One thing you can bank on in Trump world is that all the chickens come back to roost and eventually all the dots connect. When we first heard Don Junior talk about “getting plenty of money from Russia” we didn’t know quite what that meant. Boy, did we come to understand a lot.

Now we’ve got a book out from Maggie Haberman, claiming that Donald Trump used to flagrantly defy simple rules about presidential document keeping and in times of uncertainty — or panic, apparently — he would eat the documents or better yet, wad them up and flush them down the toilet, where the White House plumbers would find them.

Reality imitates art and stupid actions take on metaphorical meaning.

Jennifer Jacobs works for Bloomberg as Senior White House Reporter.

Now there are actually two stories here, the substantive story itself of Trump jamming up the plumbing at the White House while simultaneously breaking records keeping laws and then the larger story of why is this information only being revealed now?

Journalistic integrity is once more on the line, because reporters are getting paid to report, we trust that they will report scoops as they occur but the fact of the matter is, so many of them sit on newsworthy stories so that they can write a book about it later.

Now this tweet got deleted. I found it in Parker Molloy’s newsletter. You might want to read that today. It addresses this entire issue of reporters saving juicy stories for books.

This is not something with an easy answer. Journalism, news, media are tough businesses. Marketing is a big deal, more of a big deal than it should be. One of the main reasons this country is in the mess it’s in is because Donald Trump was taken seriously and given tons of media coverage in 2016, far more than he could have purchased for many millions of dollars. It was a wild story, you can’t blame the press for covering it. On the other hand, covering Trump’s excesses and normalizing them with 24/7 coverage played a key role in him getting elected.

it was a strategic error, but one that I would bet editors would do again if they had it to do all over.

And there’s this. This interview with Bob Woodward took place in September. It wasn’t until October 5, 2020, almost a month later, that the CDC announced that the coronavirus was airborne. Up until that time contact with surfaces was being touted as the most important factor.

These are not questions with easy answers or matters with simple resolutions. Competition is always going to keep reporters withholding information and funneling it out tactically. Just another aspect of the play within the play which is Washington politics.

Here’s your bonus clip for today.

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5 COMMENTS

  2. Besides the obvious criminality of covering up his crimes, he’s flushed a number of careers & reputations down the toilet. Unlike his smelly shit, that gets recycled into better things, the stench of his treason & those with him will only grow stronger as time & history unfolds. Benedict Arnold has been recycled eons ago, but his name lives in infamy. He was lightweight compared to this bunch of asswipes.

  3. Agreed emphatically, Scott. The Trump “brand” name, which he so proudly and arrogantly stuck on all his buildings, will become history’s synonym for Traitor, alongside similar but now-faded-with-time monikers like Mr Arnold and Norway’s Quisling. Trump will indeed be remembered by history, but not in the self-glorifying way he had in mind.

    • Tarantino’s character Aldo the Apache comes to mind. Whenever his guerrilla group captured a nazi, he’d ask them what they planned to do with their uniform. They always said burn it etc. His reply? “Well if it were up to me, you’d wear that goddamn uniform the rest of ur life. But, I realize that’s not practical. At some point ur going to have to take it off. So, I’m going to give u something u can’t take off.” He then had his men hold them down while he carved a swastika into their forehead. One of my favorite Brad pitt roles.

  4. Every single “journalist” who sits on scoops solely to put them in books later on (especially regarding the White House and the government in general) needs to be taken before a judge–or several judges–and forced to explain WHY they thought that was a good idea before being fined $1,000,000 for EACH “SCOOP.” (Granted, I doubt the Supreme Court would uphold such fines but it would seem hard to reconcile the stories of Trump’s little toilet visits with a bunch of reporters deliberately withholding details of their stories–or even the entire story–until they get some lucrative book deal in which they spill all the tea.)

    I mean, sure Woodward and Bernstein became famous with their book “All the President’s Men” but, as far as I recall, the pair didn’t sit on any of their “scoops” before the book was published. The Washington Post was printing stories that Woodward and Bernstein were reporting AS THEY REPORTED THEM. And the pair simply expounded on what they did and how they did things in the book.

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