John Merrow thinks the White House press corps has failed to ask Trump tough questions. This was true during the 2016 campaign, he says, and its true now.
The recent Chris Wallace interview on FOX was a rare exception. Wallace has facts to challenge Trump’s lies.
But typically he ignores questions and answers questions that no one asks.
He always plays the victim, and a docile press lets him get away with it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Apologize for the length of this in advance, but I was sent this piece by historian Heather Cox Richardson this morning and it seems to fit with post:
August 3, 2020 (Monday)
Both the administration’s disastrous response to the coronavirus and looming legal troubles are putting pressure on the president.
Yesterday, Dr. Deborah Birx, the advisor to the White House on the coronavirus pandemic, warned we are entering a “new phase” of the disease as it is “extraordinarily widespread.” Today, Trump accused Birx of crumbling under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of her usually upbeat presentations about the crisis. “So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!”
When reporters asked what he meant by the tweet, he answered, “Well, I think that we’re doing very well and we have done as well as any nation.”
The U.S. has more than 4.5 million infections and more than 155,000 deaths.
In an astonishing interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, aired tonight, the president could not seem to grapple with the reality that the numbers of dead are climbing in America. He continued to insist that what mattered are cases, and that we have high infection numbers only because we are testing. Swan explained that our death rate as a proportion of our population is “really bad,” but Trump incorrectly insisted it is “lower than the world,” and told Swan, “You’re not reporting it correctly.”
Today another penny dropped, too. We learned that the Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. is apparently investigating Trump for more than the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who both claimed to have had an affair with Trump. Vance’s team appears to be focusing on tax fraud, insurance fraud, and bank fraud, all crimes Trump fixer Michael Cohen said were on the table. According to CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, this is significant because hush money payments are hard to prove because the prosecutors have to prove intent. Financial fraud, in contrast, is based on documents.
This seems to be bad news for Trump, and his lawyers were in court today trying again to stop Vance’s subpoena of Trump’s financial documents from his accountants, Mazars USA.
As for the upcoming election, there is something obvious in front of us:
No one is pretending that Trump is going to win the popular vote. He’s not even trying to. He’s doubling down on the culture wars that excite his base in the hopes of getting them to turn out in strong numbers, most recently by sending federal law enforcement officers into cities led by Democrats in order to create images of what looks like rioting, to enable him to set himself up as defending “law and order.”
At the same time, he and his supporters in the Republican Party are working to guarantee an undercount of votes for his opponent by attacking mail-in voting, shutting down polling places, kicking people off voter rolls, undercutting the United States Postal Service, and even, perhaps, by permitting a wave of evictions that will make it significantly harder for displaced people to vote.
It is notable that, as a country, we are not talking about policies or winning majorities. We are talking about how Trump can win by gaming the Electoral College, or by cheating.
In the past few days, polls have shown that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is running strong against Trump in the Rust Belt swing states that Trump needs to win. A new poll yesterday shows Biden at 50% and Trump at 41% in Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral votes Trump picked up in 2016 and that he sure would like to have again this time, although there are routes for him to win without them.
Also yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about a crisis in mail delivery. “Neighborhoods across the Philadelphia region are experiencing significant delays in receiving their mail, with some residents going upwards of three weeks without packages and letters, leaving them without medication, paychecks, and bills,” it began. The recent overhaul of USPS procedures has led to the pileup of undelivered mail across the country.
The new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a Trump loyalist, claims his new regulations are to promote efficiency, but the sudden slowdown of mail delivery just as people begin to receive and return their ballots raises concerns that it is a deliberate attempt to skew the vote. On “Fox News Sunday,” yesterday, host Chris Wallace asked senior Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller “Isn’t the postmaster general increasing the chances that the Postal Service will be overwhelmed… coming up to the election?” Miller replied that any problems would not be DeJoy’s fault, but rather the fault of Democrats who are changing the rules around mail-in voting.
The Trump campaign is also alarmingly unwilling to rule out accepting foreign help to pull out a win. According to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Trump asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for help swinging agricultural states back to the Trump camp with large purchases of U.S. agricultural products, an ask that he apparently got with the Chinese trade deal of January 15.
Last week, a Brazilian newspaper reported that U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Todd Chapman lobbied for lower ethanol tariffs by emphasizing “the importance for the Bolsonaro government of maintaining Donald Trump as U.S. President.” According to a letter written by the chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Eliot Engel (D-NY) and chair of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Civilian Security, and Trade Albio Sires (D-NY) to Chapman, demanding an explanation by 5:00 on August 4, the article went on: “Iowa is the largest ethanol producer in the United States…and could be a key player in Trump’s election. Hence the importance – according to Chapman – for the Bolsonaro government to do the U.S. a favor.” The report has been independently confirmed by another Brazilian newspaper.
