The news now is 99% Trump 24 hours per day. 97% of it is bad or negative on Trump.
Analysis: Only 3 percent of reports on CBS, NBC positive for Trump
A new analysis by a nonpartisan media research firm shows that just 3 percent of the reports about President Trump that aired on NBC and CBS were deemed positive.
The data comes from an analysis by Media Tenor, an independent media research firm founded in 1993.
The firm’s analysts watched 370 news stories about Trump on the “NBC Nightly News,” “CBS Evening News” and Fox News’s “Special Report” between Jan. 20 and Feb. 17. Trump took office the day the analysis began.
Overall the analysis found that on NBC and CBS, 43 percent of stories on Trump were negative, while only 3 percent were positive. Fifty-four percent of reports were considered neutral.
I’m not sure I would agree on what is “neutral.”
I am not the only one who thinks a coup d’etat is under way.
Spengler, who is my #2 go to guy after Fernandez,
thinks what is going on is a coup attempt.
A ranking Republican statesman this week told an off-the-record gathering that a “coup” attempt was in progress against President Donald Trump, with collusion between the largely Democratic media and Trump’s numerous enemies in the Republican Party. The object of the coup, the Republican leader added, was not impeachment, but the recruitment of a critical mass of Republican senators and congressmen to the claim that Trump was “unfit” for office and to force his resignation.
It’s helpful to fan away the psychedelic fumes of allegation and innuendo and clarify just what Trump might have done wrong. Trump will not be impeached, and he will not be harried out of office. But he faces a formidable combination of media hostility—what the president today denounced as a “witch hunt”—and a divided White House staff prone to press leaks. The likely outcome will be a prolonged dirty war of words that will delay Trump’s domestic agenda and tie down his loyalists with the chores of fire-fighting.
The result, if it is not ended soon, will be a catastrophic loss in the 2018 election. That loss will not be because of dissatisfaction with Trump but with anger at GOP politicians who seem to prefer the Deep State and its machinations to governing.
The other potent enemy Trump has is the intelligence “community” which has wildly expanded since 9/11.The Journal editors imply that disaffection in the intelligence community is the result of Trump’s obstreperousness, but the source of the dispute is policy and accountability. Trump’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was fired by Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for claiming that U.S. intelligence agencies bore some responsibility for the emergence of ISIS. The CIA funded Sunni rebels against the Assad regime including many from a branch of al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, in its campaign to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump has shifted America’s priority to stopping the bloodshed in Syria rather than forcing out al-Assad, and is willing to work with Russia to achieve this—provided that the result doesn’t give undue influence to Iran, a senior administration official explained.
The CIA has been largely incompetent, in my opinion, since the Church Committee destroyed the Directorate of Operations in the 1970s.
The CIA Director, William Colby testified and after he was replaced by George HW Bush as Director, he died mysteriously in what might have been a suicide.
The present controversy will not end well.
But these measures only compensate for the lack of trust. They do not restore it. Who will eventually dangle from the gibbet now under construction is hard to predict, but it’s safe to say the victim will resist with a fight that will devastate the political landscape. The Trump election revealed a nation nearly evenly divided. This near equality means neither side can realistically expect an outright victory. Nothing is now certain except uncertainty, for as Clausewitz observed:
[W]ar is always the shock of two hostile bodies in collision, not the action of a living power upon an inanimate mass.
Strife used to stop at the water’s edge. What destabilized America is the chimera of a permanent majority, the temptation of something other than a stalemate which has seduced a political system that has grown weary of compromise and desirous of partisan dominance.
Let’s review the bidding. What would it take to call this a coup ?
Let me see if I have this straight.
After a conversation in the Oval office with President Trump, James Comey, then the Director of the FBI, remembered a memo to himself in which he recorded Trump saying regarding the investigation of his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, “I hope you can let this go.” Or at least, as someone who supposedly had read the memo and then supposedly read an accurate quote from it over the phone to a reporter at the New York Times.
Nobody knows who read the memo, if it exists, to the reporter. This is called “gossip.”
But assuming that that’s what Trump actually said, and that that’s what Comey wrote in his memo to himself, and that that’s what was read over the phone to the Times reporter (unlikely since this is third-hand hearsay, inadmissible in any court, analogous to the child’s game of telephone) is that so bad? Does it really differ substantially from “I hope the weather will be nice tomorrow”? To be sure, it would have been better had he said “I hope you find you’re able to let this go,” or “I hope it turns out that Flynn did nothing wrong.”
As usual, the writer wishes that Trump would “shut up” about it but that is who he is.
Maybe the only person crazy enough to take on the Deep State would be just this sort of extroverted showman who does not need the donor class of the GOP.