On Tuesday evening, when the speculation about Trump’s trip to Mexico was stirring around, at least a couple of commentators were asking why Trump scheduled his “major” immigration speech in the evening — early evening in the west, but after 10pm in the east. They commented that evenings are for rally speeches, but policy speeches are supposed to occur in the daytime.
The timing of newspaper press deadlines means that much of the story had to be written ahead of time, and then quickly edited right before it goes to print. But, with the NY Times, we’re talking about more than one newspaper, because the NY Times syndicates its articles to hundreds of smaller newspapers around the country.
TPM posted a pair of stories that seem to bookend the real outcome — the press corps got bamboozled and in the process delivered the mixed messages that the Trump campaign wants. As long as the press keeps covering the mixed messages, there’s no substantive coverage of what any of the purported policies actually mean. No hard questions. No factual analysis. Just media exposure for its own sake. No different than celebrities who are famous for being famous. Exactly the way that Trump likes it.
Trump punk’d them into regurgitating the daytime narrative that his campaign was about to pivot, that he looked and acted semi-presidential in Mexico City. And then in his prime time speech, he pivoted all the way back to where he started last summer — with the wall, mass deportations, goon squads, criminal aliens, etc.
First, Lauren Fox and Annie Rees compiled an excellent timeline of the Trump campaign’s back-and-forth flip-flopping on immigration since August 21.
Bamboozled! What Made Everyone Think Trump Was Changing On Immigration?
There was quite the hype going into Donald Trump's immigration speech Wednesday night. Trump and a fresh-faced campaign manager had kept us on the edge of our seats. There was a last-minute diplomatic meeting with the president of Mexico for goodness sake. There was a press conference hours before his address in which Trump himself said the words "I happen to have a tremendous feeling for Mexican Americans."
This, many Republicans hoped, sounded like a candidate who was going to shift, change, soften, moderate ... PIVOT, if you will (sorry, we had to say it).
It was all a ruse, though. What we were left with was the Trump we have always known.
But, TPM’s article on the extensive rewriting of the NY Times article seems to clue in that the late timing of the immigration speech was intentional. That the Trump campaign purposely muddied the narrative. The NY Times seemed to have much of the story already written in advance, and when the Trump campaign pulled off the bait-and-switch, they were in full-on damage control.
But, as the TPM article shows, the original botched story went out and got into print with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram headline declaring “Trump Drops Deportation Plan.” Presumably the Star-Telegram is one among many newspapers that reprint articles from the NY Times, and put the mangled story into print.
NYT Scrambles To Rewrite Botched Story On Trump’s Immigration Speech
About an hour after the original story was published, the story underwent a substantial rewrite to eliminate language about Mexico pitching in to solve the immigration crisis.
The Times didn't run an editor's note explaining the story had been substantively changed, but the edit-tracking site NewsDiff clearly shows the extent of the revisions.
I think it was pointed out on Rachel Maddow’s show, but these mixed messages are exactly what Trump wants. It keeps him implanted into the news cycle, and this kind of constant shifting prevents any substantive policy discussion or even simple questions about what any of it means. If nobody knows what policy is being proposed, then nobody can analyze it. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, where the flip-flopping itself becomes the story rather than the actual policy or the lies that underpin Trump’s rhetoric.
It’s very clear that Trump hasn’t a clue about details of how he’s going to carry out any of his proposals. Then again, this morning the press corps was back to reporting on Trump’s latest “softening” rhetoric, just as they are still reporting about last night’s speech.
There’s nothing about clarity. This is a house of smoke and mirrors. Nothing substantive and nothing even real. It’s a warped dystopian Halloween maze that Trump is trying to sell as the world that we inhabit.
