Category: Attack the Press

Trump to Dana Bash: That’s ‘a Very Rude Question’

With less than two weeks until the 2016 presidential election, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Donald Trump about where, and how, he’s spending his final days as a candidate.

The Republican nominee did not much care for the reporter’s inquiry.

“I think it’s a very rude question, to be honest with you,” said Trump, taking offense to Bash asking why the candidate was at a hotel ribbon-cutting in Washington, rather than campaigning in key battleground locales like Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida.

“For people who say you’re taking time out of swing states to go do this,” began Bash, referencing Trump’s appearance at the soft opening of his latest real estate jewel, Washington’s Trump International.

Cutting her off, Trump criticized not only the question, but also his opponent, the Democratic nominee: “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting, because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then goes home and sleeps. Yet you’ll ask me that question.”

Trump has campaign stops scheduled in North Carolina for later on Wednesday, before the nation selects it’s next president on Tuesday November 8, 2016.

(h/t CNN)

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H613iUjfzc8

Trump Surrogate Newt Gingrich Has Heated Exchange with Megyn Kelly

A visibly angry Newt Gingrich battled Megyn Kelly in a Tuesday night TV segment that left Donald Trump supporters accusing Kelly of bias.

Gingrich, speaking as a surrogate for Trump, said Kelly is “fascinated with sex” after Kelly brought up allegations of sexual assault and unwanted touching by the GOP nominee.

“You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” Gingrich said.

She responded: “You know what, Mr. Speaker, I’m not fascinated by sex, but I am fascinated by the protection of women, and understanding what we’re getting in the Oval Office.”

Gingrich advanced a common conservative complaint — that allegations against Trump are getting an undue amount of media attention.

The conversation ended with Kelly asserting that Gingrich — a paid Fox News contributor — had “anger issues.”

Gingrich addressed the segment on Twitter Wednesday morning, writing, “For the record, @megynkelly was wrong, i don’t have anger management issues. I do have media bias issues!”

Tuesday’s already tough segment turned fiery when Kelly raised the possibility — stated as a question, not a fact — that Trump could be a “sexual predator.”

Gingrich, who when he was Speaker of the House led the impeachment of Bill Clinton on charges related to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, objected to this. He tried to turn the conversation around by invoking allegations against Bill Clinton: “I just want to hear you use the words. I want to hear the words ‘Bill Clinton sexual predator.’ I dare you. Say ‘Bill Clinton, sexual predator.'”

Kelly did not take his bait.

Gingrich also seemed to dismiss Fox’s own electoral map, which shows Clinton well ahead of the 270 electoral votes she needs to win the presidency.

Kelly cited several such maps, including Fox’s, and said “these are nonpartisan outlets that are just trying to call the electoral scoreboard.”

“They’re not nonpartisan outlets,” Gingrich responded. “Every outlet you described is part of the establishment.”

“Fox News? Really? Are we? I don’t think so,” she said.

“Oh c’mon,” Gingrich said.

The segment ended up proving what Gingrich said at the very beginning: That Americans are living in “two parallel universes” right now.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

Trump and his surrogates are having a very hard time distinguishing between Bill Clinton’s consensual sex and Donald Trump’s sexual assault. As conservative commentator Ana Navarro explained, “Sexual assault and sex are two different things. One is unwanted, one is wanted.”

Newt Gingrich made an interesting point that Megyn Kelly was fascinated with sex because was in a unique position to be somewhat of an expert being on his third marriage, cheated on his first two wives, asked them for an open marriage, and was having an affair while he was impeaching Bill Clinton.

But I’m sorry we were talking about Megyn Kelly and her supposed fascination with sex.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-C0CcI-fY4

Trump Keeps Criticizing the Media While Citing it to Attack Clinton

In a span of 10 minutes, Donald Trump both blamed the media for working against him and used their reporting to bolster his attacks on Hillary Clinton during a rally here Monday.

Citing a new “front page” report from the Wall Street Journal, Trump lobbed a new attack against Clinton that included “shocking new revelations” that Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee donated money toward the campaign of Dr. Jill McGabe, the spouse of the FBI official who later oversaw the investigation into Clinton’s email server.

Both the FBI and a spokesman for the Virginia governor denied any political motive behind the donations.

“It just came out,” Trump teased, seeming to applaud the reporting. “They just figured it out.”

