Is This For Real?

On Wednesday, during lunch break, an article, “Donald Trump didn’t want to be president”, caught my eye and pulled me into the article. It turned out to be excerpts from a tell-all book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolffe, and boy, was it a doozy. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, so, as a reminder to do research on the points in the article, I emailed to myself: “Is this for real?”

I really didn’t want to be caught by fake news.

Little did I know that the book would be a hot topic over the next for days, if not for a week.

The consolidation into one book of all of what I’ve been reading or hearing over the past year about the President paints a horrifying picture of our Presidency. It just seemed so fantastical that I had to ask “is this true?” But then, when I thought about all of what I have been reading the past year, I realized the book was just repeating what has been said before, albeit with different words and in a more entertaining fashion.

And later research into what the pundits were saying warned that Michael Wolffe had a tendency to play fast and loose with facts and usually provided little or vague sources. Reporters were going to have to confirm the allegations in the book. And yet still later research indicated that pundits were saying that the book, while not confirmed yet, had a ring of truth to it because the stories dovetailed with what they’ve been hearing all along from the White House. So, while some details were in error (the John Boehner quip), the broad strokes provided a truthful picture of the reality at the White House. 

And some of the points made by Steve Bannon about the June 2016 meeting with the Russians are just damning. I worry about the consequences of such an inflammatory book on Mr. Trump’s state of mind. He already seems kind of weak in the mind – his speech pattern appears to be degrading – that the pressure from the book’s bombshell is bound to make things worse for him. It feels like we are getting closer to an inflection point.

Some news reporters and pundits seem…I don’t know…Concerned? Dismayed? Troubled? Watching their faces as they try to report on this bombshell is very sad. Here’s a video on John Meacham talking about the impact of this week (this week we had tweets on whose nuclear buttons were larger, the book bombshell, and tweets about Bannon losing his mind when he lost his job). In a nutshell, historians will be writing about this week for a long time.

Then there are others who took to making fun of him. At this point though, it is not funny. Here’s an article about the Gorilla Channel, an example of a tweet that some gullible people actually believed. It’s so bad that it’s embarrassing.

“Depending on how you look at it, the Gorilla Channel Incident is either a sign of the imminent collapse of critical thought and public discourse.”

So it looks like the left also doesn’t have critical thinking. But this tweet isn’t funny. It’s not funny for the country and it’s not funny for the world.