Donald Trump's campaign has (ahem) a bit of a reputation for hostility to reporters. Sometimes Trump leads it himself, as happened with Univision's Jorge Ramos; sometimes Trump lets the crowd know which outlets are watching the festivities, so that they may lustily boo; sometimes the crowd or staffers do it of their own volition.
And sometimes the reporter works for one of the most pro-Trump "news" outlets in America, and all hell breaks loose.
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski reportedly grabbed the arm of Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields during a press conference earlier this week and yanked her down. Fields said in a piece published Thursday that she almost fell to the ground, adding she was "shaken" by the incident.
Fields posted a photo of the resulting bruises on her arm, marks that look suspiciously like four fingertips. A Washington Post reporter personally witnessed the incident, verifying Fields' account and identifying Lewandowsi as the Trump manager who did it.
And this is what happened next:
- One of Fields' Breitbart colleagues tweetstormed his skepticism that the "incident" happened—for which he was suspended. (Note that the Breitbart site is a serial promoter of hoaxes, most famously the various efforts of faux-video "journalist" James O'Keefe, and so the suspicion that one of their own reporters was faking a story in order to hurt the Trump campaign is either the most expected response ever or a deeply ironical irony.)
- The Breitbart CEO issued a rather fidgety denunciation of the "someone" who did it, "if that's the case."
- The Trump campaign simply denied it happened, issuing a statement declaring that "not a single camera or reporter of more than 100 in attendance captured the alleged incident"—ignoring the aforementioned Washington Post reporter who witnessed it firsthand.
- The man identified as doing the assaulting, Corey Lewandowski, canceled a prescheduled interview with the Washington Post reporter who verified the incident happened.
- The man identified as doing the assaulting, Corey Lewandowski, took to Twitter to share a link showing that while working at the Daily Caller in 2011 Fields reported being beaten by NYPD during the Occupy Wall Street protests: "Professional reporting or attention seeking?", he mused.
So in short, the Trump campaign claims it didn't happen and that the reporter probably is just “attention seeking.” The Trump campaign claims nobody witnessed the event, steadfastly ignoring the reporter that witnessed it. One of the Breitbart reporter's own colleagues wrote a series of tweets suggesting she was making it up. The Breitbart staff stands behind their reporter … "if" it happened.
And the Breitbart devotion to Donald Trump remains, apparently, undaunted.
Is there any lesson to take from all of this? I'm not sure. It is a bit of a microcosm into the mindsets that has led to a Donald Trump candidacy in the first place, though. Things you don't like are a conspiracy; evidence of those things being true is either ignorable or just proof of more conspiracy; say a contrary thing loud enough and everything will work out. And that, future grandkids, is how climate changed happened.
Oh, and Trump's inner staff is now physically assaulting reporters who ask the wrong questions. I guess that counts as news too.