The news isn’t the news when it makes the newsies look bad — and Donald Trump made ABC’s Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace look awful after his arraignment on Tuesday.
Tapper and Wallace’s inability to cope with Trump was on embarrassingly full display when the “disgraced” (their word, not mine) former president seemed to be having the time of his life at a Cuban restaurant in Miami, near the courthouse where he’d just pleaded “not guilty” to charges that he’d done the same things that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were mysteriously never charged with.
Trump met with supporters at Miami’s famous Versailles, where they sang “Happy Birthday” while possibly hearing “Hail to the Chief” in their heads. Trump’s actual birthday is today, June 14.
“We don’t need to see anymore,” of Trump at Versailles, whined Wallace. “We know where he is.”
Dour Jake Tapper wasn’t having any of the fun, either.
While Trump was smiling and ordering tasty Cuban food for his fans — I’ll take the fricasé de pollo, Mr. President — Tapper was barking orders from his anchor desk at his beleaguered control room. “The folks in the control room,” he demanded, “I don’t need to see any more of that.”
Triggered much?
“He’s trying to turn it into a spectacle, into a campaign ad, that’s enough of that,” he pouted. “We’ve seen that already. Let’s go over again the 37 charges Donald Trump is facing.”
This is the same Jake Tapper who, 20 minutes earlier on his little-watched “news” program, enjoyed a pleasant chat with “Russia collusion hoaxer,” Andrew McCabe.
Irony alert! CNN's Jake Tapper told his audience that the network wouldn't air Trump's speech because live because "he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous." Keep in mind 20 minutes prior he had on Russia collusion hoaxer Andrew McCabe. pic.twitter.com/iyLdFNDMuZ
— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) June 14, 2023
Read that emphasized part again. Tapper would rather repeat himself ad nauseam than let viewers see more of Trump.
ASIDE: Tapper these days reminds me of something my grandfather once said about an acquaintance who — uninvited — kept coming by to chat at the table where we were having dinner. “He’s a man of few words but, dear God, the turnover.”
What, if I may ask Jake personally, does a prima donna do when she’s upstaged? She has the curtain closed on the upstart so she can have the applause all to herself.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that it’s newsworthy when someone who has just been charged with 37 counts of this and that is in good enough spirits to enjoy a tasty lunch and that his supporters showed up to enjoy his company. Setting aside my conservative bias for just a moment, maybe it means that Trump knows the charges aren’t serious or maybe it means he’s just a sociopath who isn’t affected by anything. Surely, Tapper could have made the latter argument.
But he didn’t. Instead, Tapper just made “the folks in the control room” cut the video — and I can tell you exactly why he did that.
Tapper and Wallace understand that television is a visual medium — and that Trump plays it better than they do.
One last thought. In my 20-plus years as a blogger and now as a (HARUMPH!) senior columnist, there are few things more fun than watching the mainstream media get upstaged, and sometimes even helping the process along. If you’d like to support all of us here at PJ Media in our noble-yet-hysterical effort, please consider becoming one of our VIP members — and don’t you dare forget to use this special WITCHHUNT promo code for a massive 50% discount.
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