President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Oh, my god, the stupid is strong with this one.

 

i am surrounded by ms-13 and a bigger never before seen ms-14 with unbelievable carnage

 

If they come across the border, people will see four women sitting in a van with tape around their mouth.

 

He is caving like a Natty Light can in the Mariana Trench and making it seem like what he's wanted all along.

 

In any confrontation, he backs down. He's a coward. And an idiot.

He'll send his lawyers at you later.

That's the way he's always done "business."

 

the horror the horror

 

Has to have the stupid overcoat. What a puss.

 

I agree with this, but I think it starts at the level of Twitter, and it might be an unsolvable conundrum. The Covington story was pretty much archetypal: a story picks up traction on Twitter and at some point surpasses a critical threshold where it becomes a story regardless of its underlying reality, because enough people are talking about it. It's sort of a War of the Worlds phenomenon. The precipitating event didn't even exist, but the reaction to it was absolutely a story that needed to be covered. Any news site that wasn't mentioning the hullabaloo regarding the Covington kids would have been actively ignoring a big story.

This wasn't a matter of a bunch of inexperienced producers on the news desk turning a Tweet into a story. By the time it made the jump from Twitter to the web, it was a story, and it would have been a story even if the Times/WSJ/Post had ignored it. And most of the damage from the story was inflicted not by the news stories that ran on the web, but by the instantaneous Twitter takes of individual journalists, pundits, influencers, whatever.

We agree on the problem. I just don't know that I agree with your interpretation of cause/effect. The notion that a bunch of millennial (or any age) web producers decide what is or isn't news is imbued with a gatekeeper mentality, when the problem is that the gates no longer even exist.

 

And a plan to do it all again in three weeks.

 

Man, Trump is doing a lot of bar-lowering in this speech. They are going to string up barbed wire and claim he won.