Thursday, August 30, 2018

You thought he was nuts before?

Vincent Price in Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968).


Read the BJ piece, but this looks weirder to me than an unusually crazy lie.

It's true that there are rumors of impending demise for NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, and spread through a venue that is famously on Trump's reading list, the New York Post's Page Six, but they have nothing to do with Lester Holt: indeed, some of Lack's mistakes look like things Trump would have approved of, following the Matt Lauer #MeToo crisis:
there’s still-lingering questions about why NBC News sat on the infamous “Access Hollywood” “Grab em by the p - - - y” Donald Trump tape, and why they refused to run Ronan Farrow’s exposé on Harvey Weinstein before he went to the New Yorker.
Plus, there’s [Megyn] Kelly’s $20 million-a-year deal personally made by Lack for the ex-Fox News star to host the soft third hour of “Today.” Despite a recent improvement in ratings, her numbers are still down 30 percent in the key demo compared to 2017...
But I can't find any suggestion that NBC newscaster Lester Holt is in trouble, or ever has been, over anything, least of all his interview of the president of 11 May 2017 when he got Trump to confirm, two days after firing FBI director James Comey, that he had done it to halt the Trump-Russia investigation:

regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.
As he'd told Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Lavrov the day before, according to Russian press reports (US press wasn't permitted to attend that Oval Office meeting, but Russian reporters were there):
“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”
Now he's suggesting that Holt doctored the audio somehow, presumably to make it sound as if it said that, and gotten "caught", and NBC was "hurt badly" as a result. Really?

The thing being, if this was a normal Trump lie, like the one just above it about Lack, a false account of a story that is really out there, there'd be some point of reference to attach it to, but there isn't. It's never been suggested, as far as anybody can determine, that there was anything "fudged" about the interview. Matt Novak at Gizmodo is one of many who certifies it:
My own search of conspiracy-minded news sites has produced nothing that would lead me to believe he got it from the internet. But for all we know this could be a completely new conspiracy theory concocted by Trump to distance himself from the investigation into obstruction of justice.
It's not from Hannity, it's not from Breitbart, it's not from Junior's or Bannon's darker sources. It really is a completely new conspiracy theory, out of nowhere, or out of private conversations in the White House that aren't getting leaked.

I think it could be a new level of delusionality, out of what's known as "decompensation"—
In psychology, the term refers to the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance.[2][3]Some who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may decompensate into persecutory delusions to defend against a troubling reality.
— under the increasing pressure he's said to be feeling from the investigation since the announcements of Don McGahn's, David Pecker's, and Allen Weisselberg's ongoing cooperation.

Posted by at Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)