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As we reported last week, even before the former F.B.I. director James Comey began speaking at the Senate Intelligence hearings on Thursday, the Right was preparing to assault his credibility. Since then, it has hammered away with any point that might undermine his credibility.
Read MoreThe former F.B.I. director James Comey released his testimony yesterday before his much anticipated appearance this morning in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. If you were a liberal what you heard was that everything that has been reported in the press about Trump’s interference with Comey was correct.
Read MoreIn the wake of Trump’s pullout from the Paris climate accord, mayors and governors across the country pledged to make their own commitments to cut greenhouses gases. While this was largely regarded as a positive development in the Mainstream Media, some in the conservative media -- which, you would think, believe power should be exercised at a local level -- saw rebellion afoot. “Democrats plot ‘Revolution’ to circumvent Trump’s Paris decision,” whined a headline in The Daily Caller.
Read MoreSince Donald Trump is president of the United States it seemed entirely possible that most of his 31 million Twitter followers were real. (Barack Obama had 89 million.) But Trump’s account is growing so fast — he added 2.4 million followers in May — that social media experts are getting suspicious. Newsweek reported that about half are automated bots of fake accounts and — better still — that the president is so obsessed with ratings that he may even be paying for them even now: “Trump's Twitter account saw an unusual spike in followers over the weekend, many of which appear to have been created artificially.”
Read MoreIn wake of revelations in The Washington Post that Jared Kushner might have requested a “safe and secure” back-door channel to Kremlin, the conservative media have been caught in a bind. The alt-right press in particular has never liked Kushner. It sees him as a globalist undermining its America First agenda. However, with his troubles threatening to paralyze the entire Trump presidency, many were offering a defense -- albeit halfheartedly.
Read MoreWell, the long awaited Congressional Budget Office score of the House Republican replacement of Obamacare is in, and this is the bottom line: if it passes, 23 million people will be booted from the insurance rolls by 2026. That is ugly math for re-election.
Read MoreLeaving a swirl of scandal in his wake in Washington, President Trump headed to Saudi Arabia this past weekend. The international stage normally makes a president look grander, but Trump had some significant obstacles to navigate. In his campaign, he had criticized his predecessor for not using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” and had said “Islam Hates Us.”
Read MoreThe word transformative is used far too often and is rarely accurate. But you cannot say it is hyperbolic when talking about Roger Ailes.
Read MoreLast week, we noted that Trump loyalists were towing the White House line on the firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey. But then came Trump's impulsive tweets on the dismissal and his hint that he might have recorded conversations with Comey. Some voices on right-wing outlets began to raise questions.
Read MoreOk. Let’s get the big reaction out of the way quickly. The Red Media that has (mostly) supported Trump all along, like Breitbart, Fox News, the radio host Mark Levin, etc., backed the president bigly on his decision to fire the F.B.I. director, James Comey, in dramatic fashion on Tuesday. As Fox News’s Sean Hannity put it: "James Comey ... is a national embarrassment. It's that plain, it's that simple…..And frankly, he's very lucky President Trump kept him around this long."
Read MoreBy yesterday afternoon U.S. time, it was clear that France would reject Marine Le Pen in favor of the centrist Emmanuel Macron. The election took a fraught turn in the final days when Macron dramatically announced that his party had been the victim of a major computer hack. It seemed like a repeat of the American election, with Russian trolls favoring a more extreme nationalist regime. But the alt-right press argued that French law, which forbade discussion of the emails in the media so close to an election, gave an unfair advantage to Macron.
Read MoreIf you don’t succeed, try and try again. Only earlier this week, it looked as if the G.O.P. would fail a third time at repealing Obamacare. But House Republicans were able to pass the legislation mid-day yesterday, squeaking by with just one more than the 216 votes needed.
Read MoreThe top news of the week, of course, is that Trump has proposed BIG reductions in corporate and personal taxes. There aren’t a lot of details, but the Conservative Media is predictably drooling over the plan. What about those deficit hawks? Well, they seemed mostly quiet as the bigger mouths advanced 1980s supply-side theory. Cut taxes, the economy grows. The cuts will pay for themselves and maybe the wall between us and Mexico. No, wait, we forget ourselves. Mexicans will pay for that.
Read MoreYes, Marie Le Pen and her anti-immigrant party won enough votes to head toward a runoff. She will face the centrist Emmanuel Macron. And, yes, the Alt-Right Media predictably gloated that another country is falling to the populist movement.
Read MoreNobody was bigger in right-wing media than Bill O’Reilly. Well, maybe Rush -- but, boy, it was close. And now the big man has been toppled. The allegations of repeat sexual harassment were too much for advertisers and, finally, for Fox. Many of his fellow conservative pundit stars seemed willing to only lightly glance at the story. LifeZette, Laura Ingraham’s site, only posted, without comment, a video of O’Reilly exploding at guests. Of course, O’Reilly famously exploded at Ingraham on air in 2013, so no love lost there.
Read MoreAs we reported here earlier, Trump has delighted his base by talking tough to North Korea. With American warships steaming toward the East China Sea, the rogue state tried a little toughness of its own by launching a ballistic missile test early Sunday local time. But a few minutes after takeoff, the missile blew up. There might be many reasons for the embarrassing failure, including basic technical incompetence, but one theory is that America sabotaged the missile through cyberwarfare.
Read MoreThe stunning past week of foreign policy U-turns has left the Alt-Right spinning. After bombing Syria, President Trump suddenly flipped on a slew of other positions, including the obsolescence of NATO (He now thinks it might serve a purpose); getting tough with China on trade (He said he no longer thought the Chinese were “currency manipulators.”); and, of course, playing nice with Russia. All this came with warning signs that the White House’s chief “America First” adviser, Steve Bannon, is on his way out.
Read MoreBy now, it’s clear that Trump’s “America First” alt-right base and media supporters were not happy with his strike on Syria last week. As anger coalesced over the weekend, the focus of the alt-right ire fell particularly hard on Trump’s son-in-law and key advisor, Jared Kushner. Kushner is Jewish and many of the attacks use the word “globalist,” which is sometimes but not always a code word for Jew. There has also been a related movement on social media to rally around Steve Bannon #KeepBannon.
Read MoreThe Red Media have been pounding Susan Rice over reports that the former national security adviser asked the intelligence agencies to “unmask” the names of Trump associates who had been picked up incidentally as part of the wiretapping of foreign operatives. The issue has set the Right on fire --even though Rice did nothing illegal and could just have been doing her job in learning who in the incoming Trump administration might be colluding with a hostile foreign power.
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So this week, the Trump administration is looking for its first big victory on anything. It expects the Senate will approve Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court even without a filibuster-proof 60 votes. The belief is that the Senate will get rid of the filibuster -- the so-called “nuclear option.” Last week, we reported that many in the Red Press were actually rooting for the nuclear option. Over the weekend, however, we detected a new strain of thinking that the option probably won’t be necessary, that the Democrats will cave on a floor vote.
