It would be amusing if it were true...
Katy Tur deserves more of a Wikipedia page than this one. It doesn’t even have her photograph on it. She's doggedly covered the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News as well. By her account she’s followed him to over 40 states and made more than 3,000 TV appearances.
Katy wasn’t even a political reporter before she started covering Trump. In fact, early in her career, when she was Keith Olbermann’s girlfriend, she was a storm chaser for the Weather Channel. Yet she landed a 29 minute one-on-one interview with him that aired three times on MSNBC.
Her role is mostly to report rather than opine, although her most recent observation — possibly original with her — was not just a snark, but an astute assessment of how Trump pays close attention to the reaction of his rally crowds than to polls.
It makes sense that Trump would trust the evidence in front of him rather than polls which show him losing in great numbers every week. He probably believes that the polls are rigged, and his audiences aren’t. Katy’s use of the applause-o-meter description is shorthand for how she described how he uses his crowds:
Trump is a room-reader. He'll slow down a line, rephrase a point, work in a pause, and ride the energy of his audience wherever it takes him. For 45, 60, even 90 minutes, he'll run through classic riffs, like bomb the hell out of ISIS, build a wall, make America great again. But he'll also experiment, as when he launched an ethnically tinged attack on a Mexican- American judge deciding the civil fraud case against Trump University.
We all are well aware, as scientifically attuned thinkers that polls are designed to sample a diverse segment representative of the entire population. It is as obvious as the dye job on Trump’s comb-over that his “sample” is a self selected like minded cohort.
Katy’s bonafides include being called “little Katy” and a lying third rate reporter by Donald Trump. Not only that, more recently he was actually shushed by him, or in Katy’s own words:
"Mr. Trump, do you have any qualms about asking a foreign government—Russia, China, anybody—to interfere, to hack into the system of anybody's in this country?”
He didn't answer.
So I tried again.
And again.
And again.
And then it happened: the shushing.
"If they have them, they have them" he was saying. "You know what gives me more pause? That a person in our government, crooked Hillary Clinton—be quiet, I know you want to, you know, save her."
My phone jumped with Twitter notifications.
"Did he just tell @katyturnbc to 'be quiet'?"
"Trump tells @katyturnbc to 'be quiet'."
"A day after a 105 year old woman casts nominating vote for HRC, Trump tells a female reporter to 'be quiet.'"
These quotes and facts are from the piece Katy wrote for Marie Claire:
My Crazy Year with Trump
Comments are closed on this story.