It's Okay If We Stop Paying Attention To Donald Trump
Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney and went further than any birther by "promising" to give $5 million dollars to the charity of President Obama's choice if the President would release his college and passport applications. When the election was called for Obama last night, no one thought Trump was going to be psyched about it. So why did this have to happen?
It's kind of a comfort that the argument that Trump's crackpot tweets were "getting an airing...so you might as well know about it" evidently was not compelling to Brian Williams, and that he was disgusted at whatever NBC News producer told him he had to read Donald Trump's tweets on a live national news broadcast, but that doesn't change the fact that Williams did read Donald Trump's tweets on a live national news broadcast.
For now, let's leave aside the negative news value of searching Twitter for supposedly noteworthy current-events commentary and treating them as though they have any weight or value -- and I say that as someone who enjoys tweeting about noteworthy current events. News producers have lots of time to kill, and on an election night there's more potential dead air than usual because of the way the actual information dribbles out, over a matter of hours. A Twitter keyword or hashtag search is easy, and broadcasting tweets is free. That doesn't make them interesting to watch...
...and given his known political leanings, Trump's tweets are among the least interesting on the internet. As he's grown ever more right-wing over the years, his views on any given subject are completely predictable; on the issue of Obama's legitimate -- even Fox News-minted -- re-election, a child could have guessed more or less what he'd say. Even those of us who have so little interest in Trump that we have blocked him so that we don't see it when he's (properly) retweeted have no choice but to keep up with his various rants because we follow people who hate-follow Trump and manually retweet him to add snitty comments. (It's still worth blocking him, though; it goes a long way toward filtering him out.) I get it, but it just underlines the point that NBC could have skipped Trump's Twitter meltdown. If you're anywhere near Twitter, you heard about it.
Furthermore, as grudging as "you might as well know about it" sounded coming out of Williams last night, it's still logic worth challenging, because...why? Why might we as well know what a real estate professional-cum-reality TV star thought about the election results -- particularly if equal time wasn't going to be given to Jeff Lewis or Sandra Rinomato? In addition to being a far-right partisan hack, Trump is, at best, an entertainment personality. Sure, he's extended his brand with fragrances and a fashion line and whatever the fuck else, but so have Lauren Conrad and Kim Kardashian, and I didn't see their tweets read out on NBC last night (though, admittedly, I went to bed around 2 AM EST). It would have been different had Williams said that, since Trump's tweets were potentially legally-actionable threats (...maybe that's going too far, but Trump did delete them later), NBC was firing him from The Apprentice. That didn't happen. So those forty-one seconds were a waste of my time (and Williams's).
On the other hand...maybe Williams's producer put Trump's tweets on the record so that they could be used in a future treason trial? Forget everything I just said: now I approve.