Real Journalism

Real Journalism1

Donald Trump tried his hand at journalism with his recent op-ed in USA Today.  His article, an attempted rebuttal of Medicare-For-All, was his attempt to both take some of the shine off the concept of government provided healthcare, and (I believe) a forum to make people think he isn’t a big ol’ dumb dumb.  You see, often enough, when Trump wants to let his opinion be known to the world, he’ll go on a Twitter tirade full of misspellings, grammatical errors, and misstatements.  Or he’ll let his West Wing staff send out a press release that has something more thoughtful written down.  And I truly believe he’s getting tired of people calling him a nitwit.  But the problem is that he IS a nitwit.  He doesn’t understand a lot of basic concepts, and as such, his attempt to show that he’s a clever writer, only reinforces that.  Within hours of the article going live, every major news outlet, most prominently the Washington Post, took his article, almost sentence by sentence, and pointed out how every bit of it was wrong.  And I don’t mean that in the partisan sense, but empirically wrong.  He got exactly one fact right, and the rest of it, by literally all standards was incorrect.  I can only imagine that Trump’s advisors made the attempt to get him to not write this article or have it published for this reason, and I have to believe Trump was certain, despite those protestations that people would think him a brilliant journalistic mind when they saw it.  And this is without mentioning how much outside editing or what kind of ghostwriting took place in it’s creation.  Suffice to say, Trump’s crusade against fake news takes an…interesting new turn now.

Leave a comment