MAGA turning on the 'mediocre' former journalist driving Trump’s inane revelations

President Donald Trump’s policies and public relations approach are in large part shaped by a journalist who has long had a reputation for being unreliable.

“Solomon’s decades-old reputation for letting down his audience is starting to reach conservatives,” wrote The Bulwark’s Will Sommer on Thursday, referring to right-wing influencer John Solomon. “Popular conspiracy theory blog Conservative Treehouse has grown skeptical of Solomon’s promises, even adding a bolded warning label of sorts to a preview of Trump’s Thursday speech so readers wouldn’t get too excited.”

Sommer quoted a popular conspiracy theory blog, Conservative Treehouse, which warned readers about Solomon by saying “caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content.”

Similarly an anchor from MyPillow founder and right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell’s channel, Emerald Robinson, expressed skepticism about Solomon’s record.

“LOL why would anybody trust John Solomon based on his record?” Robinson posted on the social media platform X.

Sommer noted wryly, “When you’ve lost Lindell’s crew…”

In advance of Trump’s speech, Sommer cited reporting that indicated Solomon was likely a major influence on Trump’s rhetoric and approach.

“Whatever Trump does, it’ll be because of John Solomon—a star conservative reporter who is, somehow, also a White House staffer,” Sommer wrote. “For nearly a decade, Solomon has had a hand in the creation of nearly every major MAGA grievance narrative, from the Russia investigation to Ukraine to 2020 election fraud.”

He added, “Solomon has a pretty clear M.O.: He’ll spin a story that seems like a massive exposé, getting it trumpeted on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem before it has a chance to deflate under scrutiny, as it usually does.”

While working on a short-term basis for the Trump White House, Sommer described Solomon as a man who tries to help Trump find information about the president’s perceived political enemies and his upcoming attempt to delegitimize the 2026 midterm elections.

“Yet this narrative impresario and his brand of quasi-journalism remain largely unknown outside the world of right-wing media,” said Sommer who covers MAGA-related news in addition to other topics for Bulwark. “In 2007, when Solomon was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review was already complaining that his stories amounted to the ‘John Solomon special’: front-page revelations that, when scrutinized, turned out to be little more than a ‘steady stream of mediocrity.’”

Sommer wrote, “Now, thanks to his role in the Trump administration, Solomon has a chance to work that magic on a much larger scale.”

Among Solomon’s various controversies, last year he hosted a phone interview with Trump in which he agreed as the president spread misinformation about the investigation into his ties with Russia, his coup attempt after losing the 2020 election and his baseless allegations of Chinese interference in American elections. Back in 2019, he spread debunked conspiracy theories that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, coming under heavy criticism from the company which published those pieces, The Hill, which promptly investigated all of his work on Ukraine.

Then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), a staunch Trump supporter, ran interference for Solomon at the time.

“‘The Hill’ told its staff yesterday that it would conduct a review of Solomon’s Ukraine reporting — and this is just three days after a Democrat on this committee told a Hill writer that she would stop speaking to The Hill because it had run Solomon’s stories,” Nunes said. “And she urged the writer to relay her concerns to The Hill’s management. So now that Solomon’s reporting is a problem for the Democrats, it is a problem for the media as well!”

from Alternet.org https://ift.tt/7cbgRdG
via sinceretalk