowing for a response from him, which is normal practice.

My approach would be to let him have his say, then surgically eviscerate his claim. I think there's a danger in calling him a liar. There's no need for the label, IMO. In fact I think the labeling undermines The Post (or CNN) credibility. IMO, people do not want news stories telling them what to think. But if you write straight headlines saying "Trump's estimate conflicts with that of (credible source). Play it absolutely straight. People will get it.

No they won't. That is the lesson I've taken from this election. People no longer care about the whole story, or what can be read between the lines.

Turn on CNN, or your 24-hour news bacchanalia of choice. See that ticker at the bottom? That's what people pay attention to now. That's the story. That's the ENTIRE story. If you "let him have his say," then he will have had his say and no one is paying attention anymore to your surgical evisceration. If you want to say "he is a liar," you literally have to call him a liar because you don't have the luxury of subtlety.

I'll echo wareyin: look to Fox News to see how it's done.

 

[Marcus]

You have yet to address how disenfranchising Trump voters with the deplorables comment somehow lost Clinton votes.

The deplorables comment reinforced an image of Hillary as condescending and arrogant, not just with the people the comment was aimed at, but with many others.

ETA: You must know that she issued an apology, that wouldn't be necessary if as you seem to think there was no damage.

 

[Meadmaker]

I worked at a newspaper for 29 years and wrote and edited thousands of articles. I don't think I ever saw someone labeled a liar (by the newspaper itself). It was part of the "show, don't tell" esthetic. And I don't see, "The President maintains, however ..." as ceding anything to Trump. It's just allowing for a response from him, which is normal practice.

This has finally changed. I have seen several headlines in mainstream sources with headlines along the lines of "Trump repeats lies about voter fraud." Hannity was outraged.

Long before this election I observed, in completely non-political contexts, that we live in a strange modern world, where it is considered an extreme act to call someone a liar, but it is not an extreme act to lie.

 

[Bob001]

You have yet to address how disenfranchising Trump voters with the deplorables comment somehow lost Clinton votes.

I doubt that it had any impact on people who had already decided to vote for Trump. But it looks like a larger-than-usual percentage of voters were undecided late in the campaign, and I suspect some of them said "So if I vote for Trump I'm deplorable? I'll show you!" And I suspect some undecideds who might ultimately have voted for Clinton just stayed home. In an election that was so close you can point to a dozen factors that could have made a difference. But "basket of deplorables" sure didn't help.

 

[Meadmaker]

You have yet to address how disenfranchising Trump voters with the deplorables comment somehow lost Clinton votes.

Let me try.

If you think that illegal immigration is a problem (as I do), and that the government should do something about it, a lot of people will call you a racist.

If you support gay marriage, but think that it's ok for a baker to turn down a wedding cake order, I can guarantee you will be called a bigot.

If you think that girls who are perfectly normal, except that they have penises, ought to use a different locker room than the girls that don't have penises, you are a bigot.

Well, a lot of people agree with some or all of those positions, and they don't really feel like bigots. When someone comes along and calls them deplorable, it ruffles their feathers. Some of those people might agree with the above statements, but not feel very strongly about them. They aren't all that significant, and not enough to change their vote. That's the way I am, for example. I agree with all of them. In other words, the "you" in the statements above could apply to me I voted for Hillary anyway because, as much as I believe those statements, I think there are bigger issues.

Nevertheless, someone out there reading this is thinking, and will probably say, that my beliefs identify me as a deplorable bigot, and despite the fact that I voted for Hillary, will say that I am a Trump sympathiser, and one of "them". Well, do that often enough to enough people, and some of those people might agree that they are indeed one of "them", and might vote accordingly.

In fact, I think somewhere around 1% of the residents of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania did exactly that.

 

[Bob001]

This has finally changed. I have seen several headlines in mainstream sources with headlines along the lines of "Trump repeats lies about voter fraud." Hannity was outraged.

Long before this election I observed, in completely non-political contexts, that we live in a strange modern world, where it is considered an extreme act to call someone a liar, but it is not an extreme act to lie.

The issue is "what's a lie?" Trump surrogates have made outrageous claims on CNN and elsewhere, and then said "Well, how do you know it's not true? Prove it's not true." If there isn't some common agreement on how to identify a fact, then the word has no meaning. In the ABC interview, where the reporter basically said "The study you're citing doesn't say what you claim it says," Trump said, "Then why did they write it? They're just groveling now." WTF??

 

[logger]

Have you ever heard of a tiny news outlet called "Fox News"? You should try watching them sometimes. They very clearly and plainly tell people what to think.

There are more than Fox!

ABCNBCCBSMSNBCCNNPBS

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The deplorables comment reinforced an image of Hillary as condescending and arrogant, not just with the people the comment was aimed at, but with many others.

So sayeth people with no evidence.

ETA: You must know that she issued an apology, that wouldn't be necessary if as you seem to think there was no damage.

Sorry, logic fail. The apology could have very well neutralized any negative effect.

Enough of this Clinton blaming, @Marcus, @Meadmaker, @Bob001: get over it. Baskets of idiots and deplorables elected a disaster. That was not Clinton's fault.

[/off topic]

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Do we have a new thread for Trump's latest blunder, the biggest most incredible blunder?

MSNBC is covering the ongoing protest at JFK airport because perfectly legitimate people arriving from Trump's targeted countries are being detained.

It's insanity, the most incredible insanity.