Donald Trump – Page 29

Times senior editor exults over Trump-driven traffic

I’m late with this, but I thought you’d like to see this internal memo a source sent me about folks at the New York Times exulting about how much traffic the paper received as a result of Donald Trump’s bizarre interview.

The Times did a good job, but I’m a little perplexed by the self-congratulatory tone of senior editor Steve Kenny’s note. Trump showed up at the offices of our leading newspaper and made news. We get it.

Subject:Late note for Tuesday, Nov. 22

Good morning, all:

What a day for news. What a day to be a Timeswoman or a Timesman.

Donald Trump’s visit to the building dominated not only our news day, but the days of every news organization in America. (The lead photo on The Washington Post’s homepage at the moment is a picture of Trump in OUR lobby.)

Starting with the off-again-on-again drama of the meeting itself ‪on Tuesday morning and continuing to our posting of the full transcript early ‪Wednesday morning, the interview drove hundreds of thousands of readers to our site.

Here are some numbers:

— The lede-all by Mike Shear, Maggie Haberman and Julie Davis — 1.2 million page views

— The Hillary Clinton prosecution story by Mike and Julie — 727,000 page views

— Jonah Bromwich’s “The Interview as Told in 12 Tweets” — 232,000 page views.

— The “Fall of Chris Christie” story by Kate Zernike — 520,00 page views. (O.K. — not related to the interview, but really big numbes.)

The interview transcript was compiled by Liam Stack, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Karen Workman and Tim Herrera. Zach Johnk of the FoNa Copy Desk was here until almost ‪1 a.m. copy editing — all 11,810 words of it. We published when he was finished, and Laurie Kawakami gave it an all-out social push.

Laurie’s effort paid off. The transcript is No. 2 on the homepage, and Stela tells me that almost 60 percent of readers are coming to it through social media. Samantha Henig sent in a note earlier in the evening that there is a plan Wednesday to post audio of the meeting, and we’ll send out an alert as well in the morning to direct readers to the transcript.

The transcript has already scored 52,000 page views, and it didn’t go up until almost ‪1 a.m.

About ‪1:15 a.m., the Post and Courier in South Carolina reported that Trump would announce Nikki Haley as his choice for U.N. ambassador. About 45 minutes later, The Post put up its own story (with its own confirmation) and alerted. At that hour, understandably, I couldn’t raise anyone, and it didn’t seem to be the sort of story to call out the troops.

I put together a 550-word piece that sourced the P&C and the Post, with lots of background from our own reporting about the furious back-and-forth Trump and Haley had during the primaries. (She supported Rubio and was outspoken in her criticism of Trump.) But in the end, I didn’t feel comfortable posting a story without independent confirmation, so we didn’t put it up. It’s slugged 24HALEY in Copy, in case any of it can be of any use early today.

The big news if we do confirm it is that she has no foreign policy experience.

Elsewhere on the homepage, Tony Scott’s review of the new Brad Pitt movie, “Allied,” is and has been the top performer, and Valeriya Safronova’s “Night Out” with Lauren Graham, the “Gilmore Girls” star, has been a favorite.

Readers seem to be hungry for something a little lighter, and we have some choice bits planned for them in the Running Story List, found here.

Among major competitors, The Post, The Journal, the BBC, and CNN are all leading with our Trump interview, although their focuses vary. The Post is concentrating on his pulling back on some campaign promises, The Journal on his “no conflict of interest” comments, the BBC and CNN with the “alt-right.” The Guardian’s lead is about what it says is a growing coalition of liberal groups urging Hillary Clinton to call for recounts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Also of note: The BBC has an interesting story about the immediate and growing backlash among the far right after our interview was published. The Post is off-leading with Nikki Haley.

—

Steve Kenny
Senior Editor/News Desk
The New York Times

Talk about this post on Facebook.

Trump to Times: Eh, I didn’t mean any of it

Climate change? Never mind. Lock her up? Didn’t mean it. Torture? I don’t think that anymore.

