 This is Stink Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. We're back. We're live. This is Stink Tech with Trump Week. Trump Week means a discussion of what Donald Trump's been doing the past few days, or the past couple of years, actually. That's Tim Epicella, and he is the host of On the Street, and what are you thinking Hawaii? And I'm Jay Fidel. We're going to talk about Trump Week today. So Tim, you know, we had an election on Tuesday, and after that election, the president did all these things on Wednesday morning, gosh, that's yesterday, to distract us from what happened on Tuesday night. And so it raises, especially with the press, and so it raises the whole question which we should discuss is his war on the press. Some people say his war with the press, I don't think so. It's his war on the press. So let's start in the first part of our discussion with when this first emerged, this war on the press. And actually, it wasn't after the election. It was before. Can we talk about it? Sure, Jay. First off, thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it very much. Well, you knew the second he came down the escalator, and he started setting his agenda on how he was going to become the next president of the United States. The press was right in there, at the beginning of all his rallies, you know, he was accusing the press of not showing the crowd size, you know, how big his rallies were. He was pointing out certain members of CNN and MSNBC as dishonest. He was kind of dishonest reporters, and he was singling them out at during those rallies, which could have resulted in violence against those reporters. So that was the very start of it. And then this term, fake news emerged, came from him. What's the point of fake news? I mean, where does that fit in this continuum of the war on the press? Well, I don't know if this is a, I don't know if there's someone on his staff that is a master chessman and looks at the big game and figures out the chess strategies, 10 spaces, or 10 moves in advance. But in my mind, if Donald Trump knew that he was going to sooner or later be under investigation, what's the most expedient thing to do to get out of it? And that is to basically label the press as fake news, as dishonest brokers, as non-credible deliverer of messages and media and facts, delegitimize those people so that no matter what they report in the future, years, you know, two years or three years ahead of, you know, in the future, whatever they say will be discounted by his 40%. Right. Simple. It's like calling an election rigged before the election happens. So you reserve- He already did it. He already did that, right? He did that. Yeah. And you're reserving the option to contest the election by calling it rigged even before it happens. That's really interesting. And it goes back to his earlier times in real estate in New York, where he watched everything that happened on the media. He called in phony tips with phony names. He manipulated the media as much as he could. He studied that his entire career in real estate in New York. And we should have known. We saw it emerging, you know, even in the campaigns of what a master press manipulator he is. It's not only that he fights with them. He tries to manipulate what they say. Well, he throws the bait out. Unfortunately, the media takes it. Yeah. And he's already planned on them taking the bait, and then he's got his strategies already lined up on how to deal with that. And that's when is the press and the media going to stop and realize we're just lemmings following a news story that he set up to begin with? Isn't it true? It's the shiny object, you know, scenario. We become, the press becomes an object of his strategy. And I remember, you know, when first learning that when he was elected, he spent all day watching the television with a hamburger. That's how he spent his time. I mean, really, isn't there anything else for him to do as president of the United States except to watch television and try to figure out what they're saying and not saying about him, and then make statements to the press to try to change the way the press reacts and change the way people think about him? Was it time well spent? Obviously, it's successful. It's working. So with the time well spent on the couch eating the hamburger and the taco ball? Yes, very, very successful. And he is directing the message and he is casting doubt on legitimate facts of what is being done and what's being said. Yeah, and it's not it's not him alone. He's got he's got agents around him like Kellyanne Conway. I remember in the campaign seeing her say things and I said, gee, that's not true. And she would make these really bald assertions, these these lies over and over again and with double down on everything, even though it was obviously a lie. She would repeat it and and then you get the feeling that it's not just him. It's the people around him and then Sean Spicer and then the woman now, Sarah, Sarah Huckabee Saunders, I mean, all these people are doing lies as and so it's not just him. He's got he's got a whole retinue of people around him that follow in this. OK, anyway, so well, just just to continue the history, so he gets elected. Talk about the way things evolved from