Dribs, drabs or drips? You make the call

B. Jay Cooper
6 min readMar 7

3/7/2023

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The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Trump on the stump. Former President Trump appeared on home turf this weekend when he spoke for two hours(!) to his homies at CPAC, an organization that has morphed from conservative Republicans to crazy people. The two hours consisted of riffs we’ve all heard before and a couple of new ones. (“I am your retribution!”) But, according to CNN’s ace fact-checker Daniel Dale, Trump was up to his old tricks/lies (read for yourself: https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/06/exp-fact-checking-donald-trumps-cpac-speech.cnn). And he visited the site of the Ohio train derailment. While he didn’t toss bottles of Trump-branded water to the citizens, of course he promised he would send some. (Reminder: He never misses a commercial opportunity.)

Dirty little non-secrets. The Fox News channel was exposed via discovery in the Dominion billion-plus dollar defamation lawsuit when a bunch of texts were uncovered showing that the talking heads at Fox (Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and others) knew all along that the Trump camp was lying about the “fixed” 2020 election. In text after text it was clear they didn’t believe any of it but they still talked about it nightly to ensure good ratings. Of course, Fox is apparently not covering that lawsuit on air so its viewers, dominated by Trump voters, aren’t hearing the facts from Fox so they aren’t believing them. And with the new majority on the Supreme Court there are efforts being…

B. Jay Cooper

Former deputy White House press secretary (Reagan and Bush 41) and former head of communications at Republican Natl Committee. My blog: bjaycooper.com.