How does Donald Trump decide to go so far as to bar a reporter from his events? It apparently involves a lot of Google News printouts, a marker and a little help from his campaign spokeswoman.
A GQ profile of Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks published Monday detailed just how Trump goes about catching up on the news about his campaign—and how one article can get a writer banned from attending his events.
“She sees the tantrums, and there are tantrums,” an anonymous source who’s been with both Trump and Hicks told GQ. “He reads something he doesn’t like by a reporter, and it’s like, ‘This motherfucker! All right, fine. Hope?’ He circles it. ‘This guy’s banned! He’s banned for a while.’ That’s exactly how it works.”
According to the GQ report, each morning staffers print 30 to 50 Google News results for “Donald J. Trump” so he can peruse the articles. Trump then circles and annotates things he does and does not like so that scans of the marked-up reports can be sent back to the journalist.
Oddly enough, the GQ profile did not feature a single quote from Hicks herself; instead, the campaign elected to have Trump speak about Hicks while the press secretary sat in the room silently.
Trump’s strained relationship with the press is well-known and well-documented. The Trump campaign recently revoked The Washington Post’s press credentials and a Politico reporter was escorted out of a Trump event earlier this month after reporting from outside the press pen because he had been denied a press pass.
However, a “Ten” could piss on his shoes and still get credentials.
If he’d ban ALL reporters from his events, we wouldn’t have to worry about him any more.
Whoever takes up that thankless task needs to make sure that practice is stopped. One of the ‘attractions’ of the Trump campaign is that no one is never really certain what’s he going to say and at what time. If I’m this guy, this guy or whoever is stupid enough to take this job, ‘warts and all’ needs to be the standard practice starting today or else I’m still on the sidelines.
I’m sure he uses time-tested techniques suited to his great intellectual capacity in order to make decisions about journalists covering his campaign, probably the same techniques he uses for all decisions of his campaign, such as:
Eeny-meeny-miney-moe
Spin the bottle
Rock, paper, scissors
Mumbley-peg
Magic Eight-Ball (Katrina Pierson SWEARS by this one!)
Ouija board (just don’t use it in front of the Christianists!)