MICHAEL RUSSELL

Donald Trump’s approach to the media is a move out of Barack Obama’s playbook

Feb 17, 2017, 2:33 PM | Updated: 3:19 pm

President Donald Trump speaks while visiting the Boeing South Carolina facility in North Charleston...

President Donald Trump speaks while visiting the Boeing South Carolina facility in North Charleston, S.C., Friday, Feb. 17, 2017, to see the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Trump visited the plant before heading to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. for the weekend. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

I don’t care whether you are the biggest President Donald Trump supporter in the world or if you hate him, because everyone can agree that his Thursday press conference was nothing short of a thin slice of fried gold!

If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it online and be sure to grab the popcorn. Once again, it doesn’t matter if you love him or hate him, you will be entertained.

For the Trump supporters out there, I know you agree with me, so I would like to address the anti-Trump crowd who rolled their eyes while reading the first paragraph.

You have to admit that Trump is playing his own game and he is playing it masterfully.

If you think all of this is not planned out, calculated, and well-timed, you’re fooling yourself.

Let’s face it, Trump’s week has not been that great. He needed to remind his base exactly why they elected him. In other words, he had to go all Trump.

I’ll agree that his speech and off-the-cuff style is a minute-by-minute proposition. Heck, it’s a second-by-second proposition — rarely does a sentence end on the same topic in which the sentence began.

But he got the media whipped up in a frenzy and it was by design.

Trust in the media is sinking to new lows. He has the entire nation second-guessing what is real and what is fake.

I’ll stick to my guns on this one: It’s a brilliant move.

I also want to take a moment to remind the anti-Trump crowd that this is nothing new.

This is actually a move right out of the President Barack Obama playbook. Not to say that it’s right or wrong, it’s just to say that we have seen this a lot over the past eight years.

I can already see the emails hitting my inbox, “President Obama never called the news fake news.” You might be right.

He might not have used the exact term “fake news.” He used something else.

Remember during the Obamacare debates, when Obama would characterize anything that disagreed with his opinion about Obamacare as “mistruths” or “misinformation?” Even when he knew that the opposing opinions were spot on?

You see, it was the same tactic that would lead to us guessing what we were reading is fact or fiction and it worked. Obama used a bully pulpit to take down his opposition, their research and their stances by declaring all of it mistruths and misinformation.

Sound familiar?

So before we get all fired up about Trump taking on the media as fake news for any stance that disagrees with him let’s remember this is the same play for an old playbook.

A brilliant playbook.

Michael Russell

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Donald Trump’s approach to the media is a move out of Barack Obama’s playbook