Smelling salts futures are going through the roof!
by digby
Watching these sanctimonious phonies in the press and the GOP wring their hands over Michelle Wolff’s performance at the White House Correspondence Dinner because she allegedly coarsened the culture and insulted that fine Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is honest as the day is long is just … please.
Here’s an example of a nice Trump voter at Trump’s Nuremberg Rally last night:
This Trump supporter repeatedly yelled at the press, calling media “degenerate filth” and to get out of his country after the Michigan rally concluded pic.twitter.com/hbd8vhpVYc— Brianna Sacks (@bri_sacks) April 29, 2018
That’s fine. He’s just got a lot of economic anxiety.
The good news is that our president restored the honor and dignity of our government so thank goodness for that:
“These are very dishonest people, many of them. They are very, very dishonest people,” Trump said at a boisterous event in Washington, Mich., speaking in front of a blue banner emblazoned with the president’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
“Fake news. Very dishonest,” he added. “They don’t have sources. The sources don’t exist in many cases.”
There was little doubt Trump would again assail members of the media after his performance at last year’s rally in Harrisburg, Pa., where the new president denigrated the “Hollywood actors and Washington media” who were “consoling each other” at the concurrent White House Correspondents’ Association’s dinner.
“Is this better than that phony Washington White House correspondents thing? Is this more fun?” Trump said to resounding applause.
“I could be up there tonight smiling like I love when they’re hitting you, shot after shot. These people, they hate your guts,” he added. “And you know, you got to smile. And if you don’t smile, they say, ‘He was terrible. He couldn’t take it.’ And if you do smile, they’ll say, ‘What was he smiling about?’ You know, there’s no win.”
Trump’s roughly 90-minute speech in Michigan — peppered with red meat and reliable targets including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and California sanctuary cities — capped a week of outbursts from the president over a series of scandals involving his Cabinet and an intensifying federal investigation into his longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
The president also wrote online that “Tester’s statements on Admiral Jackson” were as baseless as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election — a probe he derided as “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!” earlier this month.
“A horrible thing that we in D.C. must live with, just like phony Russian Collusion,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “Tester should lose race in Montana. Very dishonest and sick!”
In his speech Saturday night, Trump compared Tester’s actions to those of the media: “We have to be very careful with the press, because they do the same damn thing.”
Trump claimed Secret Service officials had already discredited the “vicious rumors” Tester spread about Jackson.
“Tester started throwing out things that he’s heard. Well I know things about Tester that I could say too, and if I said them, he’d never be elected again,” Trump said, adding that he had narrowed his list of potential nominees to become Veterans Affairs secretary to five candidates.
The president also disparaged Mueller’s probe at the rally and suggested the American intelligence community was steeped in corruption.
“Look at how these politicians have fallen for this junk — Russian collusion, give me a break,” Trump said. “The only collusion is the Democrats colluded with the Russians, and the Democrats colluded with a lot of other people. Look at the intelligence agencies.”
He added: “It’s a disgrace what’s going on in our country.”
Railing against the “fake news” and their “fake sources” elicited a huge “boo” from the rowdy crowd, as did mentioning former FBI Director James Comey.
“He’s a liar and a leaker. I did you a great favor when I fired this guy,” Trump said of Comey, calling the leadership and “corruption” at the FBI a “disgrace.”
Trump also thanked House Republicans for releasing the House Intelligence Committee’s final report on the Russia investigation, which concluded there was “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. House Democrats disagree with that assessment.
When Trump brought up German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who visited the White House on Friday, the crowd started to boo.
“No, don’t blame them,” Trump said. “It’ll all be fine. … Blame your American presidents, and your American representatives.”
Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan is up for reelection this year, and Trump mentioned her by name as someone he thinks should shoulder part of the blame for “failed” and “unfair” trade deals.
At one point, when mentioning the black unemployment rate — which has been falling since 2010— Trump brought up his back-and-forth with rapper Kanye West this week.
“Any Hispanics in the room?” Trump asked, to tepid applause. “Not too many? Eh, that’s all right. … In all fairness, Kanye West gets it.”
Thank goodness the Republicans are there to defend us against all that coarseness and meanness at the White House Correspondence Dinner.