By Michael Woyton
Some days you just know where to start.
And then you find out the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist gave a “news” conference.
Yes, president-elect Donald Trump spoke Monday in front of reporters, whom he called corrupt, and said he would consider a pardon for New York City Mayor Eric Adams, even though he said he wasn’t familiar with the charges Adams is facing, the Associated Press reported.
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The sultan of Mar-a-Lago also boasted/lied that “he has done more in his short transition period than his predecessor did in all four years,” the AP reported.
Trump considers his transition period as more successful than Biden because of a $100 billion dollar investment in the United States by SoftBank GroupCEO Masasyoshi Son. Remember, he promised anyone who said they were going to make a billion-dollar investment all the expedited approvals and permits they needed, environmental concerns be damned.
To put the promised $100 billion from Son in perspective, the Biden administration’s bipartisan intrastructure deal, passed Nov. 6, 2021, comes to $1.2 trillion.
So yeah, Trump good, Biden not good.
Trump also mentioned the mysterious drones during the hourlong presser, saying that the government knows where they are coming from and just doesn’t want to say.
He even said, since they were spotted over his Bedminster golf course, he maybe won’t be spending the weekend up there, the New York Times reported.
That’s some good news.
The twice-impeached leader of the free world also said during the “news” conference that he was planning to sue the Des Moines Register for a pre-election poll that turned out to be wrong. (Imagine a poll not being accurate.) He also said he was considering legal action against “60 Minutes” for a perceived misquote.
“We have to straighten out the press,” the Times quoted him as saying. “The press is very corrupt. Almost as corrupt as our elections.” (Was the election he just won “corrupt”?)
Trump is going to continue threatening and suing news organizations he doesn’t think has treated him properly, and what “properly” means is anybody’s guess.
Obviously, the man who has yet to be sentenced for 34 felony counts of falsified business records has smelled blood in the water that lets him know what he can get away with when it come to news organizations and social media.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame and who owns the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times have all bent the knee or kissed the ring of the incoming president.
Over the weekend, a settlement between Trump and ABC News was announced with ABC paying $15 million to a presidential museum and foundation, plus $1 million in legal costs, for the former and future president.
Why the payout?
Trump said George Stephanopoulos defamed him when he said 10 times during a March interview with Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina that a jury found that Trump raped writer E. Jean Carroll, CNN reported.
Trump has denied and continues to deny that he raped Carroll in the mid-1990s and that he defamed her in denying her claim.
A jury in 2023 found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, though it didn’t find that she proved the rape. In August 2023, a judge was dismissing Trump’s countersuit against Carroll and concluded “that Trump ‘raped’ her in the broader sense of that word, as people generally understand it,” CNN reported.
That means that ABC settled the defamation lawsuit, admitting that the network and Stephanopoulos regret the statements made in March, even though a judge in August 2023 pretty much said, yeah, it was rape though not according to the then-legal definition. (The definition of rape in New York state was changed in January.)
Some media experts are saying that this win for Trump is also fortuitous because the man who lies constantly won’t have to be deposed while under oath.
But, according to Poynter, many see it “as ABC News (and Disney) caving to Trump.”
Oliver Darcy in his Status Newsletter said it will “embolden Trump and his allies, who have vowed to launch an unprecedented assault on the free press.”
It is difficult to not believe the worst in Trump. After all, just today he called the press corrupt and said the press has to be “straightened out.”
Maya Angelou gets quoted a lot these days. She said, “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”
Maya Angelou is not wrong.
Lead art: Screen grab from Google Maps
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