Donald Trump Is Competent at One Thing: Making the Media Jump From Scandal to Scandal
He knows nothing about government or the world, but he does know how to divert attention from Scandal A to Scandal B to Scandal C. As a result, the media are spinning in circles.
MARGARET CARLSON
05.18.18 5:07 AM ET
I’ll say one thing for Donald Trump. He can take any problem and push it off the front page. As with a child, it doesn’t have to last long, just enough time to get a respite from one scandal by shifting attention to another.
Take the summit. Back in March, as a 60 Minutes interview of Stormy Daniels was scheduled to run in a week and was Topic A in Washington, Trump leapt at the flimsiest of chances to negotiate with Kim, abruptly switching his strategy of demeaning Kim Jong Un to sitting down with him on the basis of almost nothing. The South Korean envoy Chung Eui-yong had simply told Trump that Kim was eager to meet and it was due, Chung said, to Trump’s “leadership and maximum pressure policy.”
Or naievete. Trump either considered the invitation a breakthrough due to his willful ignorance of history or a welcome opportunity to move the conversation away from his lawyer trying to enjoin CBS from airing the Daniels’ story, or both. A summit could permit him to so dazzle the world with his peacemaking skills, it could dominate coverage for weeks, drowning out two more women lawyer Michael Avenatti says are in the wings ready to offer proof he paid them off.
One day the murderous dictator was Little Rocket Man with a small button; the next, a leader worthy of sitting across from the most powerful man in the world. There was nothing in writing but Trump nonetheless made a pop-up appearance in the press room to tease that he would have a really big announcement soon.
The Insta-Summit was so sudden his national security staff was caught off guard, yammering platitudes about it. Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, about to be fired, was in Djibouti, having been banished to a tour of “s-hole” countries in Africa. He pretended a meeting was fine but just this week, Tillerson warned of leaders who push “alternative realities” when “America's future [should] be fact-based—not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises."
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-is-competent-at-one-thing-making-the-media-jump-from-scandal-to-scandal?ref=home
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