there. Well, the way things evolved was the very next day after the election day. They were talking about crowd size, if you remember, from memory serves me, he went to the CAA and the Hall of the Stars where fallen CIA agents, you know, are being to be honored there. And what is this topic of the day? Crowd size. What did Miss Conway? She would basically say to reporters that question, the facts that they were reporting as facts. She said, they're alternative facts, a new introduction into the lexicon of America as to what lies, you don't call them lies, you call them alternative facts. So that's day after the election and we only ripen from there. Yeah. OK, and then we get this constant drum beat of the war on the press and the press is not truthful. Singling out, and this is really, we should discuss this, singling out some media against other media. And all of this really has evolved, hasn't it? I mean, if some of the things that were happening today, that are happening today, would have happened in January of 2017, we would be aghast. But what's happened is the new normal has changed. The new normal has evolved. And we almost accept the notion that the President of the United States regularly lies. You know, the New York Times was counting the lies. It's over 6,000 now. Is that right? Yeah, over 6,000. And his dozens per day, whenever he opens his mouth, he's lying. And it's a new normal. We almost accept, I don't mean me and you, but I think there's a lot of people who accept what he says, and they forgive him when they find out that it is a lie. So what you have is an acceptance of anything he says. And when you have that, you don't have any filter. You don't have anybody saying, no, that's not true. So I think that has actually grown in the past year and a half. But how did that get to that point? And that is the strategy of repetition. If I can repeat different lies for so many times, over a course of weeks, months, years, that is desensitizing the audience, whether it's his 40% or potentially 90%. If I can just keep repeating the lie over and over and over again, I've desensitized him, I've worn him down, and now I can lie with abandon and not have to be concerned about it. Yeah, and also it's eyeballs. What I mean is he's managed to work the press, manipulate the press so that everybody is watching him. He's the show. He's the reality show every day. That has happened in the months following the inauguration where everybody watches him. So he has much more visibility than, say, the New York Times, which some people in the red states won't read at all. They think it's all false. It's all fake news. But the reality is even the people who do read it are a small percentage of the national readership, the national viewership of people who watch him and hear him double down on the lies. So the lies ultimately, I think, have more effect on public thinking than a good newspaper does. Well, you could argue the influence of his appointment to the FCC and almost the green light for Sinclair Broadcasting to infiltrate the smaller news markets and basically be a loudspeaker or a bullhorn for Donald Trump and go from the ground up versus the national news down. At some point, the national news and the local news is going to meet somewhere in the middle. And Sinclair Broadcasting? It would have happened. That Sinclair deal would have been approved except the court stopped it. And although he is madly trying to pump new conservative lawyers into the federal court system, the court that stopped it still had the old kind of judges in the court system. So scary that if that came up today, not so sure whether a court with more of his appointees would have stopped it, Sinclair was a very dangerous case. I just see this whole battleground, if you will, as a marked strategy of different avenues on how to compromise legitimate news and legitimate facts, be it through Sinclair, be it through his surrogates, be it through Trump himself lambasting the media as a full blown strategy from day one. And what the ultimate effect is, no matter what I say, no matter what I do, people will say, okay, I'll go with it. Yeah, well, the comment he made during the campaign, if I shot somebody at Fifth Avenue, nothing would happen to me, I could get away with that. Well, it's a lot easier to lie than shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. If I lie, I'm going to get away with it. And he does get away with it. So he makes the lies, nobody calls it, well, they call them on it, but the calls don't stop him because he doubles down. That's his thing, repeats it. And so what we have here is a war about truth. And so I think a lot of people are confused. I think a lot of people were confused in this election. Sure, the Democrats took the house, but there's still a lot of red states and the red states are taking the Senate because that's the way it works. And so what we have is people who are really not informed, people who are victims of this thing about war on the press and fake news and all the lies that the White House is generating these days. I guess I would ask you, where does this go? Where's it going this week, okay? Because the beat continues. As I said at the opening, after the election, we didn't hear from him