The war on the press now includes charges of blackmail
by digby
Honestly, this is just getting ridiculous:
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski accused the White House of trying to manipulate them with a National Enquirer story, writing in the Washington Post that a White House staffer claimed the tabloid would print a negative story about them unless they “begged the president” to stop it — something a fellow Morning Joe host described as “blackmail.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski’s op-ed was a response to President Trump’s tweets that called Brzezinski “low I.Q. Mika” and said that her face was “bleeding” after plastic surgery.
When the White House called, “We ignored their desperate pleas,” they wrote. (The story they’re referring to appears to be a report about the relationship between the co-hosts, who are now engaged.)
The allegation also came up when Scarborough and Brzezinski, who had planned to take a break for the Fourth of July weekend, returned to their show to condemn the president’s attack. Trump was watching, as his tweets later showed:
So apparently the White House is blackmailing members of the press now with threats to have their henchmen in the tabloid press go after them. I'm no lawyer but that sounds like it might be criminal.
There's more:
On Friday, MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough made the explosive claim that three of President Donald Trump’s most senior White House aides “warned” the couple that the tabloid The National Enquirer would publish dirt on them unless they “begged” the president to intervene.
The Morning Joe co-hosts declined to name the multiple White House officials involved in this bizarre, ongoing feud. But one of those “top White House staff members” was senior advisor and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, two White House officials confirmed to The Daily Beast.
The White House says it was just a friendly conversation not a threat. And we don't know if that was who Scarborough and Brzezinski were talking about in their op-ed.
But one thing is sure. Trump is not doing the job of president. He's a celebrity managing his personal PR. He doesn't seem to know that this is not the job of president.
Maybe in the end this will finally show us that our system being so dependent on the abilities of one person running a powerful branch of government isn't a good idea. There's a reason no other country in the world has adopted it. It's just not that great. We've been lucky to have had mostly reasonably sane, if not entirely competent, presidents. I don't know if we've ever had one who was both mentally unstable and intellectually limited like this one. He is clearly unfit. And the dynamic that put him in the office, a party that is ideologically extreme and incompetent, was probably a necessary precursor. So we have a perfect storm.
It's not working. And I don't know if it can be fixed.
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