Even Fox News can’t figure out what to do with this Trump scandal
On Sunday night, one of the biggest bombshells of the election may have dropped. Of course, Donald Trump is capable of doing and has done much worse than failing to pay any taxes at all for most of the past 15 years, but this is probably a bigger deal than anything outrageously offensive he’s said between now and 2015, because it’s all in how Donald Trump perceives it. He doesn’t care if his supposed enemies think he’s a bigot or a bully – but he really doesn’t want to be seen as a loser or as weak, and he can’t bring himself to accept that he’s anything besides the ingenious billionaire he always props himself up as.
This poses a bit of a problem, to say the least. Of course, Donald Trump went about things in the usual way – screaming and throwing a tantrum, which he’s currently on the third day of doing. The trouble is that unlike his past scandals, it’s pretty hard to find the right way to spin this in Trump’s favor. The Access Hollywood tape was spun as just being “locker room talk,” for example, and eventually brought a few reluctant Republicans back to Trump.
Now, Trump’s spin doctors at Fox News are desperately trying to find a strategy, and their political editor Chris Stirewalt has come right out to say it: “On the one hand, he says it’s totally fake news, but also then he has to say it was “illegally gotten.”
Given the way we’ve seen Donald Trump carry himself lately, this is a bit of a tall order and the most likely situation is that he’ll never fully make up his mind and swap out one or the other on any given day – but the tell here is that Trump’s people don’t know what to make of it at a point where more bombshells are likely to follow. Now that the media’s focus will be on Trump’s tax returns for at least the next week, momentum is on our side – and why we need to drive up Joe Biden’s numbers by donating and phone banking to get him elected on November 3.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making