The SS Donald Trump is as leaky as ever, despite the captain’s insistence that things are fine.
On Monday, Donald Trump tweeted this: “The so-called leaks coming out of the White House are a massive over exaggeration put out by the Fake News Media in order to make us look as bad as possible. With that being said, leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!”
Well, what are they Donald? Is it all media fabrication and nothing for us to be worried about? Or is the White House infested by traitors and cowards who are releasing your secrets to the hated foe? Somehow I don’t think it can be both.
Either way, it seems The Donald has probaby fired off this tweet to shift the focus of the recent Kelly Sadler controversy
If you don’t remember or haven’t heard, a White House aide named Kelly Sadler allegedly joked that John McCain is irrelevant to the Trump administration because he’ll be dead soon anyway. Which, on the face of it, is true. Does phrasing it as a mean joke make it more or less truthful?
Anyway, Trump is now taking aim at the “leakers” allegedly inside his administration, probably in order to portray the Sadler issue as an example of the untrustworthy press using non-credible sources to smear him. If the White House focuses the debate on the issue of whether White House leakers exist (and, if they exist, whether they’re credible sources for the press), it takes the focus off of whether John McCain is a praiseworthy figure and whether the Trump team’s mockery of him is unacceptable.
And the truth is that the Trump administration has been making a concerted effort to crack down on leaks lately. According to several senior White House officials, (Leakers themselves? How deep does this rabbit hole go!?) Sarah Sanders scolded her staff on Friday for making the John McCain joke. And last night, Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News that she thought it was possible someone might get fired as a result of the Sadler comments.
Whether that would be Sadler or the person who leaked the comments (allegedly in order to make Kelly Sadler look bad) remains to be seen.
The Sadler leak shows that the White House has still not successfully eliminated all its PR vulnerabilities, despite the crackdown on leakers. Trump has said numerous times that plugging the leaks in his administration is a high priority.
Remember when Anthony Scaramucci said he was going to fix the leaks by firing everybody? But he lasted what, a month as White House Comms Director. And confidential info still pours out of the White House like water out of a perforated bucket.
Every President has suffered his fair share of damaging leaks. (Nixon even built a team of special investigators he called “the Plumbers” to try and stamp out the leaks from his own administration.) But Trump-leaks have become a near-constant factor of our modern political environment.
The news-cycle now thrives on a constant stream of tidbits from the White House; nothing is ever confirmed, it’s only rumors and “sources close to the President”, never any facts or evidence.
At the end of the day, given how much has already leaked, if the media did want to fabricate stories about Trump and attribute them to “leakers”, nobody would bat an eye. Any story about the President’s supposed bad behavior will be met with blind acceptance by his foes and blind disbelief by his allies. At this point nobody is trying to prove anything or persuade anybody; it’s all about how the next story will draw the eyes of the public.
The leftist media reports on this continued circus because, whether the stories are true or not, it doesn’t matter. They know they’ll never be able to shake support for Trump among his base, so they produce these stories in order to draw attention and ad revenue whenever Trump or one of his employees “allegedly” says or does something horrible.
And whether they actually did it or not never really mattered, in the media’s eyes. All that matters is whether you can believe they did. This is the consequence of a media that has a political agenda recognizing that credibility no longer matters. All they care about now is whether they can get anyone to pay attention.
