Campaign Action
Kellyanne Conway finally admitted the truth over the weekend: The Trump administration is trafficking in "alternative facts." Translation: lies, lies, and more lies.
Donald Trump's distorted worldview that he was elected by a landslide, his inauguration crowd was massive, he was maybe the first to hold a Lincoln Memorial inaugural concert, and the media has completely misrepresented his posture toward the CIA is all verifiable garbage—the rantings of a madman who is completely and likely permanently disconnected from the planet the rest of us inhabit.
And Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, rushed into his first turn at the podium Saturday brandishing his truthless leader's unhinged beliefs like a loaded gun.
"This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period," Spicer said, contradicting all available data.
If the facts had been roaming around Fifth Avenue, they would surely have been gunned down.
Look, these are the biggest bunch of loon bags to ever haunt the White House halls. Yes, that matters, but it no longer deserves or requires informed questions to reveal it. Jay Rosen at PressThink has a better idea: #sendtheinterns.
“Send the interns” means our major news organizations don’t have to cooperate with this. They don’t have to lend talent or prestige to it. They don’t have to be props. They need not televise the spectacle live (CNN didn’t carry Spicer’s rant) and they don’t have to send their top people to it.
They can “switch” systems: from inside-out, where access to the White House starts the story engines, to outside-in, where the action begins on the rim, in the agencies, around the committees, with the people who are supposed to obey Trump but have doubts. As I wrote on December 30:
The outside-in approach and a call to abandon sending reporters to White House press conferences—Trump’s in particular—are ideas I have been writing about for months. Sending interns is an ideal solution. Let them serve as stenographers. By all means, we want all Americans to witness Trump issuing a scathing rebuke of facts that is built on total crap. Let him sully himself in his own waste.