Photo by reza shayestehpour
Blame it on the rain that was fallin’, fallin’
Blame it on the stars that didn’t shine that night
Whatever you do, don’t put the blame on you
Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah– Milli Vanilli
“I just did an interview…with NBC fake news. And because it was raining, I got a little bit angry at them. I was not happy with them.”
“Storms bring luck to whatever the occasion.”
For some reason, it keeps threatening to rain – and sometimes actually rains – on Trump’s parades, though in the end it hardly seems to matter. Still, it is a shame that rain was forecast for Trump’s June 26 Freedom 250 Concert and that neither Milli Vanilli nor, by Trump’s own estimation, other “third-rate” stars shone that night, all of them, save Vanilla Ice, having bailed on an event many of them were apparently enticed to join in to satisfy Trump’s lust for attention and adulation. However, rain did fall on his Meet the Press interview, inclement weather threatened the success of his UFC circus, and severe storms virtually ruined his Independence Day celebration, although none of it came early enough to cancel Charlottesville 2.0: the July 4th march of 400 masked, khaki-clad white nationalists. Or were they simply ICE agents celebrating the nation’s birthday and, belatedly, their Führer’s?
During his Meet the Press interview, a fuming, red-faced Trump threw his mic to the ground, crushed it underfoot, and stomped away from host Kristen Welker after she pressed him on his illegal slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and election-fraud lies. Toddler that he is, Trump responded with “I-know-what-you-are but-what-am-I” retorts right out of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, though voiced with less self-assurance than that film’s eponymous man-child.
If only Trump, the unwoke, social justice warrior, were as impassioned about the “Central Park Five,” five black[1] and brown youths, falsely convicted in 1990 of the rape of a white jogger in 1989 and imprisoned for between 6 and 13 years before being exonerated in 2002, an exoneration based on evidence rather than on the self-serving political machinations of a miscreant president. The same man who today defends insurrectionists who attacked police, threatened to kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, and defecated in the halls of Congress, who counted a convicted pedophile as a bestie, and who himself was found liable for sexual assault, notoriously took out full-page newspaper ads demanding that the Five “be forced to suffer” for their “crimes” and that the death penalty be reinstated to execute them. A quarter of a century later, Trump continues to deny their innocence, even as 97 of the rioters he pardoned have gone on to commit additional crimes, including at least 14 who have been charged with sex crimes.
Yet during the interview, when Welker countered that many of the Jan. 6 defendants pleaded guilty, Trump the Compassionate declared it was “because they were frightened they would spend 15 years in jail,” and blamed their convictions on “dirty cops,” “Comey,” and “people like you, the dirty press.”
The tactics of fascism may be universal, but its vocabulary is localized. As usual, Trump used the interview to attack “fake news.” Nazi propagandists had another word for it: Lügenpresse, the “lying press.” The irony is that legacy media provides him a platform to spread his exhaustive litany of lies, not only those about the 2020 election, his “yuge” crowds, and on-again-off-again “victories” over Iran, but also about the media itself, setting the foundation for its own destruction and replacement by the “truthiness” of state-sanctioned media, where truth is based on gut feelings, not factual evidence.
Of course, any Trump encounter with women reporters would not be complete without him hurling misogynist slurs. He did not disappoint. “You’re either corrupt or you’re stupid,” he ranted at Welker, concluding, “Our country can never be great with a dishonest press.” So, without irony, declared our pathologically prevaricating president.
“There’s more evidence than ever presented,” he continued, growing more and more agitated. “We’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked and Meet the Press is crooked and so is ABC, CBS, and CNN. You’re one-sided crooked networks. All right, let’s call it quits ’cause I’ve had enough.” To which Welker pathetically responded, “I traveled all the way to Wisconsin…,” mirroring Trump’s self-centeredness.
Still, to her credit, Welker did push back, only to back down after the interview when she addressed viewers – and perhaps her NBC overlords, cautiously treading the line between gratuitous apologia and journalistic malpractice. “I spoke with President Trump on Saturday and we both acknowledged the complications during the interview posed by the rain.” So the rain, or so we are led to believe, set him off.
Spin it as she might, rain was not the issue. Trump’s frequent fumbles with umbrellas may account in part for his surliness; however, the weather, at least until recently, has never set off his tantrums, which have grown more frequent in the wake of a string of humiliating setbacks: the court-ordered removal of his name from the Kennedy Center (still concealed by tarp), legal challenges to his “anti-weaponization” fund and billion-dollar ballroom-bunker boondoggle, his “Donroe Doctrine” donnybrook in Iran, his slimy green Reflecting Swamp, the SCOTUS decision upholding birthright citizenship, and his sparsely attended Freedom 250 Great American State Fair. Trump’s only win to date appears to be his UFC one-ring circus, his imperial presidency’s answer to the Colosseum.
Then again, perhaps Welker was thinking about the fate of former ABC News reporter Terry Moran, who a little more than a year ago aggressively pressed Trump on a series of issues, most notably the obviously photoshopped “MS-13 tattoos” on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles. Not long after, Moran was fired for a mean tweet about Trump and Stephen Miller in which he accurately described the deputy chief of staff as a “world-class hater” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.” Truer words have never been spoken, but they apparently violated ABC News’ “highest standards of objectivity, fairness, and professionalism.” Telling the truth, it seems, is now grounds for dismissal.
Miller, for those keeping track, a promoter of the Haitians-are-eating-pets smear, is on record as claiming that America was better off before the Civil Rights movement, that immigrants from third-world countries are unassimilable, and, circling back to his anti-Haitian rhetoric, that they are “destroying” Springfield, Ohio, and the nation as a whole. The father of four, whose most recent spawn was born last month, has also argued that pregnant foreign women should be banned from entering the country.
