Your average liberal journalist isn't going to think The New Yorker magazine when it comes to fake-news sites on Facebook. But my wife hopped in the car yesterday and asked, in a please-shoot-this-down tone: "Trump didn't really say that if I'm impeached, I'll have the greatest ratings ever." My first reply -- not kidding -- was "that sounds like Andy Borowitz" ...and his brand of leftist humor/hate at the Borowitz Report. Sure enough, she brought it up on her phone:
Now if you look a little harder, the words "NOT THE NEWS" are under the picture. But the photo is from the Lester Holt interview and the Trump-boasting is a little too close for comfort. But this Facebook post is even more likely to be misleading:
A few hours earlier, the hatred for Trump came through much more clearly, since it came with profanity for emphasis:
Borowitz also offered this humor tidbit for the Trump haters before that: "The only part of Trump's presidency I'm looking forward to is the sentencing phase."
This was the beginning of the Borowitz satire, complete with Lester Holt thrown in:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Donald Trump boasted that, if he is impeached, the television ratings will be higher than those of any other impeachment in history.
“Everywhere I go, people tell me that if I am impeached, they’re going to watch it,” he said. “The ratings are going to be through the roof.”
He said that he expected his impeachment ratings to be “many, many times” the size of the audience for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998.
“It’s not even going to be close,” Trump said. “The ratings for Bill Clinton’s impeachment were a joke.”
Asked about the recent impeachment of the former South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Trump said, “Did anyone even watch that one? That was Korea. Nobody cares.”
Earlier: In 2012, Borowitz wrote that Rick Santorum was a “terrorist” and a “mental patient” and wrote the fake headline "In Possible Gaffe, Romney Says Poor People ‘Taste Like Chicken’." In 2008, by the way, Borowitz complained about me to National Review when I mentioned he donated thousands to Barack Obama's campaign.
From further left, Salon's Alex Pareene panned Borowitz as writing "dad jokes for self-satisfied liberals":
This material is designed to elicit a smirk of recognition and agreement from your average polite NPR listener....The best humor involves the element of surprise. Borowitz never surprises.... Borowitz is perfect for the comfortable old liberal readership of the New Yorker, so long as no one wants to even slightly challenge or surprise them."
