Donald Trump just handed out his “Fake News Awards” as his own world burns

| 11:53 pm EST January 17, 2018
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

Donald Trump is a fake billionaire who is best known for hosting a television show where he fake fired people. He tells so many lies, fact checkers have trouble tracking them all. He’s so corrupt, he has to resort to yelling “fake news” whenever the media exposes yet another one of his embarrassing escapades or criminal scandals. On Wednesday evening, Trump finally handed out his long promised “Fake News Awards.” They were predictably a dud. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to take his eye off the ball.

Trump’s awards, which he hyped for two weeks and even postponed once, ended up being nothing more than a top ten list recapping some past instances in which he’s yelled “fake news.” There was nothing new here. It clearly wasn’t even written by Trump himself, so it didn’t provide him an opportunity to blow off steam. If it was intended as a distraction from Trump’s real scandals, it wasn’t controversial enough to make much of a dent.

In hindsight this was nothing more than Trump having impulsively announced that he was going to hand out Fake News Awards without ever intending to really do it, and then his people slapping together something crappy so that the media would stop asking if the awards were ever going to happen. Not only is Trump embarrassing himself with this nonsense to no real effect, he’s doing it as his world burns around him.

Even as Donald Trump was announcing his underwhelming Fake News Awards on Wednesday evening, his former right hand man Steve Bannon was finalizing his status as a cooperating witness against him with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was expressing exasperation at Trump’s inability to pick an immigration position ahead of a potential government shutdown. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was expressing fear about the shocking Democratic victory the night before in a special election in an extremely Republican district in Wisconsin. Trump’s world is on fire, and he’s playing stupid games. He’s not even playing them well.