plaidadder:

So, I’m not going to link to any of this because I don’t like to amplify the noise and distraction Team Trump puts out, but let me just say this about Sean Spicer’s press conference yesterday.

Lying to the American public is a fine tradition amongst press secretaries for Republican presidents. I’m sure press secretaries for Democratic presidents do it too. But the Republicans really made it an art, especially during George W Bush’s two terms. It used to drive us crazy. Rove and Ari Fleischer, especially, were so good at manipulating the media, in the presidential pool and everywhere else, and it was a real problem, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war. They made a case for that war and they sold it to the press and the press sold it to the people. And people are still dying because of what W’s press team was able to do with lies.

They also lied about smaller things. They were caught more than once, for instance, photoshopping images in their campaign ads, and using various other staging techniques to make W’s crowds look bigger. 

Trump’s team has a very different way of dealing with the media. On the one hand, it’s terrifying to watch, because it is very reminiscent of the way that totalitarian rulers often deal with the media, and Robert Reich and others have pointed this out for us many times and I do not disagree. The strategy is, instead of trying to make your lies fit in with received truth, you just invent your own bonkers reality and put it out there. The thinking is that even if you can’t force everyone to believe in this bullshit reality, you can at least get them to doubt their own, and that’s really just as good because it makes it harder for people to organize against you.

I don’t disagree that this method is legitimately scary. I only note that so far, Team Trump doesn’t seem to be very good at it. There is a certain segment of the population that believes anything Trump says whether it’s obviously false or not, and for that segment, I’m sure that press conference was quite convincing. But whether he acknowledges it or not, TrumpNation is a minority party. He lost the popular vote and he’s coming in to office with the lowest approval rating in pollster memory. If he really wants to become Big Brother, he has to increase the number of people who believe what he says instead of their lying eyes. This does not seem to be happening. 

Until that does happen, performances like Spicer’s yesterday are not going to help him. Trump believes that one’s best defense is a good offense. But all the aggression on display, both in terms of content and in terms of style, in that press conference tell you that this administration is actually already on the defensive. Why is Spicer even addressing the question of inauguration crowd size at his first press briefing? Why did he go to the trouble of generating a technobabble pseudo-factual justification for something obviously falsifiable? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because Trump is feeling totally secure and confident right now. Ari would have gone in there, not brought it up, talked about the 20 horrible things his president has lined up for his first full week in office, smoothly deflected all pointed questions he received about those things, and if asked about the thin inaugural crowd sizes would have said that the President was very pleased with how well everything went or else laughed it off with something affable yet sinister, like “what matters isn’t how many fans you have on the Washington mall, but how many seats you have in Congress.” 

That’s because Rove understood the importance of controlling the media narrative and framing the debate. Trump’s team either doesn’t think they have to do that or doesn’t know how–or, most likely, simply can’t because their actions are determined by Trump’s lunatic priorities, and Trump is essentially reactive rather than proactive. Trump obviously, right now, feels lousy about the inauguration. He couldn’t get the acts he wanted. (He says he doesn’t care; that’s clearly not true.) He couldn’t top Obama’s inaugural crowds. (Spicer says they did; it’s clearly not true.) His speech, which he was so proud of that he staged a picture of himself ‘writing’ it and posted it to Twitter only to be immediately dragged for it, was universally panned by mainstream media outlets (and then later dragged on the Internet for plagiarism). And now, on his first day in office, somewhere between 2 and 4 million people in America demonstrated against him.

Rove would have figured out a way to change the subject and W would have told him go ahead and do it and he would have given instructions to Ari Fleischer and he would have gone out there and pulled it off. Trump evidently told Sean Spicer to go out and tell everyone that Trump had the biggest inaugural crowds ever. If, as one imagines, someone on team Trump objected that this is an easily demonstrable lie, he no doubt insisted that they prove it was true. And that’s what produced that angry, hostile, defensive press briefing, during which Spicer told lies, made up lunatic explanations for them, yelled at the press corps about how wrong and shameful they were, and took no questions.

