Milbank: White House proficient at Russian-style propaganda
By Dana Milbank
Published: August 12, 2017, 6:01am
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The fake news media is full of accounts about how President Trump’s standing is slipping among his “base” — his most loyal supporters.
Balderdash.
There is no reason to think Trump’s support has slipped in the slightest among those who like him best: the 144 million men, women and children of the Russian Federation. A poll released by the Pew Research Center in June found that 53 percent of Russians have confidence in Trump, 67 percent there think he’s a strong leader, and 62 percent find him charismatic and well qualified.
Unfortunately for Trump, most Russian nationals are not (yet) eligible to vote in the United States. But Trump’s eastern base nevertheless has ways of boosting his popularity at home, and not only by hacking the Democratic National Committee and doing other things of interest to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
As The Washington Post’s Abby Phillip reported, “a virtual army of accounts identified as having ties to a Russia-backed disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. political system zeroed in on efforts among Trump’s supporters to attack his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, over the firing of two Trump loyalists.”
That’ll teach the national security adviser to cross Trump’s Kremlin cohort. But while it’s generous of Putin to put his bots to work for Trump, this White House is perfectly capable of importing Russian-style propaganda without help from Moscow.
Trump’s White House has been churning out so much that it literally overloaded the system. Rapid-response director Andy Hemming had been sending out positive stories about Trump to so many journalists that, Politico reported, “the White House IT system could not handle an email going out to such a big list, and all of his emails were being blocked by a firewall.” The glitch was fixed.
This week, meanwhile, saw the debut of Trump TV: a Webcast of “real news” by Kayleigh McEnany, a pro-Trump pundit formerly of CNN. In the first installment, she announces, in front of a Trump-Pence campaign backdrop in Trump Tower: “President Trump has created more than 1 million jobs. … President Trump has clearly steered the economy back in the right direction. … President Trump is finally putting the American worker first. … President Trump is dedicated to honoring these men and women who fought valiantly for our country.”
Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted: “Wow. Feels eerily like so many state-owned channels I’ve watched in other countries.”
We already have Trump TV
We hardly need Trump TV, though, because we already have “Fox & Friends,” the Fox News morning show. Vox this week analyzed transcripts of 17 months of the show and found some extraordinary changes since the election: They started using “we” statements with much more frequency (“we need to,” “we are going”), referred to the occupant of the Oval Office as “the president” far more often than under President Obama, and had many more statements instructing or advising Trump and predicting actions.
Then there’s “the president” himself, a one-man propaganda machine. This week he has, among other things, gone after Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who had spoken on TV about Russia’s election meddling.
Trump attacked Blumenthal for lying about serving in Vietnam. (He served in the Marine Reserve during the war but not in Vietnam.) Trump said Blumenthal “cried like a baby” when caught. This was similar to Trump’s attack on ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, claiming she was “crying” and in “tears” after Trump won. Neither appears to be true.
Happily, the Trump White House has not yet borrowed all forms of propaganda employed by the Putin regime. Russian state media released photographs of a shirtless Putin boating and fishing on a Siberian lake. If the White House releases photos of a shirtless Trump golfing in New Jersey, it will be time to talk seriously about impeachment.
