____by J.J. Solari with illustrations by Hal Robinson, Jon Towle and George Fleming
I should really be the one at those anti-Trump Washington press conferences and be the guy who points energetically at one of the, ya know, one of the 50 or so wannabe-famous people who sit all crammed together in that fart-filled White House corridor asking astoundingly boring questions that their editors told them to ask and stuff?
You know, the real ugly people who are devoid of personality and must read their questions since they probably don’t even understand their questions since they’re not their questions? Those people?….I should be the guy during Trump’s new term who points to those people to hear their Kamala-like rambling and usually accusatory questions of an idiotic nature. I should be the guy who deals with that.
Most people would not want that job because it’s 50 against 1. What they don’t figure into the situation is that the 50 people are all morons who are convinced they are gods while the one person conducting the proceedings USUALLY, unlike the reporters present, has some notion of the world beyond the liquor cabinet and Rupaul’s Drag Race.
Now, while the “White House Press Corps” is a collection of idiots….. and I’m not just name-calling now, these are very haughty, self-absorbed, unaccomplished, incapable morons…..while the Press Corps is composed exclusively of idiots, the “press secretary,” the fellow or gal at the podium is convinced “the press” is not only smart but is a collection of people who sincerely give a shit about things. They don’t. They have no idea what giving a shit even means.
To give a shit you have to know right from wrong. To give a shit you must have some level of ambition above hoping you win the Nobel Prize for literature even though you have NO writing talent. Which every journalist has: no writing talent. They have “creative redefining of colloquial English” talent. Well, not talent: they have to have it actually taught to them–in whatever high school is and in whatever college is.
Journalists are not aware right and wrong even exist. All journalists are aware of is that they got jobs as “writers” but that they are not “talented” writers. They eventually REALIZE they are not talented writers and I WILL give them that. Journalists are not stupid. Just intellectually slovenly, if not actually allergic to intelligence.
Rush Limbaugh used to refer to them as stenographers. Which insults stenographers because stenographers must be accurate. A journalist is about as concerned with accuracy as he is concerned with exercise. Which is….. not concerned. Accuracy to a journalist means “doing exactly what my editor ordered me to do. “Now you might ask are editors journalists? Yes, but they have the gift of “office politics stratagem” which is its own discipline. Which your typical by-line journalist lacks even though they routinely see themselves a keyboard Napoleonic Generals. Though they have absolutely no actual leadership abilities.
In fact, the average professional writer/ “journalist” has no abilities whatsoever, usually never having had a job that requires a learning curve, like, say, auto mechanics or form-setting carpenters. They do not even make good security guards because they can only confront bureaucrats without fear: which, bureaucrats, being even more inept in the “real world” than even journalists are, they are terrified of journalists…..which is basically abject morons being afraid of marginal morons…… and journalist know this, so they routinely treat bureaucrats with a snarky attitude and an air if self-righteous magnificence.
This strutting attitude is almost instinctive when confronting bureaucrats since bureaucrats make no pretense at being able to “best” a journalist in an argument. Which is all politics is, arguing on a graduating scale, the top level of which is an international war being fought by everyone else EXCEPT journalists and bureaucrats. Pretty good gig the bureaucrats and the journalists have going for themselves. Especially in times of war.
However, none of this paints any sort of a clear picture of why I should be the press guy during Trump’s term.
The Simple answer is because I am the only writer who not only knows how to-the-bone worthless the members of the Washington Press Corps of indifferent little snotheads actually are, and I am the only one who is not afraid to bring it to their attention face to face while grinning at them like the Wishmaster.
You see all this press conference crap about interrogation and reply and leading questions and guarded responses and all this Witness Stand courtroom drama being manifest within a narrow hallway filled with farts from the asses of a legion of hungover talentless failed novelists….it has no actual justification for existence. No press conference has ever resulted in any change of policy, nor has any accusatory question ever been responded to with a “Thank you for this: we’ll get right to work and change that policy more in accordance with your observations regarding its shortcomings!” That’s never happened.
THIS JUST IN
Pete Hegseth, who is the whatever a Defense Secretary is, was just at a meeting with some Saudis, even as we type, which Saudis were sitting at the table in their costumes from 100 million years ago, and Hegspeth announced that he would take some questions. Some bonehead assfucker so-called reporter pipes up and asks Hegseth why he hired an “underqualified retired lieutenant general,” whatever those are, “to be the next chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,” whatever that is.” Hegseth said “I am going to choose to reject your unqualified question.”