But all that was forgotten just a few minutes later, when Trump called the press “thieves and cooks.” Not all, he hedged, “but much of it.”

He then continued on a long-winded diatribe against the press, who he has singled out in recent weeks as one of his main campaign foes this election cycle.

“The media isn’t just against me, they’re against you,” Trump exclaimed. “That’s really what they’re against. They’re not against me, they’re against what we represent. Like Hillary Clinton, they look down on the hard working people of the country, that’s what’s happened. The media is entitled , condescending, and even contemptuous of the people who don’t share their elitist views.”

The crowd excitedly turned and booed the press, training their sights on those of us sitting amid the rows in the open-air amphitheater.

The Republican nominee promised that if elected he would be the voice of the people, a voice that would “boom through the halls of Washington” and prove that this election would be “bigger than Brexit.”

That is, of course, if Mr. Trump pulls off a win 15 days from now. The polls he once held in such high esteem and gleefully spouted from his podium during the primary have now drawn his ire and wary eye. In fact, the GOP nominee has spent much of his dwindling time on the trail disparaging polls that show him down. Of late, Trump has begun decrying the polling practice of “oversampling” calling it a tactic of voter suppression. “It’s called voter suppression,” Trump extrapolated of the goals of oversampling. “Because people will say ‘oh gee, Trump’s out.’ We’re winning, we’re winning.”

In actuality, oversampling is standard practice for pollsters and can give a deeper look into larger groups of voters.

But Trump cautioned of underestimating him, as some did during the primary process. “Remember what he said?” Trump reflected on President Obama’s nay-saying in the early part of the this year. Mocking the president, Trump mimed, “Donald Trump will never win the Republican primary, he will never do it, sorry. Sorry, he will never win. The Republicans will never do that. Well, they did that. Sorry.”

Trump’s speech – as usual – was filled with attacks for opponents. But he did come stocked with new ideas, rehashing Saturday’s Gettysburg speech where he laid out over two dozen policy plans for what the first hundred days of his administration would look like.

Amid laying out his plans, Trump lamented the state of America’s infrastructure. Concerned over the state of our bridges, Trump decided “I’m going to start swimming across rivers and lakes, I don’t want to drive.”

Later at a rally in Tampa, Trump went out of his way to defend himself against attacks linking him to Russia — but then defended Russian President Vladimir Putin against the same attacks from other politicians.

Trump promised he had “nothing to do with Russia,” and was even willing to provide a written statement on the issue.

Yet in his next breath he defended Putin against attacks from fellow American politicians. “They say such bad things about Putin,” he lamented. “And then they’re supposed to negotiate with Putin? Why would he do this?”

Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, resigned amid reports about his dealings with Russia and Ukraine.

(h/t NBC News)

Reality

According to Donald Trump, when journalists write articles about him, the press is “dishonest” and “out to get him,” but when they write about his rival Hillary Clinton, then they are trustworthy without a shadow of a doubt.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibBksU70Ao

Trump Suggests Curtailing First Amendment

During an interview with CBS Miami, Donald Trump said he’d like to change the nature of the First Amendment in order to make it easier to file libel lawsuits against the media.

Trump spoke with Jim DeFede on Sunday, and he was asked about whether he feels that “too much protection” is given to the free press. Trump affirmed his belief on this issue, stating that America should lean towards the United Kingdom’s system for libel because it gives people who sue media agencies “a good chance of winning.”

“Our press is allowed to say whatever they want and get away with it. And I think we should go to a system where if they do something wrong… I’m a big believer tremendous believer of the freedom of the press. Nobody believes it stronger than me but if they make terrible, terrible mistakes and those mistakes are made on purpose to injure people. I’m not just talking about me I’m talking anybody else then yes, I think you should have the ability to sue them.”

Under English law, defamatory statements are assumed to be false, and the burden of proof lies with the defendant to show that their statement is true. While Trump talked about this system, Trump said that the American press is never compelled to apologize, and that “they can say anything they want about you or me and there doesn’t have to be any apology.”

Trump’s relationship with the media has been complicated to say the very least. Throughout his campaign, Trump blacklisted news agencies for months, ranted about “dishonest” journalists numerous times, and has threatened to expand libel laws as president.

