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Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Trump Really Is A Master of The News Cycle

It's amazing to watch the reaction today to a comment made by Donald Trump at a news conference this morning.  First of all, Trump held a press conference, like he does on most days.  He was asked about the hacking of the DNC and the emails released by Wikileaks a few days ago.  He was also asked about the Democrats' crazy charge that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC in order to help Trump.  Trump pointed out that he has no business ties to Russia.  He has no investments there and no dealings with the Russians.  When he got another question, Trump quipped that if it really was the Russians who hacked the DNC, then maybe they could also find Hillary's missing 30,000 emails and give them to the FBI.

That was it.  The media went crazy.  The Clinton campaign released a statement condemning Trump for calling on a foreign power to interfere with our elections.  The sanctimonious anti-Trump pundits started their barrage against Trump for his "improper" statement.  The whole Washington establishment started ginning up outrage over a joke made by Trump.

But let's step back from all this for a moment.  The truth is that it was a brilliant move by Trump.  Yesterday, the Democrats nominated Hillary as the first woman candidate ever for president from a major party.  And what is the media focused on?  TRUMP.  What is the subject of discussion?  TRUMP?  With that one joke and the Clinton/media predictable response of phony outrage, Trump is dominating the news during the Democrat convention and just when Hillary has been nominated.

The funniest thing is that very few Americans other than die hard Hillary supporters are going to believe the charge that Trump actually wanted the Russians to get involved in hacking to find Hillary's missing emails.  It was a rather obvious sarcastic joke.  So with one line Trump has sent the entire press corps and the Clinton campaign running after a meaningless subject.  It's Hillary and her media supporters who look silly, not Trump.

And there's one final note here:  the ferocity of the response to Trump suggesting, even in jest, a way to retrieve Hillary's deleted emails shows that there really must be a lot of damaging stuff there.

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