Daily Archives: June 19, 2017

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Monday that it is possible we will have an answer by the end of this week as to whether tapes really do exist of President Trumps conversations with former FBI Director James Comey or if the President of the United States, when he tweeted suggesting there might be tapes, was just making shit up.

Maybe not coincidentally, Trump has a deadline of the end of this week to turn over to the House Intel Committee all memos about, and any tapes of, conversations with Comey.

Ten days ago, Trumpagain dodged a question as to whether he did, as he hinted, tape conversations with the FBI director, as he had suggested in a tweet shortly after sacking Comey.

Well, I will tell you about that, sometime in the very near future, Trump sidestepped when a reporter directly asked him, during a Rose Garden news conference, whether the tapes actually exist.

Addressing the questions at a joint presser with Romania President Klaus Iohannis, reporters noted Trump was hinting the tapes exist. Im not hinting anything. Ill tell you over a very short period of time, Trump shot back. Oh youre going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer, he added as reporters kept lobbing more tape questions. Back then, Spicer told reporters, in response to questions as to when they would have an answer on Trump tapes: When hes ready. Just watch the helicopter.

In May, Trump tweeted, the day after sacking Comey, James Comey better hope there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

Trumps tweet seemed to suggest that POTUS had recorded those conversations, though he refused to elaborate in a Fox News Channel interview days later. The tweet triggered TV news pundit to talk again of Richard Nixon and Watergate. Those pundits thought Trump ought to know that if he did record that dinner or those two phone calls he does not own them; they are federal records, thanks to Nixon.

Speaking of tapes, no audio or video exists of todays tape teaser by Spicer. Thats because Mondays White House Press briefing banned video or audio recording of the press gathering. Team Trump is trying to keep press focus off the investigation of Russian meddling with the election and whether there was any collusion in that effort by members of his campaign.

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Donald Trump Tape Tease: Sean Spicer Says Big Reveal Possible At Week's End - Deadline

Unlike most presidents, who keep the public at arm's-length, President Trump appears to let us into his head with his constant tweeting. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Unlike most presidents, who keep the public at arm's-length, President Trump appears to let us into his head with his constant tweeting.

President Trump did it again on Twitter late last week.

"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt," he tweeted Friday morning.

Once again, a Trump tweet set off a media frenzy, this time making everyone wonder whether he was indeed confirming that he was under investigation for obstruction of justice. (The White House later said the tweet was not confirmation that Trump has been informed that he is under investigation.)

This isn't the first time that Trump has made trouble for himself in his tweets (see: the tweet that a judge recently cited in once again blocking Trump's travel ban). But his tweets are more than a potential legal liability, and they're even more than fodder for the occasional breaking news alert his Twitter feed is groundbreaking in that he seems to be letting us inside his head. And in doing so, he is the first president to narrate his presidency in real time.

But he is not just any kind of storyteller. He peppers those tweets with things that most politicians strain to hide: factual inaccuracies, evidence of character flaws, unsupported allegations.

Social media has given America President Donald Trump, unreliable narrator.

A point of view that clouds the story

Trump's Twitter account with its commentary on current events by one of the main players in those events could someday be an obsession of postmodern literature professors. And just as it's impossible to put down Catcher in the Rye or Lolita or Gone Girl, Trump's Twitter feed has captivated Americans' attention. Every ambiguous post sparks a debate about not only what he means but also what prompted it: What is motivating him today? Why say this, and why now?

In literature, an "unreliable narrator" is someone who tells the story while layering a clearly distorting lens over that reality there is a clear point of view (The Catcher in the Rye's angst-ridden teenager, Pale Fire's unhinged professor), and it shapes how the story is told. It doesn't necessarily imply malice (consider Huckleberry Finn or Tristram Shandy), but simply a point of view that clouds the story.

In The Art Of The Deal, Trump praised "truthful hyperbole" a kind of purposeful truth-stretching to get people "excited." In other words, he has shown a willingness to distort the facts. With his regular usage of factual inaccuracies and disputes with the "fake media," Twitter Trump has given us a framework to figure out what exactly his lens on the world looks like.

Trump isn't entirely unique in this regard: Everyone is an unreliable narrator in some way. And Americans often regard politicians in general as unreliable narrators. When politicians explain their views of the world, we can easily guess at their basic motivations: advancing policies, winning for their party, protecting their legacies.