Recently, the litigious Trump has threatened to sue The New York Times for publishing his old tax information. He has also made similar legal threats to sue the women accusing him of sexual abuse, along with media outlets giving them coverage.

(h/t Mediaite)

Media

CBS Miami

Trump Walked Off of an Interview After a Question About Racism

Donald Trump on Thursday cut an interview short with an Ohio journalist after the correspondent asked him to address criticism that he’s racist and sexist.

The Republican nominee quietly thanked NBC 4’s Colleen Marshall and began to walk away while she was halfway through asking him how he feels about being “labeled a racist” and “called a sexist” so close to Election Day.

When she proceeded to probe him for his response, he said: “I am the least racist person you’ve ever met.”

Trump had been discussing an array of topics with Marshall, including his claims that the election is rigged and Republican leaders who have withdrawn their support from him, for about three minutes before she brought up the apparently sensitive issue.

(h/t Time)

Reality

If Trump can’t answer a simple question from a reporter without losing his temper, how can we expect him to react when dealing with adversarial foreign leaders?

Trump claimed he was the least racist person ever, and we might be inclined to believe him if it wasn’t for the racist things he has said over the course of his campaign.

So far we’ve cataloged over 115 instances of Trump making a racist comments or claims. Some of them include:

  • Donald Trump was the leader of the “birther” conspiracy theory movement, which was a racist attempt to delegitimize America’s first African-American president.
  • As House Speaker Paul Ryan explained, Donald Trump’s remarks saying a judge presiding over a lawsuit involving his scam of a university was biased solely because of his Mexican heritage is “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
  • Trump tweeted wildly racist and inaccurate stats about murders by race in the United States.
  • Trump retweeted the same white supremacist not once, but twice.
  • The Trump campaign had 3 known white supremacists as delegates to the Republican National Convention to represent Trump, William Johnson, Guy St. Onge, and Lori Gayne whose Twitter handle was “whitepride”.

Media

Trump Tries to Undercut New York Times Article by Lying

At a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, Donald J. Trump went on a raving tear about the media, telling the crowd the press will say any lie in order to keep Hillary Clinton in power.

As his evidence he cited a The New York Times article published back in May with the headline “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private” where the authors conducted more than 50 interviews over the course of six weeks.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html)

In his speech, Trump claimed that one of the women featured in the article, Rowanne Brewer Lane, recanted her story which undercut the rest of the evidence.

However Brewer Lane, who was interviewed for this story by Fox and Friends, only disputed the Times’ framing of her account, never the facts of the events.

“Actually, it was very upsetting. I was not happy to read it at all,” Brewer Lane said. “Well, because The New York Times told us several times that they would make sure that my story that I was telling came across. They promised several times that they would do it accurately. They told me several times and my manager several times that it would not be a hit piece and that my story would come across the way that I was telling it and honestly, and it absolutely was not.”

But when asked what the reporters got wrong, Brewer Lane said they took her quotes and “put a negative connotation on it.”

Even though Brewer Lane never disputed the facts of the article, The New York Times story is just not Rowanne Brewer Lane’s account of Trump in the 1990’s but the experience of 50 women who were interviewed for the article. If we can discount Brewer Lane’s story then that still leaves 49 women, 11 who were named, who had the same experience of misogyny from Donald Trump.

Donald Trump lied.

Reality

Unless Donald Trump can prove that the remaining 49 subjects were also misrepresented, it is incorrect of him to declare the story was “proven false.”

And this does not cover the sexist comments made by Trump since announcing his campaign. Just a few examples include:

Trump Cites Hacked and Fake Online Polls to Prove He Won Debate

Part of Donald Trump’s persona is that he “wins all the time.” So what happens when he objectively loses in the first presidential debate in virtually every scientific poll by a far more prepared opponent? Apparently Trump goes into full denial and finds every online poll that supports the outcome he desired and it doesn’t help that pro-Trump media like Fox News joins him.

However there are a couple of problems with using online polls for gauging election results. First, they are not restricted to likely voters, so an 8-year old who is not of age can cast their vote. Scientific polls look for sample demographics that are in-line with the national population, online polls do not. Also, most online polls do little to prevent duplicate votes. For example, you can vote on a laptop, then a phone, then an iPad. You can also open the poll and vote in different browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. If you turn on a browser’s “privacy mode” then browser cookies are disabled, which are used to track your activity on a website, and this opens up to hacking using automated programs called “bots” which can continuously cast votes.