By the way, while checking to be sure I had Fleischer’s dates right I discovered an opinion piece of his from last fall about the presidential election. Fleischer told everyone that he was going to leave the presidential section of the ballot blank. Because of course he’d die before he voted for Hillary…but even he couldn’t vote for Trump.

Bill Clinton’s first term proved that when you get a president on the defensive on Day One, you can significantly limit his ability to accomplish anything. The real story coming out of that press conference is: there’s blood in the water. The next thing we want to hear–the next thing that will tell us that Trump is still on the defensive–is that a couple of his incompetent billionaire cabinet heads got picked off. That’ll be our job for next week.

andreashettle:

snorlaxatives:

while i’m complaining about things, let’s stop referring to the disabled man donald trump mocked simply as the “disabled reporter” his name is serge kovaleski he’s a pulitzer prize winning reporter it literally takes 2 seconds to find that out via google. he’s more than a prop to prove a point.

Thank you for pointing out Serge Kovaleski’s name.

The other thing that bothers me a LOT about all the focus on how Trump “mocked the disabled reporter” is that people don’t learn anything about the many more serious reasons why the disability community is so worried about the potential impact of the Trump presidency on our freedoms and human rights. Yes, this is a man who sometimes acts like a puerile 10-year-old schoolyard bully, and no that’s not an attractive look. But this is also a man who keeps getting sued for all of his buildings that violate regulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). He acts as if the disability community is to blame for the costs it takes to re-do parts of his buildings to make them ADA accessible instead of realizing that everything would have been much cheaper if he had simply ensured that his buildings were designed to be accessible in the first place. ADA accommodations add LESS THAN ONE PERCENT to the cost of a typical building – if it is designed from the blueprint onwards to be accessible and usable for all people. It only becomes expensive if you refuse to design the original building to be accessible and then have to go back and tear down parts of the building in order to do them over correctly.

This is ALSO a man who wants to appoint Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. This is a woman who has little to no understanding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) or why it scares parents of children with disabilities to hear her say that the education of children with disabilities should be left to the states, not decided by the federal government. Does she not realize, before we had federal laws protecting the rights of children with disabilities to access an education, it was a regular thing for states and schools to simply refuse to enroll students with disabilities in school at all? They weren’t just declining to provide special education services back then, they were simply not allowing them to enter the classroom at all. For example, children who used wheelchairs could be told that they were a “fire hazard” for other children because of their wheelchair and barred from enrolling or otherwise obtaining education on that basis.

And Trump also wants to appoint Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Jeff Sessions has a bad history with disability rights in Georgia.  Senator Tammy Duckworth has raised concerned about whether Jeff Sessions is the right man for a post that is supposed to, among other things, uphold the most important civil rights law for people with disabilities–the Americans with Disabilities Act.

No, I’m not exactly impressed with how he mocked Serge Kovaleski regardless of whether you choose to believe that he did the mocking based on Serge Kovaleski’s physical disability or whether you think he did the mocking as an intended insult to Serge Kovaleski’s intellect–which does not make the mocking any less ableist. But this is pretty trivial to me compared to the big role Trump could end up playing in eroding many of the hard won civil rights protections that disabled Americans have attained in the past 40-plus years and make it that much harder to win the remaining civil rights that are still out of our reach today. And I really hate how the media has basically reduced all of these serious concerns among the disability community down to this one puerile moment of mocking a disabled reporter who they cannot even dignify with his own name, Serge Kovaleski.

politicalprof:

Two thoughts for winning the Trump era, however long it lasts:

1. Pay no attention to his tweets and twaddles. I mean, zero. Trump lives by vendetta. He eats attention and shits responses. Trump believes Trump lives only because people respond to Trump tweets. 

Cut off the food. Rob him of his sustenance. When the energy dies, so does Trump.

2. Fight everywhere else. Expose every ridiculous law and regulation. If you can, sue to stop violations of citizens’ rights. Become an ally of everyone being bullied and marginalized and left behind. 

You cannot win an attention war with a narcissist being enabled by others who feed off his narcissism. You have to turn apparent strengths into actual weaknesses. You have to play your game, not theirs. 

It’s time to stop reacting. It’s time to start winning.