Trump's punishment of the press is a gift to his supporters - and a hint of his re-election strategy
SUNDAY, FEB 26, 2017 11:00 AM EST
Sean Spicer's ban on major news outlets is chilling — and is a big wet kiss to Trump's base, with an eye on 2020
BOB CESCA
During the Obama years, one of the ongoing points of discussion was the White House’s “three-dimensional chess,” based on a scene from the original “Star Trek” in which Mr. Spock emphasizes his vast intelligence and complex strategic thinking by engaging in a futuristic chess game involving several interconnected game boards. In other words, with every political or policy move, we wondered about President Obama’s long game. Whether there was any regular strategy along these lines is still up for debate, but it seemed to make sense: Obama, a highly intelligent and pragmatic figure, working toward an endgame through a series of small, seemingly unrelated moves.
On the other hand, there’s President Donald Trump. It’s extremely unlikely that Trump is capable of thinking and planning on the same level as Obama and his team, even though there are quite a few smart political thinkers insisting that Trump, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Stephen Miller have gamed out a strategy in which, perhaps, a series of distractions is scheduled in advance, paired with nefarious deeds committed behind the scenes. As the theory goes, while we’re all distracted by Trump’s ridiculous, unpresidential blurtings, Bannon and the rest are busily seizing the moment and getting away with murder.
It’s difficult to accept that there’s a method to Trump’s madness — a petulant, erratic, undisciplined, mentally unstable man who’s really nothing more than another angry racist at the end of the bar who watches too much Fox News and won’t shut up about it. For a guy who insisted that the leaks about Mike Flynn “were real” but “the reporting was fake,” a plan appears contrary to his berserker style.
When we learned, however, that the New York Times, CNN, Politico, the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed had all been barred from attending Friday’s press briefing, that suggested what could be a rudimentary yet potentially effective plan underway by the Trump White House. Go figure: It has little to do with making America great again, and everything to do with trying to set up Trump’s re-election in 2020. Whether or not that simultaneously juvenile and chilling act of revenge is part of a long-term attack on press freedom is up for debate. But it’s clearly meant as a smoochy late Valentine to Trump’s most devoted supporters.
Since he first tweeted about Obama’s birth certificate (citing unnamed sources, by the way), Trump has been driven by two things: 1) being popular, and 2) saying whatever’s necessary to fluff his base, including and especially the neo-Nazi alt-right faction. Consequently, we’ve been assaulted by an nonstop tennis ball machine of insane bleats, nonsensical tweets and, all in all, more than enough horrendousness to make his loyalists extremely happy.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/02/26/trumps-punishment-of-the-press-is-a-gift-to-his-supporters-and-a-hint-of-his-re-election-strategy/
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