What he SHOULD have said was “What is your name?” And then, “What alleged news entity do you work for?” And then, “Do you have your own byline?” And then, “Why do you think he’s unqualified? Are you an expert on hiring and firing? Who hired you? Based on what? Do you have an example of your writing here with us so we can all try to determine YOUR qualifications?”
By this time whoever that asshole was would be famous worldwide because even the most devoted Hegsmeth-hating news hack could not sit on that story and all of its “bombshell” aspects. PLUS, that rude, ignorant reporter never would have showed up to another Hegspeth swah-ray ever again. Win, win, win all the way around all over the place.
The reason no bureaucrat ever actually DOES this is because even the most wizardry-adept bureaucrat on earth knows that the most bottom-runged bottomfeeder at any news barn can write a lot more interesting and scathing article about any bureaucrat on earth…..if things get personal…..than that bureaucrat could write about that reporter. Because bureaucrats are about as capable of writing a complete sentence on their own as they are of knowing what their job description is, forget about writing an entire, brutalizing essay about a reporter. Yet there isn’t a hack with a journalism degree who couldn’t write a ten thousand word hit-piece on any bureaucrat on earth if he had enough coke, daiquiris, bennies, or hugs from mommy, which ever was more convenient and at hand.
PLUS, all bureaucrats know that journalists will, if there is something in it for all of them, they will through sheer numbers, monopolize every “news” outlet, with each outlet writing their own “concerning” article against the targeted bureaucrat. They’re all loyal to each other in a crisis: the only crisis in their lives being another journalist being mocked.
The news biz isn’t like it used to be. Remember the movies from the ’40s? When the cops or the mayor would have all the reporters gathered around, all yelling for a statement, and the Mayor, all chummy, calls them “boys,” and says, “Ok, ok, boys, I’ll give you the story but, ya gotta keep it off the record that it was me what told you.” They all excitedly agree, and then he tells them what they want to hear, and by god if they don’t keep their word.
This would never happen now. There’s as much likelihood of a journalist keeping his word as there is of Rachel Maddow dating a 20-year-old skinhead with a ten inch dick. Fortunately for the journalists, they don’t really need inside information. They just make it up. And claim “sources” or “people close to the incident who spoke under conditions of anonymity said….”
But this is not 1940. NO one trust journalists today. Satan would refuse to give chummy inside info to journalists for fear they would warp and spin his remarks into levels of foulness and disreputableness so sinister that even Satan would be lawyering up to sue for slander.
Let’s talk now about Presidential press conferences and why only I should be conducting them — at least for Trump.
1: I’m the only hack who knows the other hacks in the Press Corps don’t REALLY care about anything, and they just want to appear noble and “concerned.” What they really WANT is to be called-on. Unfortunately for the Press Secretaries what the Press Corps ALSO really wants is to embarrass the Press Secretary. This desire goes into overdrive if the President at the time is not “someone who likes the press.” No one in their right mind would like the press. However, most people are not in their right mind. They’re in someone else’s mind. They’re in the mind of whoever is redefining vocabulary now and whoever is redefining reality at the moment. Two cases in point out of millions of cases in point would be human caused global warming and something relentlessly called “fossil fuel” and something called “the environment.” Ok, three cases in point. And “social justice.” Four cases in point. Actually there are a lot of cases in point. I have written a translation dictionary that describes, so far, almost 300 cases in point that all members of the Press Corps proclaim as reality which are actually “political science.” Which ALSO doesn’t actually exist. Good luck any journalist breaking THAT story.
2: I actually understand the bizarre, convoluted, Marx-based language they are speaking, and I would quite cavalierly, were one of them to ask a so-called question regarding one of these fables they concoct out of their failed-novelist creative engines called “the journalistic mind,” such as something about “gun violence” which also doesn’t exist……. while any other Press Secretary would nod and wait for the idiotic question to be completed before coughing-up some sort of equally convoluted response…..I on the other hand would quite cavalierly seek clarification of the question. Since it would be basically incomprehensible except to another reporter. And I would explain what it was ABOUT the question that was causing me a problem in understanding: perhaps having no subject matter: perhaps having a false premise that I am just supposed to believe is factual: perhaps having a topic that switches to another topic halfway through. Perhaps having words in it that have no actual clear definition. Like “racist.” Or “privileged.” Or “moral.” Or “sustainable.” Or “empower.” Or fucking “thrive.”
