When it comes to Twitter rants, President Donald Trump rarely disappoints. For the establishment media, his tirades are both a blessing and a curse. While providing them with the best free promotion they could hope for, he exposes their bias, hypocrisy, and dishonesty. He delivered in epic fashion Saturday morning with a blistering septet that covered the “Amazon Washington Post,” the “Fake News Media,” and the “Failing New York Times.”
It didn’t stop there, however; Trump also threw in references to Hillary Clinton, former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, James Comey, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department’s Special Counsel, Robert Mueller. Russia also got a mention, as did the missing Clinton emails.
If Twitter was a piece of contemporary art, this Tweet-storm – perhaps, Tweetnado – was a masterwork. As seemingly random as a Jackson Pollock but as clever as an M.C. Escher.
Lulling his prey into a false sense of security, the president began with a tribute to recently departed White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Before his 140 characters were exhausted, however, he had segued neatly into his favorite, and most popular, tactic of attacking the leftist media.“Sean Spicer is a wonderful person who took tremendous abuse from the Fake News Media – but his future is bright!” He went on to blast the Washington Post for a recent article which alleged that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had discussed “campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow” with the Russian Ambassador, during the 2016 election.The Post provided no verifiable sources for the story, instead attributing the allegations to the usual “U.S. officials.”
The president did not specifically comment on the veracity of the article but said: “These illegal leaks, like [James] Comey’s, must stop!”
With his next tweet, Trump turned his attention to TheNew York Times. He accused the newspaper of foiling an attempt to eliminate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the purported leader of ISIS. Here, Trump appears to be referring to an aborted 2015 special operations mission to kill al-Baghdadi. As reported by Fox News, General Tony Thomas, who heads the Special Operations Command, attributed the failure of the mission to a media leak, involving a Times article from June of that year. “That was a very good lead,” Thomas said. “Unfortunately, it was leaked in a prominent national newspaper about a week later and that lead went dead.”
Trump wasn’t done yet. In further tweets, he questioned why the “many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes” were not being scrutinized; referencing Clinton’s and John Podesta’s well-documented links to Russia and the former’s bleaching of some 33,000 emails that should have been turned over to the State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Despite the merriment that always seems to accompany a Trump Twitter tantrum, the president does raise numerous valid points. Clinton emerged almost unscathed from a series of scandals that would have ended many a career – quite possibly, with time served in a federal penitentiary. At the same time, the left-wing media continues efforts to destabilize and delegitimize the Trump administration. The truth is mixed with conjecture and, sometimes, pure fiction. Both Congress and the Department of Justice have enough evidence – and evidence with at least as much, or more, credible foundation – to investigate both the Clinton campaign and the former Obama administration for years to come. One cannot help but sympathize with Donald Trump, then, when he insists that he is the target of a witch-hunt.
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