And that means we can easily determine for ourselves how big the gap is between what any given politician says and what we perceive to be factually true.

But with every Trump tweet, Americans have the unique opportunity to measure and remeasure that gap.

Trump demands our attention over and over again

We occasionally get glimpses of presidents' inner lives (like Obama tearfully admitting his fury over the Sandy Hook shooting). And after presidencies, we get memoirs (George W. Bush writing about his decider-ness in Decision Points).

However, no president has narrated his presidency so heavily in real time. And Trump adds to that an aggressively unfiltered voice his tweets present a man willing to be impulsive, say things that aren't true and take aim not only at members of his own party but also at his own administration. His Twitter feed seems to let us know when he wakes up, when he goes to bed, what he is obsessing over at the moment and even which cable news outlets he is watching.

It's the kind of hints that J.D. Salinger has Holden Caulfield drop for us in The Catcher in the Rye. Yes, Holden tells us what he is doing, but Salinger wants us to also pay attention to the lens through which Holden views the world. Holden himself is the story.

That second part drawing our attention not only to the story but also to the point of view it's coming from is what makes this kind of story compelling. A third-person Catcher in the Rye would be hopelessly dull.

Similarly, up until now, the presidency has largely been narrated in the third person, by the media, by political scientists, by pundits (some of them unreliable themselves).

We've been able to glean all of those usual political motivations from past presidents, but it has been dull in comparison to what we could only imagine was going on in their heads. What was going on in Clinton's brain when he hit on a young intern? What did George W. Bush think on Sept. 11, 2001? We had no way of knowing in the moment.

Is Donald Trump actually Nabokov?

Candidate Trump holds up his book "The Art of the Deal," given to him by a fan in Birmingham, Ala. In the book, he espouses "truthful hyperbole." Eric Schultz/AP hide caption

Candidate Trump holds up his book "The Art of the Deal," given to him by a fan in Birmingham, Ala. In the book, he espouses "truthful hyperbole."

If Trump is indeed the unreliable narrator, his Twitter feed perhaps best resembles Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, considered one of the greatest works of 20th century fiction.

A quick summary: In Pale Fire, a fictional poet and professor named John Shade writes a 999-line poem, which is presented near the start of the book. The poem is, by turns, poignant, mundane, funny and wrenching, telling about Shade's youth, his marriage, his daughter's suicide and his struggle to come to terms with death.

After Shade's death, a fellow professor, Charles Kinbote, writes a 200-page analysis of the poem. That analysis is a total misreading Kinbote believes the poem to be about himself, and he also claims to be the exiled king of a foreign country named Zembla. And yet, even while it's a rambling, deranged delusion of grandeur, it's also utterly captivating.

Kinbote's analysis seems to have entirely lost touch with reality in a way that Trump's tweets have not. But just as the reader can look at the "reality" of the poem and then at Kinbote's commentary to decide how big the gap between reality and his commentary is, we can see what is going on in the real world, then look at Trump's tweets and decide for ourselves how big that gap is.

And on top of all that, there is yet another layer.

After all, Trump's tweets have led to endless conjecturing about why he tweets. Does he simply lack a filter? Is it red meat for his base? Is he carefully planting distractions when the news isn't going his way? Does he secretly want his executive order to fail? Is covfefe a coded message????

Literary critic Wayne Booth, who is credited with coining the term "unreliable narrator," expounded on what makes this kind of narrator work.

"All of the great uses of unreliable narration depend for their success on far more subtle effects than merely flattering the reader or making him work," he wrote in his The Rhetoric of Fiction. "Whenever an author conveys to his reader an unspoken point, he creates a sense of collusion against all those, whether in the story or out of it, who do not get that point."

So the question is who is colluding with us as readers. Essentially, one of the great debates over Trump's tweets boils down to this: Is Trump Kinbote, or is he Nabokov?

Almost 70 percent of voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, think Trump tweets too much, according a recent poll. J. David Ake/AP hide caption

Almost 70 percent of voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, think Trump tweets too much, according a recent poll.

At one extreme, some Trump opponents consider him to be Kinbote delusional or, at the very least, showing his weaknesses while being oblivious to the fact that he is doing it. There is a sort of collusion for these readers in the sense that Trump is unconsciously colluding with them by in their minds letting them know how far his perceptions are from reality.

