President Trump won’t attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner because he wasn’t elected to “pretend” to like reporters, a Trump aide said Sunday.
“I think it’s kind of naive of us to think that we can all walk into a room for a couple of hours and pretend that some of that tension isn’t there,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders told ABC’s “This Week.”
Sanders compared Trump’s open hostility with the press to getting egged.
“One of the things we say in the South [is] if a Girl Scout egged your house, would you buy cookies from her? I think that this is a pretty similar scenario,” Sanders said.
“There’s no reason for him to go in and sit and pretend like this is going to be just another Saturday night.”
Trump’s fighting with the media is such a brilliant move. If he took the George W. Bush path, and hailed the media as brilliant and decent, he gives them all the power. If Donald Trump lets the media convince voters that the President and the media are good friends, then when the media criticizes him, people would think he must have had the criticism coming, if such a good friend as the media felt it had to criticize him. In that case, a criticism is a violation of expectation, and so the amygdala will increase its prioritization, and focus the mind upon it, conferring increased relevance on it.
But if Donald Trump and the media are all-out enemies, then every criticism is expected, and thus not a violation of expectation. Since it is expected, the public’s amygdala will gloss over it and look for something it wasn’t expecting somewhere else.
If you are a politician, and you make friends with the media, you are betraying a level of stupidity on your part that should preclude you from any leadership position in the conservative movement.
Thank God we finally have a President who gets it.
Spread r/K Theory, because the media are the enemies of all of us
[…] Trump Wins By Fighting With The Media […]
Mika Brezyinski on Morning Joe responded to a clip of Sanders saying that with: “Who’s throwing eggs?” I couldn’t figure out if MB was trying to take Sanders literally –which of course would be incredibly ridiculous, or if she was challenging it as a metaphor, as if no one in the media is taking runs at Trump or taking his words out of context or in their worst light possible or just lying etc. etc. It’s like, ‘the gaslighting will continue until he submits.’ So, yes, thank God he’s not submitting to it.