These entertaining interplays would result in the reporter getting very angry. Reporters do not do anger well. They don’t really do anything well. But they especially don’t do anger and frustration well. And Jim Acosta comes immediately to mind for some reason.
Let me give more detail regarding Acosta.
The worst, most girly-level outburst of distressed hysteria ever recorded emanating from a frenzied-with-apoplexy loon at a non-situation that the reporter considered to be a threat to world if not galactic peace….. came from Jim Acosta.
Donald Trump had just been elected for the first time. What anyone in the real world would have considered a non-event and a normal experience……to Jim Acosta it was not a normal experience, it was in fact a breach of political protocol and historical tradition so grievous that only a cry of hysteria could salve the wound and ease the pain.
I am GUESSING that the “normal experience” was some breach of pomp and circumstance that Trump displayed that ran afoul of Jim Acosta’s Personal Handbook of Proper Presidential Deportment. I am GUESSING that Trump did or said something “not Presidential.” What the press considers Presidential, incidentally, is obeying all reporters’ demands, wishes, insistences, definitions of words and phrases, political opinions, and observations about reality.
Trump apparently failed to do one or more of these things.
And so it was, Senor Acosta was giving his synopsis of the new President from outside the White House, and in the fading light of late afternoon, I am guessing that Trump, having a successful career at a real job in the real world and not fully adhering to the Bow Down To Reporters Handbook, did something to run afoul of Senor Acosta’s preferences.
And as a result, Acosta, from outside the White House, while gaspingly struggling with The Vapors, he was trying, almost faintingly, to explain to the woman in the studio far away what he was undergoing and suffering as a result of this near-death experience. Whatever that near-death experience was, he gestured with his arm, like they do, to what was behind him, which was, ya know, the White House, and in a gasping “I can’t breathe” moment, similar to what a Rupaul contestant experiences when one of the gay judges is unhappy with some of the beadwork on the male contestant’s dress, James The Great, his arm stretched outward and rearward crying out like Peter O’Toole portraying the anguish of Macbeth, shrieked, “(gasp) (gasp) (gasp)……THIS IS THE WHITE HOUSE!!!!!!!!!”
I am guessing and I am not sure, but I am guessing that Jim Acosta has at least one if not more Mexican chihuahuas at home, and him returning to his digs after a hard day at “work” and opening the door and finding his chihuahua deceased and partly inside the chomping jaws of Jeffrey Dahmer could not have provoked in Jim Acosta a cry of travail filled with more grief, shock, and inconsolable sadness.
That was all he could say: this is the White House. And it was, it was right there behind him. His grief was at a level incomprehensible, his anguish inconsolable.
There’s a point to be made here. Which is that reporters with penises, unlike reporters with vaginas, are not “manly.” But don’t get me wrong, neither are bureaucrats. It gets worse. Bureaucrats and journalists are mutually dependent parasites. The bond is like, for instance, remoras having remoras on them. Neither group has any members in it — if you have any sand in you at all — that you would want to have anything to do with. Only Reagan and Trump, in the entire recent history of bureaucrats and journalists, have exuded anything close to resembling male American backbone and lo and behold they are the only two, at least modern, Presidents who have had successful careers outside of politics. They had actual American Male Lives at some point in other words. Everyone else in office are lifer welfare recipients at a high rate of pay on “the public payroll.” Which is, to put it in real terms, the shakedown payroll.
3: I am the only person alive, apparently, who knows what the Constitutional definition of “freedom of the press” actually means. Which give me quite an advantage over everyone else in journalism and politics, if not over everyone on earth. While bureaucrats have actual power and authority, journalists have something called “freedom of the press.” Which in Constitutional Mystical Language means “freedom to print things onto paper and distribute those things with impunity except for libel and slander.” Which is routinely successfully circumvented through wordplay.
In 2025, however, “freedom of the press” now means, at least as far as journalists are concerned, “freedom of physical access to all properties on earth, and freedom of ascribing to imaginary beings called ‘sources,’ make believe statements and assertions, and freedom to call anything normal as ‘concernings’ and ‘troublings,’ and “impending catastrophic consequences.”
In other words, freedom of the press to today’s journalists means freedom to be a pontificating lunatic cult member tantrum-thrower global sovereign.
