Donald Trump is so confident about the outcome of November’s vote that he’s planning well beyond Election Day.
“They’ll turn the campaign into a news network,” predicts Ben Shapiro, the former editor at large of Breitbart and a conservative commentator and author.
And just where on the spectrum might such a venture position itself?
“Bannon and Trump see an opening to the right of Fox,” Shapiro said.
With Steven Bannon running the show, it would certainly seem like Breitbart News has the inside track for becoming the post-defeat (but never admit defeat) core of the white nationalist media empire that builds on Trump’s campaign.
But there’s another contender for the role of Trump’s media footrest. Last week, the Associated Press handed the Trump campaign a pre-digested “scandal” about the Clinton Foundation—a scandal that only existed because the AP decided to slice the data in just the way they needed to create the narrative they wanted, then fronted the piece with an eyeball-grabbing tweet that was entirely in error. They then compounded the issue by refusing to correct its errors and instead building on them.
On Sunday, Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the Associated Press, stepped up and admitted what was already obvious: the Associated Press isn’t interested in being right. Confronted with the tweet in question, Carroll gave what has to be the most twisted response since whenever someone last asked the Trump campaign about immigration.
CARROLL: I would say that we’re a lot better at breaking stories and covering news and gathering video and taking photographs than we are on tweets, (INAUDIBLE). This one could have used some precision.
STELTER: Does that mean regret?
CARROLL: No. If we felt it was wrong, we would have taken it down right now.
STELTER: It was wrong. It says that half of the people she met with were donors.
CARROLL: Yes, I think it was sloppy.
All that translates as simply: We were wrong, but we don’t regret it and we’re not about to fix it.
A few days before the AP crafted the Clinton Foundation scandal, it published a “big story” about the Trump family—a piece so extraordinarily fluffy and pro-Trump that the term “hagiography” seems short of the mark.
There's something about bulldozers and hard hats that brings a family together.
It worked for Donald Trump and his father. And it worked for Donald Trump and his children.
Long before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, New York real estate mogul and reality TV star, he was Fred Trump's kid, sitting at his dad's knee playing with blocks as his father developed homes and postwar apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens.
Lionizing Fred Trump’s bringing luxury features to the middle class, the article makes exactly zero references to how Fred Trump actively engaged in a decades-long program of discrimination, or how Donald defended those policies. And soon, the article reaches such heights of cornball, that it’ll make you check twice for the Onion url.
Donald Trump worked with his father even before he completed college and in no time leapfrogged his dad in the arts of both deal-making and self-promotion. Manhattan beckoned, and the younger Trump answered, against the advice of his more cautious father.
From there, the story becomes so saccharine that 4 out of 5 dentists reported being actively ill when reading it.
Trump's three oldest children — there are two more from his second and third marriages — clearly inherited their father's and grandfather's love of the deal. They're all executive vice presidents, directing development and acquisitions as a team. ...
The kids are expected to keep managing the Trump Organization should their father win the White House.
The “kids.” The 32, 34, and 38-year-old “kids.”
This isn’t “The Big Story.” This isn’t a small story. This is a public relations bulletin.
Even when you look at the little nuggets hidden in the dross ...
One of Donald Trump's first big projects: Armed with guaranteed loans from his father and generous tax abatements, Trump transformed the defunct Commodore Hotel into a glimmering Grand Hyatt adjoining Grand Central Station that opened in 1980.
And even when discussing Trump’s disturbing relationship with the estranged Tiffany, the story can’t stop twisting absolutely everything into a point in Donald Trump’s column.
In the heat of the divorce battle, Ivana Trump was quoted as saying of her husband, "Donald has gone weeks on end without seeing the children at all."
But Ivanka, in a 2004 interview with New York magazine, said the breakup ultimately brought the three kids closer to their father.
How sweet is that? Daddy neglected his kids, but it was all for the best.
One of the big head-scratchers about Trump is how the candidate so prone to hype, bluster and insult managed to produce children who seem so even tempered.
Trump offered this explanation during a 2004 interview with CNN's Larry King: "I worked at it. I was tough. I was firm with them. I didn't give them too much money."
Yes, how could he have produced kids so level-headed they fly around the world to shoot elephants and leopards? It’s because he “didn’t give them too much money.”
It’s enough, AP. Your entry has been received. Don’t worry. The Trump campaign will get back to you.