I'm waiting for that shoe to drop. Which shoe is that, you might ask? This is the shoe that will have the media tearing their hair and weeping over the outrageous President Trump. There have been others, but the most notable example of such a shoe is this tweet:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Typical of the headlines flooding the media after Trump's tweet, was this from the New York Daily News: Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower before election on Twitter.
Trump offered no evidence of his explosive claim, which was quickly denied by an Obama spokesman and shot down by White House insiders past and present.
"A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," said Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis.
"As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."
For some context, on Presidential Inauguration Day, January 20, 2108, the New York Times print edition arrived at newsstands sporting this front page, over the fold headline: Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides. The online version was quickly amended to read: Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates.
Jan. 19, 2017
WASHINGTON — American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
Bottom line: the Trump campaign was under surveillance by the Obama administration on the pretext that Trump campaign associate Carter Page colluded with Russians to fix the U.S. presidential election. Several weeks after Trump tweeted "Wiretap!" Jonathan Turley wrote, Trump was right after all about the Obama administration wiretaps.
He [Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)] also said that the inadvertent interceptions were then subject to “unmasking” where intelligence officials actively and knowingly attached the names of the parties to transcripts and then circulated the information widely within the intelligence community. If true, that would clearly support a part of the president’s allegations and raise very serious questions about the improper use of surveillance. It would be Trump’s ultimate “redrum” moment.
Yet, when this disclosure was made by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, CNN and other news outlets immediately proclaimed that it did not prove anything about the Trump allegations — again emphasizing that he said Obama “wiretapped” Trump’s phone. That is like saying that an alleged victim is not to be believed because he said that some “second story man broke into my home” when the evidence showed that there was no second story on the house and the burglar entered through an open window.
We have since learned that FISA warrants issued on Page meant that anyone in the Trump campaign with whom Page communicated electronically was subject to surveillance by the FBI. We have since also learned the the FBI sent at least one informant to spy on the Trump campaign. To protect it from the Russians, so they said, but they never informed the Trump campaign of the supposed threat or the "protections" provided.
Collusion with Russia was a fairy tale that only grew legs after Hillary Clinton lost the election. Up until that time nobody believed there was any Russian collusion including Hillary, Barack Obama, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign. After she lost, Russian Collusion became the Democratic Party's lead talking point. It did not resonate with most Americans.
Within three months of Turley's article an opinion poll from The Hill found this:
On the question of collusion, 52 percent said they don’t believe Trump coordinated with Moscow to influence the 2016 presidential election. But 54 percent said they believe Trump’s associates may have been involved.
Either way, 62 percent of voters say there is currently no hard evidence to support the collusion claims.
Further:
In addition, 62 percent said there exists a campaign to delegitimize the president. This includes 87 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats. [My emphasis]
The media is not winning points on this issue. Trump has been masterful at forcing their biases out into the open where voters can see them and see that it is largely a media driven campaign to delegitimize. Trust in the media sinks to new depths.
Poll: 77 percent say major news outlets report 'fake news'
By CRISTIANO LIMA 04/02/2018 10:50 AM EDT
President Donald Trump is not alone in thinking media outlets spread "fake news."
More than 3-in-4 of 803 American respondents, or 77 percent, said they believe that major traditional television and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday, marking a sharp increase in distrust of those news organizations from a year ago, when 63 percent registered concerns about the spread of misinformation.
Among those, 31 percent said they believe those media outlets spread "fake news" regularly, and 46 percent said it happens occasionally.
The findings also showed Americans diverging on what constitutes "fake news," with 65 percent saying it applies broadly to the editorial decisions outlets make over what topics to cover and 25 percent more narrowly defining it to apply only to the spread of factually incorrect information.
The time is ripe. The midterms are two months away. Rather than sit back and wait, prepare his defenses, Trump, I expect, will spring his own October Surprise. When it hits the media will erupt in an all consuming outrage — 24/7 wall to wall coverage. But a solid majority of Americans will read past the shocking headlines and will look to alternative news sources, maybe even to the president himself. And then they'll decide the media are mostly lying, and they'll back Trump.
I expect Trump to trigger new rounds of media outrage in three to four weeks. Maybe it will be in the form of an "outrageous" tweet, or perhaps in a press conference he will let slip remark like the one in Helsinki where he "misspoke" and everyone took him to task for failing to back U.S. intelligence agencies. Or better still, maybe there will be a high profile indictment of a former high ranking DOJ or FBI official, a hero of the left.
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