Journalists do this sort of creative and deceptive “reporting” and opinionating because they are frustrated failed novelists. One does not become a “writer” except for one of two reasons, sometimes both: One, he is genuinely artistically driven to “do his thing” even if never successful, or two, he wants to become famous for doing something other than physical labor. These number-two people pursue something called “a degree in journalism.” Which to an editor means he successfully allowed himself to be trained into the myth of “the class struggle” and all of its attendant corollaries in accordance with the current definition of “the public good,” and means he exhibited “a passable facility in the written word.”
A subcategory of this category, is the writer who “wants to accrue an audience and fame and riches via composed sentences.” Writing requires a reader, which, unlike musicianship, which only requires a listener. Unlike what listening is, reading is “work.” You can listen to music very successfully and fulfillingly without ever having to learn how to read music. You can appreciate the visual arts without ever having to learn how to make your eyes function. Reading writing, however, requires, of all things, knowing how to read. Which must be learned. Most people don’t really like reading. Untalented writers ….that is to say failed novelists called journalists……somehow realize this. This is why “the news” is always bad news. If the headline is dire or misleading enough to warrant a sense of urgency in the reader or scanner or whoever it is who still reads journalistic prose, then it will get read. Especially if the “news” is indicative of or suggesting to be an impending threat to the hoped-for reader.
Which is basically all the “news” is: journalistic prose of a dire nature that the writer wishes and yearns that was INSTEAD the prose inside a best seller of his. And not on a site-screen or… come to think of it, I guess that’s all there is now: magazines and newspapers are basically relics of a bygone age. It’s a very bad era for writers. This is why journalists are increasingly becoming more and more assholized and Chicken Littled: like Satan they know their time is short.
While all “news outlets” are, during their waning existences, filling their communication platforms with utter, childish, snotty, peevish, and extremely unintelligent rank, 100% pure anal, rectal, bungal fecal matter, and I am speaking now of such shithead-rife entities as The New York Times, Reuters-Rhymes-With Goiters, Rolling Stone, The Huffington, Salon, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Politico, CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Scientific American, National Geographic, The Daily Beast, The Hill, Buzzfeed, Fortune, ABC News,The New Republic,The Wrap, Futurism,The Independent, Yahoo Finance, TheConversation, Business Insider, NPR, PBS….. while they are all becoming name-calling children, the writers are doubling-down on their frustrated creativity at having to be a reporter rather than being Steven King.
Even the weather is now fake news. Weather is now caused by humans, not the sun. Rain-dancing instructions will eventually become part of every weather report. Meteorology is now a department of political science. Which science doesn’t actually exist, since there is only one kind of politics and it’s very unscientific. It’s the do-what-I-tell-you kind of politics. Which is not scientific. It’s a declarative announcement of YOUR servitude to the commands of unindustrious morons. That’s what political science is. And that’s what journalism is.
But enough about modern life, let’s talk about how to handle the Washington Press Corps.
Press Secretaries are supposed to make the President “look good” to the Press Corps, which as you remember are 50 lifetime-inactive sloppy dressers crammed into a hallway. Press Secretaries “protect” the President from these. These “theses,” whatever they even are, are considered by the Press Secretary to be feared adversaries.
In actual fact the Washington Press Corps would be fleeing out onto the lawn if a koala dropped a long rope through a hole in the ceiling and started slowly climbing down — backwards —towards them. There would ensue a shameful scene of volcanic eruptions of bodies roaring to their feet, the men all bursting past and through the women since most male journalists have never had any personal interaction with women and would see them merely as things blocking their chances for freedom and safety in the out of doors and out of reach of the koala menace.
This, then, this assemblage of cowardly idiotic assholes is what the Press Secretary considers as wary, cunning adversaries. This is because press secretaries are either 1: not journalists themselves, or 2: if they ARE journalists and they are nervous regarding the Press Corps, then they are likely Right Wing journalists which are routinely Christian and who are convinced the Constitution was Divinely Inspired. Whereas the Press Corps knows the Constitution is not actually anything. The Constitution is in fact the exact opposite of Divinely Inspired. This accurate announcement I just made is not considered “American” by Right Wing journalists. Assuming there are any.
But let’s get back to the Press Corps and how they actually deserve to be treated. For one thing their questions are always going to be stupid: uninteresting: vague: duplicitous: full of openings for ambiguity in the answer which the journalist or his editor will pounce upon later during “the news hour.”