The big takeaway from Donald Trump’s interview with the New York Times was how casually he walked away from some of the most caustic things he said during the campaign. If there’s a more striking example of a politician admitting that he essentially lied about everything to get elected, I’m not aware of it.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

Yes, media could have done better. No, it wasn’t their fault.

The media, for all their faults, did not elect Donald Trump. His supporters knew exactly what they were doing. They heard it all—the racism, the misogyny, the personal attacks, the Russia connection, Trump University, and on and on and on. And they decided they’d rather vote for a bomb-thrower than continue with the status quo.

On this day of all days, I am loath to cite polling as a way of explaining anything. But as Bill Schneider wrote for Reuters, exit polls revealed that only 38 percent of voters believed Trump was qualified to be president, compared to 52 percent for Hillary Clinton. What does that tell you?

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org. And talk about this post on Facebook.

Prediction time

Hillary Clinton has been ahead by about four points in the polls. My guess is that she’ll actually win by around six points, based on two factors.

First, she’s on the upswing, and was even before FBI director James Comey said, uh, never mind. Second, by all accounts she has an incredibly strong get-out-the-vote effort and Donald Trump has nothing.

No prediction on the Electoral College except that it won’t be close. And the Democrats will narrowly regain the Senate.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

How the media blew the 2016 presidential campaign

Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe the media’s widely derided coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign had little effect on where we stand days before this horror show comes to its merciful conclusion.

Consider: A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll released Friday evening showed Clinton with a four-point lead—identical to President Obama’s margin of victory over Mitt Romney in 2012. As New York Times columnist David Brooks said Friday on the PBS NewsHour, “Everyone is dividing based on demographic categories. And, sometimes, you get the sense that the campaign barely matters. People are just going with their gene pool and whatever it is.”

But even if voting patterns are largely preordained in this hyperpolarized era, that’s no reason to let the media off the hook. Journalists have an indispensable role in our political system. They have a responsibility to provide us with the information we need to govern ourselves in a democratic society. And they have let us down.

Read the rest at U.S. News & World Report. And talk about it on Facebook.

What if Trump were the Democratic nominee?

Mitt Romney on the campaign trail in 2012. Photo (cc) 2012 by Dave Lawrence.

Alex Beam’s column in today’s Boston Globe got me thinking: What would I do if Donald Trump were the Democratic nominee? Alex confesses that he was a late arrival in the #NeverTrump camp. I’m not a Democrat, but I am a liberal. Because of the unique threat I think Trump poses to our democracy, I’ve broken with past practice and said whom I’m voting for this time around: Hillary Clinton. I have great respect for Republicans and conservatives like Mitt Romney and Charlie Baker, who came out against Trump early on. But what would I do if the shoe were on the other foot?

So here’s my little mind game. I can’t think of a Democrat who’s analogous to Trump, so let’s just imagine that Trump himself had won the Democratic nomination; it’s not that far-fetched given his chameleon-like political identity over the years. And since Trump is hardly a traditional conservative, let’s imagine, too, that there’s one significant issue on which he departs from Democratic orthodoxy. For the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate that Trump the Democrat holds the same views on immigration as Trump the Republican.

Now, then. There aren’t really any moderate Republicans left on the national stage, but there are rational, sane Republicans: Romney, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich to name three. So let’s extend this experiment by imagining that Romney had somehow won the nomination. How would I vote?

On the one hand, Trump the Democrat has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who’d protect same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, to raise the minimum wage, and to reform Obamacare by seeking to add a public option. Romney has promised the opposite, and has vowed to repeal Obamacare, even though it’s based on Romneycare. On the other hand, Trump is Trump, with all the baggage we’ve seen on display throughout this campaign.

I would like to think I’d vote for Romney, but I’m honestly not 100 percent sure. Part of me believes that we could survive four years of Trump the Democrat, and that it would be worth it so as not to unleash the right. Then again, Romney’s a sensible guy, and maybe he could find some sort of middle ground.

It’s not easy, is it?

How Trump is trying to delegitimize a Clinton presidency

Trump rally in Arizona earlier this year. Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore.

