The Washington Post broke the story but missed the joke when they reported that Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told senior lawmakers that “Putin pays” Trump. Now, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise says the episode is further evidence that Trump is “incredibly thick skinned.”
Because they missed the punchline, WaPo reported as a matter of fact that during a secretly-recorded meeting Republicans thought money was changing hands. According to the transcript, Scalise quipped that if the joke stayed private leadership would “know that we’re tight.”
A week later, Scalise tells the Washington Examiner that WaPo story reveals a biased media “who want to destroy Donald Trump” and are “fixated on anything that can be portrayed as negative.”
“I think most people are starting to see through that and so we’re just going to focus on doing our work with President Trump,” Scalise insisted. “You can see that he’s incredibly thick skinned for all the garbage they throw at him.” And frankly, he’s sort of right.
Newspapers have laid waste to entire forests in just four months with apocryphal stories. There was the one by the Associated Press about Trump mobilizing the National Guard. Another by the New Republic that Trump contracted a sexually transmitted disease like syphilis. The media has been wrong so often, about so much, that our own Becket Adams has put together a “catalogue of the media’s bias-fueled failure fest.”
A review of that database of bad journalism shows that Trump really has had to endure what Scalise rightly describes as “garbage.” But for all the abuse Trump endures, there’s clearly just as much complaining.
At the Coast Guard Academy last week, Trump declared that “no politician in history has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Before that dubious historical proclamation, the president was busy branding the press corps as “fake news.” The president was so irked by pesky reporters, CNN’s Jake Tapper reports, that he even suggested throwing journalists in jail.
Depending on one’s political persuasion, the evidence either paints Trump as an oversized cry baby or a magnanimous leader rising above the fray. Clearly Scalise believes it’s the latter.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
