Ben Shapiro of National Review Online tallies the damage from President Trump’s ongoing fight with mainstream media outlets.
Just when you think things can’t get any stupider, they do.
On Sunday, President Trump tweeted out a gif of himself clotheslining someone, knocking him to the ground, and then pummeling him at an old WWE event. In the gif, the head of Trump’s victim has been replaced with the CNN logo, so Trump appears to be tackling and then beating the hell out of the network he most despises, the one he has best used as a foil in his rise to power. Trump’s CNN tweet followed on the heels of his tweets from last week, in which he attacked MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough in the most personal terms.
Trump supporters responded with unrestrained glee to much of this: Trump was fighting back! CNN, meanwhile, responded with its typical restraint and objectivity: Reporter after reporter declared that Trump’s tweet didn’t merely represent an obvious breach of decency, an unpresidential and apparently pathological outburst of spontaneous rage-tweeting; it promoted violence, and Trump would have blood on his hands if some rogue follower picked up a gun and decided to come after Brian Stelter. …
… So here we are: a media nobody trusts schoolmarming a president who’s simply the class clown. Nobody looks good in this particular fake wrestling match; the question is why anyone engages in it at all. After all, we know that the match isn’t real. Trump so adores the media attention that if CNN and the New York Times were to stop covering him, he’d quickly set himself on fire outside their offices. Likewise, if Trump were to stop tweeting, CNN would have to go back to covering missing Malaysian airliners.
It’s a romance made in hell, but the ratings sure are stellar!
