EDITORIAL: Stop Obsessing Over Golden Showers and Follow Some Golden Rules

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On Wednesday, the American people endured the dumpster fire that was Donald Trump’s inaugural news conference as president-elect. Despite countless attempts to remain gracious, Mr. Trump quickly became overwhelmed by a rabble of feckless reporters who refused to even entertain the thought of a cordial tone. After the smoke cleared from the battlefield, Trump again emerged victorious. “I won,” he said, referencing the election and the blitzkrieg orchestrated by the subversive media. And like Charlie Sheen, he’s still winning. Point is, the press could still serve a purpose. And if they want to be part of this democracy, they’ll need to learn new strategies. As a conservative journalist, politician and business tycoon, I’m here to teach so-called news people the principles of covering strong Republican rulers.

Surprise Attacks and Sabotage, Unsurprising Trump Victory

Within minutes of opening the meeting, vicious liberal journalists harangued their soon-to-be commander with vitriol, unfounded accusations and agenda-laden questions -- all of it underscored with the juvenile glee that accompanies a predilection for bathroom humor among the immature. You know the state of journalism is truly in the toilet when discussions of toilets and their contents become “important” topics in the national conversation, let alone a paper’s lede.

But Trump, demonstrating the leadership qualities that won him the election, fired back with volleys of painfully astute denouncements. He exposed BuzzFeed as a “failing pile of garbage,” CNN as “fake news” and generally told the rest of the lamestream media to shove it. As the New York Times observed, Trump “more or less told the whole lot of reporters at Trump Tower to stuff it when it comes to his unreleased tax returns because everyday Americans don’t care and, anyway, ‘I won.’”

The Times is correct. Americans don’t care about Trump’s tax returns. They care about military, homeland, economic and labor leadership. They care about protecting Christianity from menacing gays, and they care about restoring the traditional family by putting uppity women back in their kitchens. That’s why they fought to install Trump into the Oval Office. That’s why he rose to power with an historic mandate. He won. And I’ll say it again: like Charlie Sheen, he’s still winning.

Trump is not only a marvelous mastermind when it comes to manipulating the weak-minded and uneducated, he’s also one of the country’s most articulate communicators. His uncanny command of social media shows that Trump is capable of serving as his own his press corps. To date, no media organization has been able to scoop Trump on Trump. But it’s unreasonable to expect that Trump can sustain a 24-hour presence on Twitter. This became especially clear when my party realized that the construction of the Mexico wall could prohibit shipments of cocaine into America by Hispanic drug lords.

So yes, the press matters. Or at least the notion of the press. Our current reporters, however, need some help. Their racy rhetoric, fancy words and high ideals may sway the emotions of tree-hugging liberal elites -- you know, all those idiots who fill their bookcases with impressive literature they’ve never read or finished, like Infinite Jest and Ulysses and A Brief History of Time and the Bible -- but their tactics fail when falling on the wiser, deafer ears of conservatives.

Convincing a Republican to consider your point-of-view requires reason and sense. That’s why today’s press must take a more thoughtful approach, grounded in the Socratic method. So I’d like to go over the filters and show journalists how to win Trump over.

Truth is Relative and Irrelevant

The first question most reporters would ask usually concerns the veracity of the intelligence they receive. Is it true? That would seem logical, but truth is irrelevant. So forget it from here on out.

Getting tangled in abstract philosophies like truth is the same futile, academic exercise that makes reporters so hostile and pointless to conservatives. Be honest with yourselves. Truth is a relative concept, and you know it. Nothing is actually true. Consider the striking research published by Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at University of California, Irvine. As The Atlantic writes of Hoffman’s case against reality:

Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Truth is an illusion. Why obsess over it? The world we idealize in our minds is a place where everything is possible. Therefore, nothing can be true. Truth, theoretically, precludes possibilities by locking out alternative or conflicting ideas as falsehoods. Truth becomes its own fabrication in an infinite multiverse of equally relative fabrications, which are themselves relative truths.

