Donald Trump finally gives out his Fake News Awards, and it’s even more embarrassing than imagined
Donald Trump spent two weeks hyping the “Fake News Awards” that he promised to hand out to journalists he doesn’t like. After announcing a specific date and time for the deranged faux-award show, Trump went so far as to postpone it to a different date and time. That date finally arrived today. His own people signaled earlier today that it might not happen after all, but this evening Trump has finally posted his awards.. and it’s even more embarrassing for him than you were expecting.
So who won Trump’s Fake News Awards? We still have no idea, because Trump posted them on a website that isn’t working. He tweeted “And the FAKE NEWS winners are…” along with a link to an article titled “The Highly Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards.” Notably, the article is hosted on gop.com, the official website for the Republican Party. Yet the link simply doesn’t work, instead displaying an error message.
Based on the Alexa traffic ranking for gop.com, there is no reason to expect that the site crashed because Trump’s tweet sent it too much traffic. In fact, the rest of the gop.com website is loading just fine; it’s only the “Fake News Awards” page of the site that’s displaying an error message. That means Trump tweeted a link to the awards before they had even been uploaded. So this is even more embarrassing for him than imagined.
However, it’s notable that Donald Trump’s “Fake News Awards” are hosted on the official Republican Party website. Even as various Republicans including Jeff Flake and John McCain resumed their attacks on Trump’s character today, it appears the GOP leadership is still playing along with Trump’s demented lunacy – at least for now. Update: the Fake News Awards have finally been posted. They’re essentially just a rundown of ten news stories that Trump accused of being fake over the past year. Yawn. Click here for Real news.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report