Trump Media Narratives That Won’t Die
The media falls for it again.
There are quite a few media narratives about Trump. They exist only because they are perpetuated. Earnest journalists and pundits repeat them over and over again, lending them credibility. But in reality, there is little if any evidence to support them as independent theories.
There’s the Trump-as-a-magician narrative. Trump deploys strategically placed maneuvers and distractions as a way to dictate coverage and implement his agenda. He is playing chess, we are playing checkers. There is always a grand, overarching strategy or game plan that supersedes all the seemingly illogical tweets.
The problem? It isn’t true. Take two recent examples.
In November of 2018, the Washington Post reported Ivanka Trump had used her personal email account for official government interactions, a violation of federal law and quite hypocritical for a member of the Clinton-lock-her-up family.
The next morning, following the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the president personally dictated an official White House statement with eight exclamation marks, beginning with “America First! The world is a very dangerous place!”
According to John Bolton, Trump then told advisors that “this will divert from Ivanka.”
“If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing,” he added.
Second, there is the now infamous Bible photo-op. The president, moments after declaring himself an ally to peaceful protestors, removed such protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades to pose with an upside down Bible across from a Church he’s been to once.
The idea to stage the photo-op only came after reports of Trump hiding in a bunker leaked to the media, enraging the president. Trump, desperate to change the news cycle, walked outside in an attempt to prove he wasn’t scared of protestors.
Given these examples and countless others, it is hard to imagine that there is some grand scheme. Or that he is some four dimensional chess master. Trump isn’t proactively setting traps, he’s reactively trying to survive. One of the first in-depth looks at the Trump administration, by the New…
