When you’ve made an embarrassing fool of yourself in this Administration, the most important thing to do is throw up a shiny object for the media to consume instead, while you run for the comfort of the next news cycle. Today it was “chief economic advisor” Larry Kudlow’s turn to make something up out of whole cloth to hide the fact that he and his boss are incompetent buffoons, who were wholly out of their league at the G-7 summit, and did a tremendous disservice to the Western Alliance in their pathological water-carrying for Vladimir Putin.
Today’s buzz phrase was Canada “stabbed us in the back.” This phrase was probably tested and approved on the plane on the way to Singapore as a surefire piece of rotten meat to throw to stenographers such as NPR who would dutifully report it without much in the way of questioning or analysis.
And look—here’s NPR now:
President Trump's chief economic adviser called comments made by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "polarizing" and said the Canadian leader "stabbed us in the back."
BLAM—“Stabbed in the Back!” Those awful, sneaky Canadians! But wait a minute…
Nine paragraphs into the NPR piece, which is interspersed by several helpful Trump Tweets, you get this:
A New York Times reporter who was present at the Trudeau press conference tweeted Sunday that he didn't understand what remarks Kudlow was referring to when the economic adviser said Trudeau stabbed the U.S. in the back.
"[Trudeau] went out of his way to try to downplay tensions," said White House reporter Michael Shear. "He didn't attack [President Trump] in any way, other than restate Canada would retaliate for tariffs."
NPR had to quote a New York TImes reporter to make the point that Kudlow’s statement is a load of made-up horseshit? Doesn’t NPR have any staff capable of critical analysis?
No. It’s a stenography outfit. What do you expect?
The reality is that Trudeau did nothing of the sort. Reacting to Trump's tariff policy, Trudeau showed a remarkable amount of restraint in simply stating that Canada wouldn’t allow itself to be “pushed around.” THIS is what he said:
"I have made it very clear to the President that it is not something we relish doing, but it something that we absolutely will do," Trudeau said. "Canadians, we're polite, we're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around."
There’s no “stabbing.” There’s no “back.” There’s no “betrayal.” Kudlow has simply made up and spit out a a lie for the media to chase. Anything to distract from the fact that Trump royally embarrassed himself and the U.S and did incalculable damage to our relationships with our closest Allies. If anyone was “stabbed in the back,” it was our allies, and the person wielding the knife was Donald Trump.
Which is really the point here—this is the Breitbart/Bannon playbook at work. Loudly accusing someone else of doing exactly what you’re doing is a time-tested method of “gaslighting,” to distract the media and the public from the reality—in this case, the reality of incompetence.
And now, let’s please move on to the next debacle in Singapore.