We know Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden and the company that had hired him, Burisma, before he would release congressionally appropriated money to help our ally resist Russian incursions. And we know that Ukrainians linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin are currently feeding information to Republicans involved with the Senate’s own new investigation of Hunter Biden.
Last summer, Trump said he would take help from Russia or other countries if they produced information he could use against his opponents. On “Fox News Sunday,” Jason Miller refused to say that the campaign would not accept foreign help in this election. Host Chris Wallace pressed him on the issue three times, and Miller simply called the question “silly.”
“Can you flatly state that the Trump campaign and the administration will not accept foreign assistance this time?” Wallace asked. “Chris, I said that’s an absolutely silly question. We’re going to go and win this election fair and square,” Miller answered.
In 2019, Ellen L. Weintraub, former chair of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) officially stated: “Let me make something 100% clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.” She continued, “This is not a novel concept. Electoral intervention from foreign governments has been considered unacceptable since the beginnings of our nation.”
The FEC does not currently have enough members on it to have a quorum, leaving it unable to conduct business.
The concern that a sitting president is angling not to win reelection by appealing to a majority, but rather by using the apparatus of his high office to cheat, is unprecedented, and we must not normalize it.
tRump is a TRAITOROUS LIAR … period.
We are only 4.25% of the world’s population, yet we have about 25% of the world’s Covid-19 cases. Trump managed to make the US #1 in something.
My son operates a mail-order company. Since DeJoy took over, hours at many post office branches have been cut, and delivery is extremely slow. This is a deliberate obstruction in the operation of postal services.
Coming from Merrow, isn’t it a case of it takes one to know one?
Using that logic, the same would apply to Diane and a lot of other people, myself included.
When asked tough questions, Trump doesn’t answer and then usually goes off on a tangent/rant and then packs up his toys and goes home. This has been going on since the beginning…..well let me rephrase that……he was flat out lying at the beginning of his term, but now, because he’s lied so much he can’t remember his own lies to build upon. The best thing the Press Corp can do now is to let Trump hang himself with his own lies. They’ve learned….. elect a clown and expect a circus…every press event is a circus and the spectators are the Press Corps.
Here’s a great “Re-Elect Trump–Pence” / government update parody that does a pretty good job of summarizing what Trump has done to the country in the last six months, cramming about 30 different news story events into just 3 minutes 17 seconds:
IRONY: whenever I play this, YouTube plays an actual Trump commercial as the lead-in. Trump folks can’t be happy about that.
Want a good laugh? Watch the Axios interview
https://www.axios.com/full-axios-hbo-interview-donald-trump-cd5a67e1-6ba1-46c8-bb3d-8717ab9f3cc5.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100
Can’t laugh after banging the tenth hole in the wall with my head. This was so painful to watch, even after all the Idiot’s idiocy from the past four years.
Only up to 10
Trying to pace myself!
I just saw some clips from the Axios interview: it looks great; am going to watch the whole thing later. When the very serious interviewer asked WHit about Covid-19 case charts (which WHit could neither read nor decipher correctly, & the interviewer pointed this out), I’m surprised he didn’t whip out his Sharpie to change the U.S. rise lines!
BTW, read Mary Trump’s book. She explains it all.
It’s called access. Any White House correspondent who asks tough questions is no longer a White House correspondent. The flip side of it is that if you don’t ask tough questions, you get to be part of a big chummy club and get invited to big parties like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That’s why the major papers and media outlets practice stenography rather than journalism. It’s been this way since at least GWB.
dienne77 If true, that’s the terrible tension the Press lives in. It’s already a devil’s bargain: Access is traded for soft-press. CBK
You are right. Trump’s handlers try to limit access only to friendly reporters. When he gets a question that he doesn’t want to answer at a news conference,he insults the reporter. The interview by Chris Wallace of FOX was a surprise because he didn’t let Trump get away with the usual lies about his “success” in leading the pandemic. Chris is Mike Wallace’s son, not a typical FOX newsie.
Anyone that challenges Trump gets the label of “nasty” or some other perjorative term.
I’m waiting for someone to retort (since WHit sinks to the level of the Grade 1 playground),
“I’m rubber, you’re glue,
Everything you say bounces off me
& sticks to you!”
So THERE!!
