Patterico's Pontifications

6/16/2016

Trump News Network On The Horizon?

Filed under: General — Dana @ 11:21 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Back in March, former Trump strategist Stephanie Cegielski penned an open letter to Trump followers explaining why she left the campaign and why she came to believe that it wasn’t possible for Trump to be anybody’s champion but his own:

What was once Trump’s desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks.

I’ll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now.

He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some.

Trump acts as if he’s a fictional character. But like Hercules, Donald Trump is a work of fiction.

No matter how many times he repeats it, Trump would not be the “best” at being a president, being in shape, fighting terrorism, selling steaks, and whatever other “best” claim he has made in the last 15 minutes.

He would be the best at something, though. He is the best at looking out for Donald Trump — at all costs.

Given that, along with his compulsion to make money and expand his brand, there is an article out today suggesting that the nominee may be looking to capitalize on the massive audience he has managed to captivate for the past year by possibly creating his own cable channel:

Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the “audience” currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” (Both Kushner and Ivanka Trump did not respond to a request for comment.)

Trump, this person close to the matter suggests, has become irked by his ability to create revenue for other media organizations without being able to take a cut himself. Such a situation “brings him to the conclusion that he has the business acumen and the ratings for his own network.” Trump has “gotten the bug,” according to this person. “So now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”

Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, adamantly denied that such conversations have occurred. (“There is absolutely no truth to this whatsoever,” she told me. “This hasn’t been even uttered. Not even thought about.”) Then, after conferring with Trump, she issued a subsequent statement clarifying her point: “While it’s true Mr. Trump garners exceptionally high ratings, there are absolutely no plans or discussions taking place regarding a venture of this nature.”

As Jim Geraghty points out,

“Some candidates just get a television contract after quitting the race; Mike Huckabee got his own show. Talk about raising the bar, if you can turn a presidential campaign into a cable television network.

Such a venture would be completely consistent with all that we know about Trump.

But when one considers the latest poll numbers, this new venture may be getting underway sooner rather than later. In addition to the not-encouraging poll numbers, just yesterday for the first time, CNN, Fox and MSNBC all cut away from Trump’s speech at a rally in order to air Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy concerns. I guess if there is a media blackout on Trump, he’ll take matters into his own hands and look out for the Real Donald Trump.

–Dana

A Sobering Thought on How Orlando Benefits Hillary

Filed under: General — JVW @ 3:21 pm



[guest post by JVW]

In a piece over at The Observer titled “The Coming Constitutional Crisis over Hillary Clinton’s EmailGate,” John R. Schindler plows, seeds, and harvests from a familiar field. He discusses the ongoing FBI investigation and the likelihood that they have discovered more than enough incriminating evidence to bring a criminal case to the Justice Department. He lists the litany of potentially explosive developments that have already been leaked, from her outing of covert CIA personnel overseas to discussions of impending drone attacks in Pakistan to the sheer sleaziness of Hillary serving as our top diplomat at the same time that her husband was shaking down foreign governments on behalf of the Clinton Foundation.

But Schindler provides a note of caution for those of us who hope that Mrs./Senator/Secretary Clinton’s goose is, at long last, cooked. With respect to President Obama’s recent endorsement of his erstwhile adversary despite the overwhelming evidence of her culpability, Schindler concludes:

How the FBI can look at all this and not recommend prosecution of someone for something in EmailGate strains the imagination. Yet President Obama has clearly signaled that it’s all no big deal. Director James Comey has a tough job before him when he takes the FBI’s official recommendations regarding EmailGate to Attorney General Lynch for action, probably sometime this summer. Since Comey is now under a cloud over the FBI’s embarrassing mishandling of Omar Mateen, the Orlando jihadist mass murderer, perhaps his resignation over that matter would be welcome in the White House, which then could find a new director more willing to bend to Obama’s wishes.

Yep, that sounds about right. Irrespective of whether or not Attorney General Lynch is allowed to (or even wants to) pursue prosecution, the Clinton Machine now has a powerful talking point. Expect to hear a lot of noise from them in coming weeks about incompetence in the FBI and how the agency is well overdue for a shake up from its poor leadership.

The Constitutional crisis in the headline to Schindler’s piece comes from what many of us anticipate to be the result: the Justice Department will provide a formal rebuke of HRC but will stop short of prosecuting her; the Clinton campaign will claim vindication and insist the matter has been settled. What Schindler and many other observers expect to happen then is some version of the following: Comey and perhaps senior intelligence officials will resign in disgust, along with some of the agents involved in the investigation; those remaining in the FBI who oppose the decision not to prosecute will begin a campaign of leaking information from the investigations to news sources, leading to a steady drumbeat of stories this fall during an election cycle that already promises to be memorable for the levels of vitriol spewed by the two major party candidates.

Should Hillary! be elected in November, we would face January 2017 with the following political landscape: an outgoing President thoroughly discredited for failing to apply the rule of law to the powerful and well-connected, a incoming President who will be the most unliked and distrusted new chief executive in our nation’s history, and an opposition party in absolute tatters. I wonder what Australia’s emigration policies are like.

– JVW

Joe Manchin: “Due Process Is What’s Killing Us Right Now”

Filed under: General — Dana @ 7:26 am



[guest post by Dana]

This is really something. And yet it shouldn’t be surprising.

Ilya Shapiro responds:

With all due respect, due process is the essential basis of America. The Constitution was established to “secure the blessings of liberty”—that’s the whole purpose of our government—and that government can’t deny us our life, liberty, or property without due process of law. If the government wants to deny someone’s liberty, it better have an awfully good reason and it better be ready to defend itself in court immediately—akin to what happens when someone is arrested or involuntarily committed. Otherwise, we’d live in a world where perhaps there’s less crime, but also life isn’t worth living.

Senator Manchin may want to live in a police state, but few of us would want to join him there. Count me out of the time machine to East Germany.

–Dana


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0629 secs.