

The press has made it their mission to disparage everything President Trump says and does – even when he is right – and the president’s response to Hurricane Harvey has proven too good an opportunity to pass up. President Trump sent out numerous tweets addressing the storm and the government’s commitment to bringing comfort and aid to those affected. Beyond that, he took the necessary steps to ensure that the people of Texas would receive the help they needed. The administration’s response has put the media in a desperate situation – if the president is doing his job efficiently, how will the they attack him?
CNN published a piece entitled “Trump is meeting (and tweeting) his Harvey moment,” which primarily reported on Hurricane Harvey and discussed the destruction that would be caused by the storm. Then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided to bring up Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s pardon:
On Friday night, as Harvey barreled toward Texas, the White House fueled a brand-new controversy when Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the controversial former Arizona sheriff convicted of criminal contempt. In the first pardon of his presidency, Trump did not follow his predecessors’ practice of consulting with lawyers at the Justice Department before announcing his decision — a move that drew criticism from civil rights groups and Democrats as well as both of Arizona’s Republican senators, Flake and Sen. John McCain.
What does the Sheriff’s pardon have to do with the storm? Nobody knows, but CNN apparently felt it was necessary to insert this helpful tidbit into a story about the president’s response to his first natural disaster.
Not to be outdone, The Chicago Tribune followed suit in a piece entitled “In effort to show engagement on hurricane, Trump responds via Twitter,” Which also featured a Joe Arpaio mention:
Trump’s handling of this crisis has been closely watched, even as the White House has faced scrutiny over several announcements Trump made late Friday just as the storm was about to hit. Perhaps the most controversial was his decision to pardon Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County who was convicted of criminal contempt for not ending his department’s practice of detaining people merely on the suspicion that they were undocumented immigrants.
Instead of discussing the effects of Harvey, Time Magazine felt that the more pressing matter was President Trump’s tweets about the North American Free Trade Agreement – and who could blame them? Amidst the flurry of tweets the president sent explaining the effort to help the people of Texas, he mentioned the trade deal and the border wall.
In the midst of a series of tweets about Hurricane Harvey Sunday morning, President Donald Trump shared a reminder of his 2016 presidential victory, asserted that Mexico will pay for the border wall and threatened to terminate NAFTA renegotiations.
Finally, The Washington Post joined in on the fun. They used Trump’s tweets to make it seem as if he didn’t care about the victims of the disaster:
He has talked favorably about the higher television ratings that come with hurricane coverage, predicted that he will soon be congratulating himself and used 16 exclamation points in 22 often breathless tweets about the storm. But as of late Tuesday afternoon, the president had yet to mention those killed, call on other Americans to help or directly encourage donations to relief organizations.
You know The Post is desperate when they resort to counting the number of exclamation points in the president’s tweets. While they state that Trump did not encourage donations to relief organizations, they forgot to mention that his re-election campaign has called for donations for victims of the hurricane. I’m sure it was an honest mistake.
When President George W. Bush failed to respond to Katrina in a timely fashion, the press had a field day. They claimed that Bush didn’t “care about black people.” President Barack Obama learned from his predecessor’s mistakes, and it showed when New Jersey endured their storm. So far, the Trump administration has responded to this current disaster effectively – which has made it difficult for the media to use the crisis against him. So, instead of informing us about the event, they are stuck reporting on irrelevant red herrings if they want to distract us from the fact that the Trump administration has handled the situation competently. And they wonder why Americans no longer take them seriously.