The latest tweetstorm that had the media all atwitter, as it were, resulted from a video President Donald Trump posted that depicted Trump clotheslining someone with a CNN logo photoshopped over his head next to a wrestling ring. The uproar that resulted was either entertaining or appalling depending on one’s point of view. The incident raised a number of questions.
Why doesn’t the President stop trolling the media and get back to the job we elected him to do?
Trump has the entire government at his beck and call. He is a skilled multitasker. He can wrestle with repealing and replacing Obamacare, reforming the tax code, building the Wall, and even returning Americans back to the moon and still have plenty of time to tweak the media.
Someone, probably an intern, can put together a silly video, uploaded it to social media, allowing the president to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.
Doesn’t the president know that he’s going to get journalists killed?
The accusation that Trump is promoting violence against the media is a hot one. The media has been echoing the Democratic Party line that Republicans want to starve children, kill old people, and devastate the land with hunger and disease for decades. Then, when a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter attacks a group of congressmen and staffers with a high-powered rifle, the press barely pauses before taking up the meme that Republican attempts to fix Obamacare will slaughter thousands, even millions.
The question reeks of hypocrisy.
But Trump is stepping all over his message about his agenda
The idea that the president is obscuring what he should be talking about, say efforts to liberate the energy economy, is certainly a legitimate one. Any other president, say, Ted Cruz, would be using Twitter to push healthcare reform, tax cuts, infrastructure, and so on.
Indeed, Trump is doing all of those things, but all anyone wants to talk about is the president’s latest attack on the media. On the other hand, if Trump were to open his mind about his strategy he would say that the press would lie about those things anyway, so he might as well keep them off balance with over the top assaults
The man in the Oval Office is really not acting presidential, is he?
As compared to dallying with interns or siccing the IRS on his political enemies?
To be sure, Trump should be a better man than either Clinton or Obama. But, remember, the president has spent most of his career dealing with union bosses, some of them connected to the Mob, and other rough characters. His method of dealing with people who are attacking him is to, metaphorically at least, go after them like Negan with a baseball bat. He is not going to change into George W. Bush who ignored media attacks. The media had just better get used to it.
