The Political Page, T+157 -- June 26, 2017

Updates

 
Later, 2:24 p.m. Central Time: wow, the mainstream media is hardly reporting this. And when they do report it, they release bits and pieces in dribs and drabs. This morning the US Supreme Court handed President Trump a huge victory, putting in place an injunction against the lower court ruling that tried to thwart the president's travel bans. That was barely reported. And had it not been for a Presidential tweet one would not know that the ruling was unanimous, 9 - 0, by the Supreme Court. Wow.

Later, 9:13 a.m. Central Time: a huge "hat tip" to Don who sent me the link: "the genius of Trump's tweets."

Google, Twitter and Facebook control much of the news we see today, but Trump’s tweets get around their dominance.

Similar to the Drudge Report website, Trump’s tweets are so well-known that people view his tweets independently of the tech giants.

The Drudge Report receives comparable traffic to Google News and The New York Times — despite the fact Google News prominently promotes the Times in search results and on its homepage.

Drudge isn’t even carried in Google News, since the site merely aggregates links to articles.

Google is the most trafficked site in the U.S. as well as in the world.

Most of the time, Google News is full of articles by the left-leaning media critical of Trump and conservatism.

But Trump’s tweets changed all that. Reporters race to report on his tweets, filling up Google News with articles that are far more favorable to Trump, since there is so little room left for spin with his tweets. A quick perusal of Google News right now reveals this headline near the top, “Trump accuses Clinton of colluding with Democrats to defeat ‘Crazy Bernie Sanders.’” The Washington Post article acknowledges, “Trump took to Twitter Sunday morning…”

There really is very little way to write the headline to make Trump look bad. There wasn’t any extra information to glean something from outside of one short tweet.

Original Post 

Huge presidential win: I almost missed this one. This is a huge win for the president but the way CNBC presented the story, I almost missed it. First, it should have been "breaking news" and it was not. Second, it came as part of a low-key segment from the milk-toast CNBC White House correspondent, who seemed to almost say in passing that the Supreme Court has issued an emergency injunction against lower court actions that tried to hamstring Trump's "travel bans."

Presidential tweets: I generally don't try to read too much into the president's tweets. For me, they are generally very straightforward and don't require a lot of analysis. However, one of the president's tweets this a.m. seems to have a very different message regarding ObamaCare -- a message very different than what he has had in the past.

Two issues:

• first: during the campaign, it was "repeal and replace" -- no compromise on this; it would happen "day 1"
• second: the legislative process has been very, very difficult; but the president continues to push the process along; as recently as last week, his tweets or public statements remained positive and he continued to make telephone calls to senators to get them to support the GOP plan

But, now today, it looks like he is coming around to what others in the GOP have said: just let ObamaCare run its natural course.

His tweet: 

Republican Senators are working very hard to get there, with no help from the Democrats. Not easy! Perhaps just let ObamaCare crash & burn!

For me, I have no idea why the GOP would want to sign off any national health care bill. It is a lose-lose.

By the way, as noted earlier, President Trump can easily weigh in on ObamaCare using executive orders. In fact, I am somewhat perplexed he did not do more along that line while waiting for Congress to get its act together.