about the election. I mean, he didn't really address the fact that he lost the house. You know why, right? Well, he changed the subject. Well, he had to change the subject because from the very beginning, Donald Trump said, this election is about me on that ballot in your state. This is, I am on your ballot. Whether I'm up for election or not isn't the point. It's about me and the continuation of my influence and my administration. So if he put himself on the ballot and it wasn't the election for him, it wasn't 2020. He didn't get what he wanted. He didn't get what he wanted. So what's the first thing I have to do? I have to change the subject immediately. Yeah, and he has. First thing he does is the long-awaited firing of sessions. I guess we all knew that at some point, sessions would be fired and he was fired. It wasn't hours before election day was over when he was first staying on two, on Wednesday morning, he was fired. Okay, and that took sucked all the oxygen out. Now, all the talk shows, all the news shows, all of them talking about sessions instead of what happened in the election. And then out of that, you get this press conference that he had on Wednesday morning, which was very contentious and he was contentious and he gets into this argument with Acosta. It was set up from the start. This was planned. Now, what's the background before this press conference with Jim Acosta? Number one, you had Donald Trump basically scolding all the Republican candidates that were up for either in Congress or in the Senate or excuse me, the House or in the Senate and he scolded them because they failed to embrace him for reelection. So he publicly shamed them. That was the start of it, of controversy for that press conference or before the press conference. And then you had the PBS co-anchor. I believe her name was Yamani Alcindor, Alcindor. And she asked a question about his proclamation that he was a nationalist. Well, it was the first thing he did. He drew out of his pocket and he said, that's a racist question. And so he basically set the stage to create a controversy and that controversy was part of the plan to get away from the election results. Then lo and behold, Jim Acosta rolls around. Now, first off, when you're president of the United States, you have a whole room full of journalists you get to pick from, a whole room. Why did he pick Jim Acosta? You're right, he had the choice of picking him and Acosta asked him a question. I think it's a perfectly wonderful question. Is what are you talking about an invasion? There's no evidence of an invasion. Why do you call it an invasion? I don't think it's an invasion. And of course, Trump said, well, I, you're wrong, I'm right, it is an invasion and I'm the president so I can define the word invasion. And then they got into this thing. Can I read his quote, May? May I read his quote? Please. Donald Trump said to Jim Acosta, you're a rude person, you shouldn't be working for CNN, you're a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible and the way you treat other people are horrible. You shouldn't treat people that way. Coming from Donald Trump? Yeah, the president and attacking the guy's credibility as a reporter and changing the subject again. So he's having this debacle with the press and there were other incidences too. And after Acosta was shut up, because Trump never really answered his question or let him ask a follow-up question, then you get to some other reporter who defended Acosta, but I thought that was nice. Alexander, I think, was his last name. Yeah, and from another one of the national media. I mean, and the press, ultimately, most of them did support Acosta by making statements that supported him against Trump. But my most favorite thing about this contentious press conference is the falsified video. Because at one point, Trump instructed some intern, one of his interns, to take the microphone back from Acosta and she tried to do it and Acosta held on to the microphone and she's all on tape. Well, if you saw it live, which I did, I happened to be watching that live, the bottom line is she did try to take the microphone. He lifted his arm up, you know, up in the air. He might have brushed her and he said, pardon me, ma'am, he said, pardon me, ma'am. I'm not finished. But did he grab her or assault her? Absolutely not. Or tried her in any way. Did Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that he actually, you know, inappropriately touched her? Yeah. I believe she did say that. She did say that and then shortly thereafter was a doctored video. Well, before that, though, if he came back onto the White House property and his press pass was pulled, you are not coming on to the White House grounds. Which was not in a press conference with the president was another issue entirely. He can't come on the White House grounds anymore. How many times does that happen with a journalist? Doesn't. Well, and what it demonstrates, we have a few minutes left to talk about what this all means because it's getting worse. And the new normal is moving further, you know, into what do you call it, uncharted territory here. You know, I think we should talk about how this relates to what happened in Germany, about how, you know, you want to