We know God exists, but we can’t prove it. We know that a force called gravity binds us to the planet’s surface, yet physicists classify it as a theory. You may say it’s raining out, and I may say it’s sprinkling. Reporters at fake news outlets may say people are being urinated on. All relative.

Some people say a glass is half full, others call it half empty. And that’s no truth at all. Is water taking up half the glass, or is the vessel allowing the liquid to occupy half its space?

We are told Obama is from Chicago. The birth certificate he forged indicates that he’s from Hawaii. His father is Kenyan. If you are born in America to an Asian parent and you look Asian, do you describe yourself as Asian on census and employment forms? Yes. So, Obama is Kenyan. But he’s also not. Again, truth is a distraction to what matters.

Consider the Affordable Care Act we’re about to gut. Is it affordable? No. Are angry insurers providing coverage through state exchanges? No, many are not. So there’s also no care. When you remove “affordable” and “care,” you’re left with an empty act. It’s a lie that somehow manages to extend medical benefits to 20 million Americans who were previously ineligible to receive them. Truth and reality do not exist as universal, objectively validated facts.

Does It Matter?

The question the White House Press Corps must consider above all others is: Does it matter?

As most people know, CNN reported on a 35-page dossier that purported to provide evidence of Russian interference with the election. The material also contained lurid accusations that Trump paid prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” show in Moscow -- sexually fetishized urination, which allegedly dampened a bed once occupied by President Obama while he stayed at the same hotel. Of course, no official in the U.S. intelligence community has verified the claims of Russian collusion or Trump’s deviant sexual perversions.

Is this true? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Personally, I doubt it. I have been associated with the Republican Party and Donald Trump for many years. In all that time, I have never once witnessed Mr. Trump paying any vendor for services rendered. It seems highly unlikely he paid for prostitutes. Of course, I also overhear scores of Americans expressing a passionate desire to pee on Trump -- for free.

These stories are pushed by professional liars. The intelligence community is a hive of spies -- operatives with false identities, names, agendas and jobs. They are often required to lie to their families and friends. Why should we believe anything presented by such a lot? And journalists are writers. I’m going to quote one of the world’s most famous authors for this. At the 2016 National Book Festival, Stephen King confessed to the audience: “Because, you know, writers are friggin’ liars. That’s what we do.”

So the question becomes, does it matter? Did it matter when the nation discovered that beloved President Bill Clinton had accessorized Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress with a pearl necklace? No. In fact, after learning that Clinton dusted a White House intern with his Arkansas Anthrax, the former president’s approval rating soared.

Should reporters care whether Trump took a holiday to enjoy a rousing round of Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Tsar? If he wants to go Singing in Russian Rain or partake of something called a Moscow Mud Pie, what business is it of ours?

Let’s face it, if your goal is to make Trump look bad, revealing his disturbing turn-ons only increases his appeal. More Republican politicians have been caught in bathroom sex scandals than transgender people. We’re not going to cast aspersions on this behavior. You will fail if this is all the ammunition you’ve got. It doesn’t matter.

Is the Information Necessary?

The next question reporters must ask themselves before putting pen to paper: Is the information or story necessary to Mr. Trump? When covering an event, a policy decision or even personal aspects of the president, the information must be necessary to his functions in the role. The story you publish should inform the decisions he must make as the most powerful leader in the free world.

Are you planning to draft a sensational gossip piece about Mr. Trump’s inappropriate relationship with his daughter? That’s not necessary. Trump knows how he feels about Ivanka, and he’s admitted as much several times. Telling your readers that Donald Trump is having sex with Ivanka is not news.

Effective articles explore issues that resonate with Trump’s plans. Focus on isolating America from Mexican rapists, protecting police officers from unarmed black teens and saving society from female social justice warriors who want to use their vaginas as weapons instead of incubators for God-given life.

(c) 2017. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. All articles are works of satire. See disclaimers.