At the other extreme, some supporters consider Trump to be Nabokov. They think he is playing "four-dimensional chess." Just as readers "collude" with Nabokov, seeing Kinbote's flaws as Nabokov lays them out, some Trump supporters feel they are colluding with the real-life Trump, the one who carefully draws our attention away from scandals and uses secret codes.

This point of view squares with his affinity for "truthful hyperbole." (But then again, potentially damaging tweets like his Friday message about being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey undermine this point of view.)

In each case, each group feels like it's privy to a secret the other group just doesn't get.

The upshot seems to be that Trump has discovered a way to push the president of the United States even further into the spotlight. As Catcher in the Rye makes Holden's internal monologue a part of the story, Trump has found a way to make the president not just a person who does things; he is a person whose very thoughts seem to be on display. (And, as has been reported, Trump loves being the center of attention.)

But it's also possible that he loses something in the process namely, a portion of his potential symbolic status. The president is always a symbol. Yes, he gives off flashes of humanity from time to time, but he exists at a remove from Americans. And despite the constant clamoring for "authenticity," this kind of remove is, arguably, how many Americans want it.

"People want the president to be a symbol, like they want the monarch to be a symbol, but there's always this curiosity about the gossip about the royal family," Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, told NPR last month. "But we don't know, and we get to muse about it. There's a comfort level about not knowing."

That arm's-length president, shown in TV news shots shaking hands and striding purposefully from meeting to meeting, is the norm. But then, Trump isn't one for norms. Our brains try to push him to that arm's-length symbolic status we're used to, but he resists, yanking us back in. Every tweet eliminates the distance, putting us right inside his head with him (or, some might argue, that is what he wants us to believe).

This kind of whiplash happens in books like Pale Fire as well. The story is humming along, but then it jolts to a stop. Wait. Am I being played?

That whiplash may be one reason why Americans seem to be souring on his Twitter feed. Fully 69 percent of voters, including 53 percent of Republicans, believe the president tweets too much, according to a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll.

The difference between Trump and Kinbote, of course, is that Trump is real, and his policies have real effects on people. So do his tweets, says one literature professor, creating a sort of Rube Goldberg machine of tweets.

"Especially in real time, the narrator has to keep going on the same storyline," said Nathalie Cooke, professor of literature at Montreal's McGill University. "So as Trump fuels the storyline with the populist Trump, the polarization in his readers actually fuels the continuation of the story."

And as the story continues, Trump has more to tweet about, creating more news and more fodder for that polarization among readers about whether he's Kinbote or Nabokov. That kind of polarization arguably fuels even more tweets tweets in which he further intensifies his us-vs.-them point of view.

But Trump's tweeting is also a risky pastime. His tweets have weakened the case for his "travel ban," for example. And his Friday tweet further intensified the nation's focus on the Trump-Russia investigations storyline.

And this is the nature of the dilemma that Trump's addictive Twitter account presents. Unreliable narrators are fascinating, but it's often because they say too much.

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President Donald Trump, Unreliable Narrator : NPR - NPR

Donald Trump loves championing the Rasmussen Reports poll.Just last week he tweeted out the survey, happily noting that it had pegged his approval rating at 50 percent, which is by no means great but far better than his average in other polls.

But it's far less likely the president will promote the polling company's latest findings,which found his approvalrating had fallen 2 percentage points over the weekend.

The latest daily tracking survey from Rasmussen pegged Trump's approval at 48 percent, down from 50 percent Friday. Disapproval of the president rose to 51 percent in the new poll, from 50 percent. The Rasmussen survey samples 1,500 likely voters over a three-day period and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

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Rasmussen, which is generally considered to be right-leaning,has found far better results for Trump than most other polling outfits. For instance, the latest survey from Gallup, on Sunday, found the president's approval rating to be nearly 10 points lower than where Rasmussen had it on Monday. Gallup pegged Trump's approval rating at 39 percent and his disapproval rating at 55 percent. That's actually a slight improvement on where Trump stood in the Gallup poll earlier in the week,when he droppedto36 percent approval, just 1 percentage point better than his all-time low in late March.

The weighted average from data-focused website FiveThirtyEight putTrump's support at 37.8 percent Monday, but it had yet to recalculate with the drop in the Rasmussen survey. Trump's disapproval rating was 55.4 percent in theFiveThirtyEightaverage, which accounts for a poll's quality, sample size and any partisan leanings.

