The economy is booming but did you know that these are the final days of Donald Trump's presidency? That is the absurd premise put forward on MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Brian Williams on Wednesday by that master of hyperbole, Jon Meacham, the man at the helm of Newsweek as it sank like the Titanic.
Meacham expressed optimism about America's future because "there is increasing evidence, there's facts in a post-truth world, facts are coming into play." There is Manafort's verdict and Bob Woodward's new book and the anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, representing "a genuine reckoning, because there are facts in evidence that weren`t necessarily in evidence when we started the month of August."
He's talking about facts in a post-truth world.... to serial fabulist Brian Williams.
Williams was conjuring up images of Richard Nixon "three scotches deep in the White House in the evening doing strange things walking down the hallway," Meacham eagerly joined in with that Woodward and Bernstein Final Days imagery.
BRIAN WILLIAMS: Well, let`s talk about this person who has written this anonymous piece. Where do you stand on the coward versus traitor versus hero versus trailblazer? And when -- I`ll go further, when Woodrow Wilson was addled by a stroke in the White House, when Dick Nixon was three scotches deep in the evening doing strange things walking down the hallway, did people on the inside talk? And were we better or worse for the lack of it?
How many scotches deep were you, Brian, after you got busted for broadcasting fiction about yourself and found out that you were dumped as the NBC News anchor?
JON MEACHAM: Well, they talked after the fact. That's what's so interesting you know and again Bob Woodward's the common denominator here. But much of what we knew about Nixon talking to the portraits and then worrying that the portraits might talk or turning up the air conditioning and building a fire in the Lincoln sitting room and raging. Most of that came in a book called The Final Days which was not published, I think, until '76 or '77. It came after the fact. This is, as ever, Trump has sped everything up, This is a real time Final Days playing out. It's as if we had this almost a webcam inside the White House.
....This is as though Al Haig had decided to anonymously write an op-ed. And a lot of the things that we found out in the books afterward, we found out in real time. That, I think, is one of the reasons I`m somewhat optimistic. At least the facts are unfolding when we still have time to do something about them.
It is really as if we had a regular MSNBC broadcast camera on both Jon Meacham and the truth-challenged Brian Williams playing out their liberal fantasies of an early Trump exit from office in a well-worn Watergate repeat scenario. It will be interesting to watch Meacham's future hyperbolic reactions if these "final days" keep stretching out, perhaps into another term.