On top of the issues with online polling, each online poll Trump cited is either faked, didn’t exist, or was the victim of a coordinated hacking attack.

For example, the morning after the debate Trump called into Fox and Friends and claimed:

“I won Slate,” Trump insisted on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning. “I won Drudge in almost 90% of the vote in the poll, I won Time Magazine. I won CBS. I won every single poll other than CNN.”

Trump also made the same claim at his event in Miami, Florida the same day. The reason why this is so strange is that CBS never held an online poll, they did however conduct a focus group of undecided voters, and Clinton came out ahead.

Later, Trump tweeted out an image of 11 online surveys which he felt backed up his claims.

Again, outside of the inherent problems with online polling, some of the numbers did not even match up. The white supremacist site Breitbart.com held a more scientific poll which had Clinton winning at 48% to Trump’s 43%, a far cry from Trump winning at 75% as he claims.

But most important, every single one of these polls were the victim of a coordinated attack by hackers on 4chan, who used automated bots to vote multiple times and skew the results.

4chan-first-debate-online-poll-hack

In the end, even Fox News had to remind employees that unscientific online polls “do not meet our editorial standards,” and had to go so far as to reprimand Trump spokesperson Sean Hannity for continuously using online polls to justify his belief that Trump won.

Even so, Sean Hannity still continues to push these online polls on his show in defiance of ethics and standards.

Trump Threatens to Sue New York Times

Donald Trump threatened to sue The New York Times on Twitter after posting several other messages blasting the paper and its well-known columnist Maureen Dowd.

“My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting,” Trump tweeted.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, posted several other tweets Saturday attacking the Times and Dowd, calling her a “neurotic dope.”

On Saturday, the Times published a story digging into Trump’s reliance on tax breaks to build his New York real estate empire. It put the total value of tax breaks on Trump properties at at least $885 million.

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

Trump has had a long history of harassing the press and individual journalists for reporting on what he says.

In the past, Trump has made his feelings known that journalists should be “congratulating” him, which is not their jobs and sounds more like the role of the press in soviet Russia.

Trump Blasts New York Times Columnist Without Provocation

Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday to blast New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, calling her “a neurotic dope.”

“Wacky @NYTimesDowd, who hardly knows me, makes up things that I never said for her boring interviews and column. A neurotic dope!” Trump tweeted.

He added, “Crazy Maureen Dowd, the wacky columnist for the failing @nytimes, pretends she knows me well–wrong!”

It’s unclear what provoked Trump’s outburst at Dowd, who hasn’t written a column since Aug. 27. However, Dowd has often mocked Trump in her columns and written satirical pieces that imitate his voice. And in an interview with CNN Saturday, Dowd said she told Trump she was concerned about the violence at his rallies, to which he responded that he liked the “frisson of excitement.”

Trump has been criticized for employing the word “neurotic” to describe women he dislikes, including MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).

(h/t The Hill)

Furious Trump Lashes Out at CNN: They’re ‘Mostly Losers in Life!’

Twitter

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump continued his war on journalism Saturday morning, taking aim at unnamed CNN panelists who have been critical of his campaign and calling them “losers in life.”

Using his favorite criticism mechanism, Twitter, Trump wrote, “@CNN just doesn’t get it, and that’s why their ratings are so low – and getting worse. Boring anti-Trump panelists, mostly losers in life!”

Trump’s push-back comes one day after the candidate was roundly criticized  by the media for manipulating them to promote his new hotel under the guise of a major announcement regarding his conspiracy mongering over whether President Obama was not born the the U.S.

On an almost nightly basis, Trump advocates — including Kayleigh McEnany and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — have been taken to the woodshed for making outrageous statements while attempting to spin Trump’s comments and actions.

Friday night, CNN host Don Lemon was forced to cut Lewandowski’s mic when the Trump booster — who receives paychecks from both Trump and CNN — refused to allow Lemon to read a statement on Trump’s birther crusade.

Wednesday night, CNN panelists laughed after a Trump advocate attempted to explain how the candidate was going to deal with the Flint water crisis by beginning, “First, we;re going to build the wall..” a reference to Trump’s proposed multi-billion dollar wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

(h/t Raw Story)

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