February 19, 2017

Premiere Episode of Trump Show Disappoints With Sluggish Pacing and Dated Material

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Today’s episode of the Trump Show was disappointing. It started late, it was only 30 minutes long, and much of it was read off a teleprompter. A few miscellaneous comments:

  • No tie! Truly, Trump is a man of the people.
  • The first five minutes is dedicated solely to trashing the media. He says he wants to speak directly to The People without the filter of fake news. “When the media lies, I won’t let them get away with it.”
  • This is all done in service of a speech carried live and commercial-free by all three cable news channels.
  • The White House is running “smoothly, very smoothly.”
  • He wants to bring back mining jobs for “clean, very clean coal.” I’m sensing a rhetorical trend here.
  • He reprises several of his greatest hits: His Obamacare replacement will provide much better health care at a much lower cost. No more jobs are going to be sent overseas. He’s going to slap a 35 percent tax on goods sent back here. And he still wants a “trillion dollar” infrastructure plan.
  • Jobs are already “pouring back in” to the country.
  • “Not one network will show the crowd,” he says at the exact moment the pool camera pulls back to show the crowd.
  • He says he got the price of Air Force One down by a billion dollars. When did that happen? Let’s google a bit…ah. It’s just your basic Trump bullshit. The CEO of Boeing has agreed to keep the price tag below $4 billion for a project that’s currently estimated to cost between $3.2 billion and $3.7 billion. Nice work, Donald.
  • He also got the price of the F-35 down by “hundreds of billions” dollars. It’s actually hundreds of millions, but who’s counting? And it was a price reduction that was already in the works before Trump ever got involved.
  • He says Obama was letting immigrants into the country with “no vetting, no nothing.” This is just a ridiculous lie.

Meh. I doubt this rally did much for him. Even his most fervent supporters are starting to figure out that Trump isn’t accomplishing a whole lot. Besides, how often can he go back to this well? Is he going to hold a pep rally every month? If he does, he better start coming up with some new material.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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