Screen grab via Washington Post.
Temporarily offline
by Tom Sullivan
Screen grab via Washington Post.
You wish.
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly informed America yesterday that the president's campaign promise that Mexico would pay for a "big, beautiful" border wall was "uninformed." The wall wasn't the only exaggeration the president had difficulty erecting yesterday.
After much hype (his own) about the prospective "Fake News Awards," the launch of his awards page on gop.com last night flopped.
Prior to the crashed site, New York magazine inquired whether the awards, like Trump University, were actually a real thing:
During the White House briefing Tuesday afternoon, a reporter asked the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, what was up; Sanders had no information, but seemed to reveal herself when she referred to it as a “potential event.” In his newsletter that night, CNN’s Brian Stelter said that he’d “suspected for a few days that the idea has fizzled,” adding that his overtures to the White House had been met with silence.When finally the site was working, readers discovered the top award for fake news went to New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman for predicting financial markets would collapse with the reality star in the Oval Office. Others covered errors by journalists on social media to a story about the president overfeeding Japanese fish. The eleventh and final envelope contained "THERE IS NO COLLUSION!" (All caps in the original.)
And then, at 8:00 o’clock, Trump shared a link to the Republican National Committee’s website, gop.com. “And the FAKE NEWS winners are…” he said.
The link was broken, like everything else.
Trump has often used his bully pulpit to highlight errors in the media, even when news organizations have taken steps to correct and apologize for any inaccuracies, and he has labeled the press the “enemy of the American people”. Trump has yet to acknowledge any of his lies, which have been tracked in an exhaustive list by the New York Times and underscore the president’s near daily disconnect from the truth.In anticipation of the "potential event," Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona denounced the president from the Senate floor, comparing him to Josef Stalin and Bashar al-Assad:
It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase “enemy of the people,” that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.Flake gives a good speech. A pity he doesn't back them up with votes as high-minded.
This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president’s party.