while i have no expectation that you will do so i write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record. what did you think when you read this? i thought it was absolutely pathetic when i read it and i thought history is going to judge donald trump very harshly as it should. you know, he has pursued an approach to the presidency where he starts lying first thing in the morning and lies all day long and the next day it s another series of lies and the day after that, just the way he ran his real estate business in new york. but history will not be kind to him on this stuff, because it will catch up to his lies. he s relied on a social media environment and a cable news environment where from day to day he just changes the subject. just the discussion about ukraine alone in there where he says you know i did this and you know i did that, and he refers to president zelensky. i mean, my first reaction was,
responsibility to monitor or basically moderate that content online. but james, the cable news environment, the internet environment was extreme well before 2016. let s go back to 2012. facebook played an oversized role in the reelection of barack obama in 2012. you didn t have the extremes there despite the fact you had cable news hosts back then saying that barack obama was a racist and wasn t even born in this country. so what happened in four years at facebook? i think a number of things happened. one is that news organizations actually started to publish on facebook, which in some ways legitimized facebook as a place for the majority of american voters to get their news. the news feed on facebook became one of the main information sources. so that legitimizizatiolegitimi
national conversation like it was in 2014 for republicans who are obsessively focused on retaking the levers of government. i do not see that among republicans. i see cultural issues and a lot of them have almost nothing to do with electoral politics. i see them receding from the conversation. the cable news environment which i loved very much is not like the national environment. i don t see the kind of enthusiasm that i see on cable news in the general electorate. to his point about what constitutes enthusiasm, whether it s rage, anxiety, what it really comes down to is whether or not the united states that gave trump the presidency in 2016 wants to basically endorse or push forward him and his agenda into the next two years. it is bigger than our average sort of collection of individual races you usually see in a midterm. this will determine his level of strength going into the last years of his presidency. if the republicans keep the house, keep the senate, it s a huge validation
he thinks cable news exaggerates the phenomenon and doesn t keep in mind that since 9/11 only 45 people have been killed by terrorist organizations. in that same period, 150,000 have been killed by guns. the argument, and you heard it again, is i don t like cable news. i don t like the way that you peddle this and exaggerate it. he s not just operating in this cable news environment. he s operating within a presidential campaign. he s not running. his name s not on the ballot. but his agenda very much is. and there s no there s no denying that one of the reasons he seemed behind, he didn t share the urgency of the american people after paris and after san bernardino, is because not only are people getting that from cable news, they re getting it from the republican candidates for president. you saw there, that was trademark obama again. he s calm. he s nuanced. he s measured. he says we re taking back 40% of the land and doing more sorties and doing this. he lays it out methodica
night. i mean, nobody knew about when this terrorist was going to be caught. we knew he would be. we didn t know what time. i had geraldo sitting here god help me but geraldo knows a lot about the case. so when there was a lull in the action. we would go geraldo, when we howie carr up in boston. family spokesman for the poor 8-year-old who was killed. little boy and we had we go to him. but cnn relied far too much on just being there. and the results were the results. yeah, very unfortunate for cnn. look, it is a challenge because i think the cable news environment, bill, lends itself to always, not just in an emergency like, this but always a sense of urgency vow news alerts and whether you are covering an actual urgent situation like this. or not, there is always sort of this injection of necessary energy. and sometimes you manufacture the energy and i think we are all kind of guilty of doing this. bill: just about filling