Every question put to the Press Secretary will be jumbled, bizarre, meaningless, unimportant, vague, convoluted and moronic. The Press Secretary will then actually try to interpret the question ON HIS OWN and attempt to answer it on the hoof. Rather than say “What in the hell did you just ask me?” Because a Press Secretary, unless it’s me, will never automatically assume that anyone in the Press Corps is a blubbering imbecile. WHICH THEY ALL ACTUALLY ARE!!!!! The only reason they are IN the Press Corps is because they have risen up the ranks in a promotion system that rewards two qualities: stupidity…..and an ability to ask legalistically-ambiguous convoluted accusatory questions.
When a Press Secretary is asked a legalistically ambiguous convoluted accusatory question his first concern is “How do I appear smart when I can’t understand the question. And is this question going to embarrass me, and I mean of course the President, if I don’t handle it right?” These 50 assholes know that the Press Hack is more concerned about his performance and the satisfaction of the President than he is interested in being any degree of sensible.
What he SHOULD be doing is asking the reporters ten questions to their every one question to him. Just for the entertainment value to the audience, if for no other reason, since neither group, neither the Press Corps or the Press Secretary, is actually important in the grand scheme of things regarding whatever “government operations” are and whatever “press operations” are since neither group is actually important in the operation of anything anyone actually needs, with the press being global gossip columnists and the government being an inherently useless money pit, since government has no actual job description other than to whatever “promote the general welfare” and “protect the public good” is. Who knows what the fuck either of those two things are. Kamala Harris and AOC and Gavin Newsom might know, but no one else does. Because it’s gibberish. It’s soothing, relaxing, mind-numbing nonsense.
Another favorite ploy of reporters being televised is to ask “What do you say to people who say that the President is…….” and then they utter some whatever that “people” allegedly ask and who don’t exist and who never asked anything. To date no Press Secretary has never responded “Who are these people: how many of them are asking that. You’re the only one here that EYE hear asking that. Is this YOUR question? Rather than other people’s question? Why would I say ANYTHING to people I can only assume you have pulled out of thin air?”
And the reason they DON’T ask the reporter this is because reporters have successfully represented themselves to non-reporters as people who care and as people who “represent” whatever the public is. And as people who are smarter than any politician. Which is actually not true: journalists and politicians are basically neck and neck in the race for the Aberation of the Natural Order trophy.
Reporters do not represent society, whatever that is, they represent themselves, their bosses, and The Religion of Social Sanctity — which is some sort of mystical veneer of holiness and communal morality. Whatever communal morality even is other than doing what a journalist or bureaucrat tells you to do…
In fact, reporters are simply and exclusively failed novelists who are eternally frustrated at not being famous but will settle for having a byline. Which means their name — or one of ten other journalists’ names — above a badly written, basically Marxist “morality” catechism. Which is, of course “the class struggle.” Which like fossils fuels and human-caused global warming and the recent global pandemic, doesn’t actually exist. It’s a contrived and fabricated non-existent political slogan. Like everything else reporters “find concerning.”
Have you noticed reporters are free from interrogation and are never asked THEIR opinions? Turns out…..they don’t HAVE any. They’re bland, dreary, lazy, unemployable at anything useful, empty-brained zombies posturing as “watchdogs of morality.” Which is just a word that exists which everyone thinks is something specific. It just means itself. Morality means morality. You’re kind of just supposed to KNOW what it means over and above anything actually specific.
Since Press Secretaries are convinced government is supposed to be benevolent….. which it isn’t, it’s a self-serving collection of people on welfare-disguised-as-service….. to be accused by a reporter pretending to be the true representatives of The People that the President — who is also convinced he is a representative of the people — is doing something that is harmful to whatever “The People” is or harmful to whatever “morality” is……. creates tension and usually anger in the Press Secretary.
This makes for good press.
In other words the Washington Press Corps actually runs the U.S. government.
FORTUNATELY……we now have “social media.” Which is the GENUINELY “free-press.” At least at the moment. Which is why Trump is again President. Which is why “reporters” are disappearing as an entity. What has replaced them is the vigilante press: the one that actually works, in other words. The vigilante press, which will eventually replace The Press AND the government….will be the True Libertarians. Not to be confused with the political party which is a collection of confused, in-fighting bunglers.
Which is why I should be Trump’s press hack: because, like honey badgers, we both know what we’re doing and we don’t give a shit about snakes._____J.J. Solari
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