It’s been like that since Reagan, as Mark Hertsgaard documented clearly in On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.
Why does the Media /Press not have a kill switch when they interview a Trump spokesperson. They not only let the nonsense filibusters go on, without answering the question . They seldom have the knowledge to make real time corrections. And when they do, usually it is inadequate to counter the prepared talking points of the Trump spokesperson.
So even yesterday’s Axios interview of Trump, when he compares death rates to other countries. The obvious answer was: those numbers in Europe like in NY and the North East were generated from infections early in the pandemic , when there was no effective treatments available. . An additional 100 thousand Americans have died at a time these countries have brought their deaths close to zero.
Here’s a clip from that interview. And I agree. As incompetent as the interview showed him to be – there could have been more push.
https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/08/the-three-worst-moments-from-trumps-newest-axios-interview/
I’ve often thought that, like everyone else, the Press must feel overwhelmed by playing whack-a-mole with the Trump lie machine . . . we are all like just-so-much roadkill in Trumplandia.
I feel that we’ve all lost our national virginity and are now just waiting to be gang-raped by Trump voters. In the words of Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Who ARE those people?” CBK
As the head of CBS News famously observed, Trump may be bad for America, but he is very good for CBS News. I hope somewhere in Joe Biden’s agenda is a robust debate about how to fix that.
Exactly. People are profiting left and right (no pun intended) from him. Whether it’s tax cuts or increased clicks on social media. Even for many people who know he is unfit for the job, there is an incentive to keep him in the news and keep him on the job.
And like a good magician is trained to have you look away from where the actual trick is being played and focus on something else…. all his nonsense in the media has many looking away from the real tricks / scams.
He gets softball questions because he gets to choose the questioners.
When Joe McCarthy had his moment in the Army hearings, and the world heard him being called out for “having no sense of decency,” his own party ran from him. When Nixon was shown to have committed crimes, his own party ran from him. When Al Franken made a dumb joke, his own party ran from him.
When Reagan organized the late release of the Iranian hostages and then paid up with the providing of arms, his party backed him and his administration stonewalled. When Bill Clinton had an affair and lied about it, his own party backed him (albeit there were re-procussions behind the scenes). When George W. Bush tortured prisoners, both parties backed him.
Unless both ends of the philosophical spectrum remain faithful to a sense of core values, Trump is what you are going to get. What conservatives do not understand is that their opponents are going to begin to do the same thing they do. Will the left ever justify the next Pol Pot? In our country? Conservatives need to recall that violence on the left has not visited us for many years. It is not fun to experience violence, but violence in the service of a revolution is particularly harsh. Just ask the victims of the guillotine.
I recall a recent press conference when a reporter asked Trump about mail-in voting and why he was opposed to it.
That question gave Trump the opportunity to rant on and on and on about the many ways mail-in votes can be made invalid. Trump was happy to have had the question even though it was not clearly a softball.
Trump is dedicated to creating a public impression that the outcome of the vote is already rigged against him. His rants about mail-in ballots have been matched by hiring a new director of the US Postal Service who has set work rules designed to slow down the handling of mail and fulfill other desires of Trump, in order to sabotage vote counting.
Laura With Trump’s upside-down, hollowed-out logic, if he happened to WIN the election, the it will have been perfectly legitimate. The logic he applies to others, he never applies to himself–unless it’s what he wanted in the first place. And if it’s not fact yet but about the future, he plays even more fast-and-loose with it.
So many keep looking for some sort of order or reason in Trump; but there is no order or reasonable discussion to be had with such a person. You might as well talk to a houseplant. CBK
I ask myself the same question all the time. Why do I go so easy on Trump? Sure, I have spilled inventive (I think) invective on his spiteful, almost empty clown-makeup-orange head almost daily for four years now, but it always falls short of capturing the full vileness of the man–his malignant narcissism, his life-long predations, his criminality, his wannabe fascism, his revolting and embarrassing insecurities, his utter callousness, his casual and omnipresent sexism and racism, his heedlessness, his knee-jerk cruelty, his amorality, his lack of any redeeming qualities whatsoever. I think of Trump, and what springs to mind is a picture of a plump orange wasp larva eating its way through a host, where the host is all the other people he has encountered or had an effect on during his breathtakingly misspent life. I’ve long prided myself on my abilities as a writer, but with all the Muses at my back, I would inevitably fall short in the attempt to capture this vileness definitively, as for a label attached to the specimen in a natural history museum devoted to nature’s failed experiments. This is what Yeats called “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.”