All of the media reaction to Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate focused on one surreal and disturbing moment. Within minutes of the close, the Associated Press moved a story with this extraordinary lede:

Threatening to upend a fundamental pillar of American democracy, Donald Trump refused to say in debate that he will accept the results of next month’s election if he loses to Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee declared Trump’s resistance “horrifying.”

The homepage newspaper headlines this morning amplify on that theme. The New York Times: “Trump Won’t Say if He Will Accept Election Results.” The Washington Post: “Trump refuses to say whether he’ll accept election results.” The Wall Street Journal: “Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Vote if He Loses.”

I want to offer a couple of points about Trump’s deeply transgressive act.

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org. And talk about it on Facebook.

The present and future of press freedom in Trump’s America

Amy Goodman. Photo (cc) via "Democracy Now!" — Amy Goodman. Photo (cc) via “Democracy Now!”

Update: The charges against Amy Goodman have been dropped.

Freedom of the press is under assault—and it’s only going to get worse in the increasingly unlikely event that Donald Trump is elected president. Three related items for your consideration:

• In Mandan, North Dakota, journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! is scheduled to appear in court today after she was arrested and charged with “riot” for covering the undercovered Standing Rock demonstrations against an oil pipeline being built through Native American lands. Lizzy Ratner has a detailed report at the Nation.

As state prosecutor Ladd Erickson helpfully explains: “She’s a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” And: “I think she put together a piece to influence the world on her agenda, basically. That’s fine, but it doesn’t immunize her from the laws of her state.” I would like to know what North Dakota law prohibits the practice of journalism, but we’ll leave that for another day.

• In the Philadelphia Daily News, columnist Will Bunch writes that the arrest of Goodman, and the prosecutor’s contemptuous dismissal of her First Amendment rights, is a harbinger of what’s to come in Trump’s America:

It’s not happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in the Age of Trump, when you have one of the two major-party candidates for president calling the journalists who cover his campaign “scum” and “lowest people on earth,” and the as-much-as 40 percent of the American people backing his campaign are cheering him on.

• In the Washington Post, media columnist Margaret Sullivan takes note of a resolution passed last week by the Committee to Protect Journalists warning that the press would be less free under a Trump presidency. As Sullivan puts it: “The idea: CPJ would make a strong statement against Donald Trump on First Amendment grounds—the kind of thing the organization had never done before. CPJ’s global mission is to try to keep journalists from being jailed or killed; but it hasn’t been involved before in politics.” (I gave a “rave” to CPJ on Beat the Press for its resolution.)

No president is especially press-friendly. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism” detailing the president’s overzealous pursuit of leakers and whistleblowers. I doubt that the woman Saturday Night Live now calls “President Hillary Clinton” will be any better than Obama.

But at a moment when our politics have gotten incredibly ugly—when a Republican headquarters in North Carolina is firebombed, and when folks at the traditionally Republican Arizona Republic are receiving death threats for endorsing Hillary Clinton—the last thing we need is a president who seems determined to whip up hate and violence against the press.

Talk about this post on Facebook.

The Comeback Id? Not so fast, say the pundits.

Photo (cc) 2016 by xx. — Photo (cc) 2016 by Colleen P.

If you thought that Donald Trump’s semi-coherent performance in the second debate would lead our ever-fickle pundits to proclaim him the Comeback Id, you were wrong—sort of.

Yes, he won some grudging plaudits for coming across as slightly less unhinged than he’d been in the first debate. Overall, though, the morning-after commentary suggests that virtually everyone this side of Breitbart saw the St. Louis encounter as merely another stop on the way to an overwhelming defeat.

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org.

In VP debate, Pence helps Pence—to Trump’s detriment

Donald Trump and Mike Pence in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this year. Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore.

The vice presidential debate will be forgotten by the time Donald Trump launches his next tweetstorm. Tuesday night’s encounter between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence was, as Glenn Thrush puts it at Politico, “less a game-changer than a channel-changer.”

To the extent that it matters, though, post-debate media commentary focused on two developments that over the next five weeks may prove more problematic for Trump than for Hillary Clinton.

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org.