OK, some of you losers out there are having trouble keeping up with the way the Trump administration communicates, so let me bring you up to speed.
Let’s take the story about President Donald Trump’s tweets alleging that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the November election. The fake news media are all upset and whiny because Trump hasn’t provided evidence to prove his obviously true criminal accusation.
They’re even more upset and whiny because the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee released a statement Thursday saying, “Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016.”
In the Trump administration, that kind of statement can mean only one thing: nothing.
And that’s why press secretary Sean Spicer came out Thursday and told the stupid and untrustworthy media that Trump “stands by” his series of tweets.
And why does the president believe a bipartisan group of senators with access to intelligence information are wrong and his four early morning tweets are right? Simple, Spicer said, “There are a ton of media reports out there that indicate that something was going on during the 2016 election.”
Don’t you guys get it? The lying, terrible media are so dumb and ignorant they can’t see that all the evidence is right out in the open -- produced by the lying, terrible, dumb, ignorant media.
Spicer went on to spend about 10 minutes reading from a series of news reports, including some from The New York Times, the same paper Trump described in a late-January tweet like this, “They got me wrong right from the beginning and still have not changed course, and never will. DISHONEST.”
None of the stories Spicer cited gave any confirmation that Trump Tower was wiretapped or surveilled, but that’s beside the point. The stories kind of/sort of mentioned surveillance and stuff like that, and by hammering away at them for so long, Spicer made his case that there’s ample evidence for Trump to accuse his predecessor of scandalous illegal activity.
Still, the media persisted, forcing Spicer to again note that Trump’s very specific accusation was actually extremely general because the president used quotation marks around the words “wires tapped.”
Trump’s original tweet read, “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Everybody knows that if you put quote marks around something, that something can mean virtually anything. Trump could’ve been suggesting that Obama was surveilling Trump Tower, or surveilling members of Trump’s campaign, or flying spy drones around Manhattan, or wiretapping a convenience store in New Jersey or whatever.
In an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Trump said, “And don’t forget, when I say wiretapping, those words were in quotes. That really covers, because wiretapping is pretty old fashioned stuff. But that really covers surveillance and many other things. And nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, but that’s a very important thing.”
Very important. In fact, even the things Trump says out loud that are later put between quote marks in print can mean “many other things.” (Even those three words I just quoted, because they’re inside quotation marks, can mean many other things. They might mean things that we don’t even know exist yet. It’s very important.)
Hopefully the innovative communication system that has been implemented by this administration is now clear.
1) The president of the United States, the most powerful leader in the free world, says or tweets something.
2) He requires no evidence to support whatever is said or tweeted, because evidence is for weak leaders and this country is sick of weak leaders.
3) If either the tweet or the words he spoke -- or any part of the tweet or the words he spoke -- are inside quotations marks, then they are vague and can mean virtually anything.
4) Any reporting on the tweet or the spoken words -- particularly if that tweet or those words are in quotation marks -- is DISHONEST, a vile concoction by the lying media.
5) If the swine media refuse to shut up about the boldly evidence-free statement, several media stories about things tangentially related to that statement will be read out loud in a mean and accusatory tone.
6) At the end of the day, nothing the president says means anything unless you agree with him, in which case it makes perfect sense and is an excellent point.
There you go. I can’t imagine anything more straightforward and easy to understand.
Please try to keep up, people. The president has an America to make “great” again.
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By Rex Huppke
Rex Huppke is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. -- Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)