Trump and his crack political advisers (or is that crack-smoking advisers?) almost certainly assumed they could play the networks, the big newspapers, and the AP for the fools they collectively have been. They clearly thought they could set the terms of conversation about Mr. Trump’s ‘putting an end to this whole birther thing’ (if you haven’t had a chance yet, go back and watch his crew of surrogates attempting to use the same schtick they’ve been employing all year on CNN and MSNBC throughout the day yesterday).
Didn’t turn out the way they anticipated.
As other DKOS commenters have amply documented, Trump’s announcement was eviscerated from the moment he uttered it, and each and every attempt by his directorate of truthiness to shout over rebuttals, deflect, or ignore being called out as disgusting racist liars was skewered, relentlessly. The AP story, running in major newspapers across the country this morning, finally introduced the word ‘lie’ to the lexicon (via Talking Points Memo):
WASHINGTON (AP) — After five years as the chief promoter of a lie about Barack Obama's birthplace, DonaldTrump abruptly reversed course Friday and acknowledged the fact that the president was born in America. He then immediately peddled another false conspiracy.
"President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," Trump declared, enunciating each word in a brief statement at the end of a campaign appearance. "Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again."
But as the GOP presidential nominee sought to put that false conspiracy theory to rest, he stoked another, claiming the "birther movement" was begun by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. There is no evidence that is true.
But when things start to ripple outside the political coverage bubble, it’s indicative that effects may be more pronounced, and that the impact will be wider, than the typical scroll across the news cycle.
A few weeks back, Wired.com, a technology and science focused site, took the unprecedented step of endorsing Hillary Clinton (it had never made an endorsement before). Today, you can find them covering the story of Trump’s lunacy and racist lies, and the media coverage of his statement, extensively. To put it mildly, this is not typically in their purview:
DONALD TRUMP TRIED to magically mask his years of paranoid speculation about the whereabouts and authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate today with a 23-word statement at his new hotel in Washington D.C. In it, he erroneously blamed the so-called “birther movement” on Hillary Clinton, and falsely claimed that he was the one who put those rumors to rest…
As we’ve noted before, Trump has a habit of running his campaign like a Twitter feed, issuing constant updates, each one more absurd than the last, to push his most recent scandal farther down the feed. Who has time to talk about the Trump Foundation scandal when it’s Birther Day on CNN? But this tactic only works when the media takes Trump’s every utterance at face value.
Did he finally admit President Obama was born in the US? Sure. But did he also lie and fail to apologize for starting that rumor while doing it? You betcha!
For those less familiar with Wired, their readership includes a large contingent of younger, techy libertarian types. It’s encouraging that they are starting to be exposed to what we progressives have been screaming about for months. This is extending well-beyond the beltway echo chamber, and Trump’s stack of free media passes seems to have run out.