#143) Your Stress is Showing

July 18, 2017

Dear Mr. President,

Honestly, you just say the most bizarre and inappropriate things.  Here's your Tweet from July 16 regarding media coverage of Don Jr.'s revelation that he had a meeting with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information about Hilary Clinton:

            "With all of it's phony unnamed sources and highly slanted and

            even fraudulent reporting, #fakenews is DISTORTING

            DEMOCRACY in our country!"

Ok, let's take this one step at a time.

"phony source":  The source was actually Don Jr. himself.  How can he be phony?  I don't even get it.  Nobody made this information up.  He admitted to the meeting.

"highly slanted":  But it is a fact that he agreed to a meeting where he believed the Russian government would give him information that would help your campaign.  There's no slant there.  That's just the fact.  Agreeing to take that meeting shows that your campaign was at least open to colluding with a foreign government.

"fraudulent reporting":  Well, fraudulent reporting would put a newspaper out of business.  This is what separates the NY Times (for example) from the National Enquirer (for example).  One is an actual newspaper which relies on it's reputation for factual reporting to sell papers and pay the bills.  The other is a tabloid with such sensational headlines as, "Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack As Love Slave" and doesn't even pretend to be factual.  Making sh*t up (and the weirder the better) is their bread and butter.  Fraudulent reporting from an actual newspaper leads to libel suits and I don't see you lawyering up to take on the NY Times.

"DISTORTING DEMOCRACY":  A free press is actually the cornerstone of a free society.  When asked about some extremely negative press coverage after the Bay of Pigs in 1962, Pres. John F. Kennedy said, "There isn't any doubt that we couldn't do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press."  The media isn't distorting democracy by reporting on your presidency…it's participating in democracy. 

You're tweets have always been fairly off-base but I think the pressure of this Russia investigation must be getting to you because this one was just plain weird.

Sincerely,

Amy Beaton