diminish the credibility of the press so that you can be the only spokesman of the truth. You want people to follow you and you want to have a not even conversation, you want to instruct them as to what to think. You don't want anybody disagreeing with you. If anybody disagrees with you, you take action against them to muzzle them. And it seems like that's exactly what Trump has been doing since the campaign, much less the election and his inauguration. And this is more of the same. This would be shattering if it had happened at the time of his inauguration. Now it happens on a regular basis, ensure there's a little pushback, but the fact is he's alienating, marginalizing, undermining members of the press, press one after another. And the public, or at least his base, doesn't believe anything the press says. Well, it's more than his base. And Jay, I think this is the crux of it. There's more than his base that's along with this ride. And I would say to anyone, I don't care how you vote, if you embrace the policies of a president, you also have to embrace what they say and what they do. You can't dissect that and say, oh, he's horrible, man, he says horrible things. He lies shamelessly, but I support his policies. No, you get to put on that badge every day saying I support Trump in all that he does and says. And if you're not willing to do that, then think twice before you support him. And the bottom line is you have to own his words, his lies, and his horrible policies. Who's you, the base or who? No, all followers of this particular Republican party. And that means all the people in the house, all the senators, you embrace them, fine. Wear a badge, say I embrace everything he does and everything he says. That's what he's got going, it's loyalty. Well, but no one wants to wear that button. I mean, they're secretly not admitting that. They're not admitting that. They're saying, I support him because of his policies. Well, the war on the press is part of that thing that they have to embrace as well and say, I stand tall with that and they're not willing to do it. Oh, the press. No, I'm saying all the politicians, all the people that vote for him, be proud. Wear that badge every day saying, I support everything he does and says. And if you're not willing to wear it, then think why you're voting for him. Oh yeah, well, good question. That's where I stand. And nothing's gonna change until we, as a society, start to recognize you cannot dissect policies from the person. Well, I think if, let to his own devices, he will bring the country low. He will undermine our democracy. He is undermining our democracy and it really sounds like a dictatorship in the making. He wants that and he moves toward that and he uses the press and as a strategy in dealing with the press to get to that. And I think we should all be very concerned whenever we see the press criticized and diminished and marginalized and undermined the way he's been doing on a regular basis. And from my money, the press should fight back all the time. I'd like to see the society professional journalism as an organization to stand tall, stand up and say enough's enough. And grow backbone, stand on your hind legs and start making yourself visible on the attacks on all journalists. As soon as you react to the attacks by running away from them and by not reacting, you're giving him more room, more credibility. He's been described as a bully. What better thing for a bully to do? What he did in that conference on Wednesday morning, he was a bully completely. So, problem is it gets worse and all we can do is try to encourage people to understand what's happening, to see it for the reality, to see it as bullying, to see it as a move toward being the only voice in the conversation and moving toward a kind of dictatorship. And diminish the Mueller investigation. Yeah, and that's the end. And that's the end result. That's the end goal of this. Yeah, so yeah, so he's working to do that because that would obviously work against him. So he's taking every step, including the appointment of Whitaker as acting attorney general. This is horrible because Whitaker is his agent to fire Mueller, that's clear as a bell. And he gets to be in that role for at least seven months. Yeah. I mean, the Senate does have the legal obligation, constitutional obligation to appoint the next attorney general, yet his interim attorney general can be in that role for a couple hundred days, seven months. That's a long time to do a lot of damage. You know, Mueller really has to let go here. He has to report his findings. He has to take the steps. He's been silent, apparently waiting for the elections to be over. Well, the elections are over. How about coming out now, Mueller? Tell us what you got. Because if you don't tell us what you got and you get fired, we lose the benefit of your work. Well, this period of time has been rather truncated. The investigation against other presidents, like Watergate, took far longer. But yeah, he's got to work fast and hard. And you better have the results relatively soon, I hope. Yeah, I hope so. When were the other? Let's talk about it next week, OK? You got it. All right, Tim Appichella. Thank you, Jay. Following Trump, Trump week. You got it. Aloha. Aloha.