"At the end of Donald Trump’s first week in office, any hope that the tumult he had provoked would settle down has been dashed.
The new President shocked his opponents to the core once again by breaking with all known political convention and proceeding instantly to set in train what he had promised the American people he would do.
From the moment he got his feet under the Oval Office desk, he produced a stream of executive orders: building the wall on the Mexican border, penalising sanctuary cities, clearing the way for the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines and more.The result was apoplexy on the left and an escalating war with the media.
There are legitimate concerns to be had about Donald Trump’s character.
However, the sustained and bilious bias and mendacity of the media coverage designed to paint him as an unhinged monster is absolutely shocking.
On Thursday, the Washington Post published a story about the first interview with the new President on ABC TV.
This story said the interview “revealed a man who is obsessed with his own popularity and eager to provide evidence of his likability, even if that information doesn’t match reality”.
The Washington Post story dwelt upon quotes from Trump boasting about the size of his standing ovations at the CIA; claimed that he was “preoccupied with two variables that are gumming up his claim of being widely beloved: losing the popular vote to Clinton and hosting an inauguration crowd that was smaller than in previous years”; quoted him boasting he could have won more of the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud; and said he kept claiming the crowd at the inauguration was “massive”, and that unlike his interviewer David Muir he was anxious to drag the conversation back to the size of that crowd.
The clips from the interview video that accompanied this story were cut accordingly to match this account.
If you read only that, you’d be pretty alarmed that someone with a serious psychological disorder was now the leader of the free world.
But the full transcript of this ABC interview, also published in the Washington Post, paints a very different picture indeed.
Most of it was about substantive issues, such as the Mexico wall, illegal immigrants, ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, voter fraud.
Only a small part of the interview concerned Trump’s popularity.
It was Muir who brought up the subject, referring to the crowd size at the inauguration and asking Trump when his popularity would “matter just a little less”...
Read on!!
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