Such pronouncements may sound relatively reasonable given that some Trump allies, such as CEO and The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis, have recommended that not only all foreign women be banned from entering the country but that all foreigners be sterilized before entry (surely a boon to the tourist industry). Needless to say, neither Miller nor Davis has lost their position.
Like Welker, Moran was confronted with a belligerent if visibly less volcanic Trump, though there were no showers on the day of the interview. Nor was it raining when Trump stormed off a 2020 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl because she dared to ask him “tough questions.”
Perhaps Welker’s Trump-endorsed inclement spin was a Hail Mary meant to spare her the same fate as Moran. Better yet, maybe she’ll pull a Jim Acosta and preemptively part company with her network to preserve her journalistic integrity.
But that may be too much to expect in an era of corporate media timidity. In fact, if anyone should have thrown down their mic, crushed it underfoot, and stormed off the set, it was Welker. Not after Trump insulted her, but right after he uttered the first of what would inevitably escalate into a torrent of self-serving lies.
Our Fourth Estate (or is that “fifth column”) would have us believe that, in the words of Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionWashington Bureau Chief Tia Mitchell, “we [the press] have to listen to him as the leader of the free world” in order “to get to the truth.” Presumably, this is to keep tabs on what he is doing, convey it to the American people, and, when appropriate, hold him accountable.
That system no longer functions.
How does one even get to that truth when all inquiries are met with a barrage of lies that are either ignored by the public, tolerated as the entertaining exaggerations of a showman, or accepted as fact? Unlike congressional committees where witnesses are aggressively, often performatively, grilled by the opposition, the media rarely pushes back, preferring to appear “fair and balanced” even if, in doing so, it amplifies them. The New York Times slogan has been replaced by a new one: all the lies that are fit to print, particularly if printing them ensures continued access to the powerful.
But ours is a “free press.” But is it? Hannah Arendt warns:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
Unfortunately, in fulfilling its duty to listen to the powerful, corporate media assumes the role of corporate stenographer, a role it has increasingly come to accept as billionaire tech bros police both legacy and new media – including CBS, CNN, X, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube – and manipulate not only the news but the algorithms that provide public access to it.[3]
However, in platforming the lies of the powerful, the media fails to fulfill its other duty mentioned by Mitchell: to seek and convey the truth. Until it aggressively and relentlessly confronts the liar, it will remain a handmaiden to, and shareholder in, the plutocracy. Although the media may listen, the new journalism requires it to withhold releasing its information to the public lest it lose access or potential bestseller book deals. Just ask Bob Woodward, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Karl, Michael Wolff, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan.
To be fair, after the broadcast, NBC News did fact-check Trump online, but this needs to be done in real time. If the media can alert viewers to AI-generated slopaganda by slapping a “FAKE” or “AI-generated” label on it, it can add chyrons during broadcasts when Trump and his enablers generate alternative-fact slop. [2] The fact that Trump is given a platform to air his lies and that NBC and other media outlets eagerly cover him and profit from the predictable spectacle of an on-air conflict – and potential follow-up interviews – is itself problematic.
The day after the Wisconsin Trump-Welker cage match, the president agreed to sit for another interview with Welker, providing him yet another platform to prevaricate and Welker, his “crooked and stupid” inquisitor, an opportunity to make amends, mend fences, and maintain access. Indeed, Trump’s agreement to sit for a follow-up has prompted speculation that his meltdown was staged. The turnaround stands in contrast to his 60 Minutes walkout when he refused to return for a joint interview with then-Vice President Mike Pence.
In the end, rain or shine, Trump gets what he desperately wants: attention. Whether his projects fail or succeed, they never escape the salesman’s spin, which suits the media just fine, since his over-the-top reactions – and the media’s own coverage of them – provide more fodder for the media mill. Meanwhile, the realities of life under Trumpism are downplayed as the media covers government-and corporate-sponsored spectacles, whether televised from a Wisconsin barn or beamed from the South Lawn of the White House, even as those masked, khaki-clad white nationalists ride buses in one of the blackest cities in the country to celebrate “freedom” on the Fourth of July. 250 years of “progress.” Or is it 50? Some things never change.
Like algae in the Reflecting Pool, lies, racism, and media malpractice are in bloom again.
Blame it on the rain.
Notes
[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and the brutalization of black people.
[2] The idea is not new. The use of chyrons for fact-checking appears in the 1971 science-fiction television movie Earth II, in which AI is used to evaluate statements made by citizens during a televised debate. Today’s technology makes such fact-checking possible, though whether we should place our trust in AI, which is itself prone to “hallucinations” and remains susceptible to politically motivated manipulations by its human agents, is another question.
[3] In 2018, The Guardian reported that during the 2016 election, out of the top 1,000 recommended videos on YouTube, 643 were tagged as having an obvious political bias, with 86% favoring Trump, but only 14% favoring Clinton, noting that “partisan videos recommended by YouTube in the database were about six times more likely to favor Trump’s presidential campaign than Clinton’s.” More recently, several progressive YouTube commentators allege that changes to the algorithm have reduced their visibility and reach. Some of these commentators, along with mainstream media journalists, have been placed on a WhiteHouse.gov “media offender” blacklist.
The post The Storm is Here: Blame It on the Rain and the American Lügenpresse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.
John G. Russell | Radio Free (2026-07-09T05:54:09+00:00) The Storm is Here: Blame It on the Rain and the American Lügenpresse. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/07/09/the-storm-is-here-blame-it-on-the-rain-and-the-american-lugenpresse/
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