Opinion: Trump is selling himself. Readers say the L.A. Times shouldn’t help.
The Los Angeles Times has a serious credibility challenge on its hands with its Trump-is-so-bad-he-shouldn’t-ever-be-president cover. It’s the latest story in this ongoing saga in which the newspaper has treated President Donald Trump like a bumbling amateur while he has treated everything it says and does with contempt, contempt for its readers, contempt for his critics, contempt for the media and most of all contempt for truth.
The Times has been a leader in this, but it has not chosen to do anything about it.
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In fact, it has been too busy attacking the president for doing less wrong than it did during the campaign. In its coverage, the Times had little to show for the fact that Trump has the better story.
The most consequential Trump story of all is the decision by the Republican-controlled Senate to block the appointment of a special investigator to look into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That investigation would have been the equivalent of a grand jury, and it would have been a serious assault on a central premise of the Obama Justice Department and the intelligence community’s narrative of Russian meddling. It would have made it abundantly clear — if only on a basic level of fact — that the Russian interference story is a whole lot worse than the Steele dossier that was in many ways the story that was sold to Trump voters. And it would have made clear that the Obama administration acted in good faith to stop what it thought was a serious threat in Russia’s cyber campaign to subvert the democratic process.
The Senate’s decision, and the decision of the Justice Department and of Trump’s own Justice Department to allow a federal investigation that would have been the equivalent of a grand jury, is a very serious mistake that is being compounded by Trump’s own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who apparently believes it is his duty to protect the president from a criminal investigation.
For Trump, the decision to hire this Russian-hater to the Justice Department has been a disaster from start to finish because it meant the Justice Department would take the side of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign against Trump. It is not yet clear, however, whether Trump will fire Sessions. It is clear he feels bound to fire