Trump's approval rating has steadily declined during his challenging first months in the White House. The investigations into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, which the intelligence community says interfered in the 2016 election, have often dominated the news.

Especially worrying for the White House are recent surveys that found some of the voters who helped elect Trump seem to be navigating away from the president. In just one month, the number of Republicans who saidAmerica was on the right track fell 17 percentage points, according a Gallup survey last week.

AnAssociated Press-NORCCenter for Public Affairs Research survey last week found that disapproval among GOP voters had risen to about 25 percent. The same poll found that only50 percent of whites without a college degree approve of the job the president is doing. Last November, sixty-six percent of whites without a college degree voted for Trump.

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Donald Trump's Favorite Poll Shows Approval Rating Drop - Newsweek

House Of Lies creator Matthew Carnahan is furious about President Donald Trumps decision to roll back relations with Cuba. Carnahan shot the Showtime series fifth-season finale in Havana last year and plans to return to shoot a new series there entirely but fears the new restrictions could make it more difficult for future collaborations between Cuban and American filmmakers.

Im f*cking pissed, he told Deadline. Im really f*cking pissed. Its idiocy, plain and simple.

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On Friday, Trump announced his decision to strictly enforce exemptions that allow travel between the U.S. and Cuba and prohibit commerce with Cuban businesses that are owned by the Cuban military or intelligence services, which in a totalitarian regime are not always easy to separate from private enterprises.

American culture dominates the world more than the U.S. military ever could or would want to. But Carnahan sees this change of course as a retreat from engaging with the people of Cuba, and a return to a policy thats failed for more than 50 years.

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Shooting in Cuba was remarkable and transformative for me personally, he said. I dont think Ive ever worked with a more enthusiastic and professional group, and a crew that was really genuinely excited to come to work every day. They were so aware of the moment that this was the first American show in 50-plus years to shoot there, and they wanted nothing more than to continue to be able to collaborate in the future.

I know people there who support the film business the small and struggling prop houses, the camera and lighting places, he said. I know people there who run restaurants in their homes, called paladares. These are places that struggle because of the system they work in. But if the idea is to foster American democratic values and business practices, this shift in polices is a disastrous idea, and all it will do is punish these people, and more likely, further empower the parts of the regime that we would all like to see sink into the background.

How disruptive the new rules will be is going to depend on how strenuously the U.S. enforces this policy, and thats going to determine how bad its going to get for Cubans and small business owners, he said. I think its really going hurt the Airbnbers and the restaurateurs and the people at the fringes of the new economy, where there is this fragile budding growth. Thats the danger that these buds will wither up and die.

The way Trump has laid out the new policy, he said, is that they want to withdraw support from anything that can profit the military. Its a socialist state, so theres a massive width of possible interpretation of that. It could decimate production, but maybe the ministry of culture or the ministry of film and television doesnt enter into the world of the Cuban military.

But if its really about pushing forward American democratic values, promoting free trade and capitalism and the things that Trump purports wanting to bring to Cuba, the best way is to allow our film and TV industry to go down there and quote-unquote infect the Cuban culture with our way of life.

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Carnahan said hes writing a new show, titledEl Showrunner, which will shoot entirely in Cuba. Its utterly subversive and will introduce ideas to my Cuban crew that even 10 years ago would have been completely unthinkable for the Cuban regime to allow to cross their borders. The story is kind of a deconstructed meta-version of Our Man In Havana, and deals with ideas about undermining the socialist state. Its still in the conceptual stage, but Im definitely still planning to go back.

Getting State Department approval to film House Of Lies in Cuba wasnt easy, even under President Barack Obamas breakthrough policy. It was always the American government, even under Obama, that was the most prickly, he said.

The episode of House Of Lies that filmed in Havana was also comedically very subversive, he said. It talks about a couple of brothers, loosely based on the Koch brothers, who come to rape and pillage Cuba. The Cuban liaison with the Cuban film community didnt censure one word. They took it as a kind of good-natured cultural exchange and all in good fun.

As for the current Castro in power in Cuba, Carnahan said, This is not your fathers regime. This is potentially a very willing partner to our industry, and they have a wealth of remarkable acting and directing talent. And they are excited to work with us on either side of our borders. Thats what should be happening a genuine cultural exchange. It brings the best of American business and ideals to this amazing place. Thats what we should be doing.

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'House Of Lies' Creator Calls Donald Trump's Cuba Policy Idiocy - Deadline