Donald Trump’s universe of alternative facts – CNN
President Donald Trump's travel ban had been in effect for less than 24 hours when, 10 days ago, he offered a smiling review from the Oval Office.
Indeed, millions of Americans with access to television and internet, and the thousands protesters at international arrivals terminals around the country, were bearing witness to the effects of his executive order.
"(Trump) said the press doesn't tell you that, doesn't like to report that -- the press doesn't like to tell it like it is," said CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter. "In fact, the murder rate is not at a 45 year high. It has ticked up slightly in the last couple years, that's cause for concern, but the murder rate is much lower than it was, for example, in the 70s, 80s or 90s."
In a tweet on Monday, Trump offered his worldview in stark terms.
"Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election," he said. "Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting."
In the reality described by Trump, a federal judge who ruled to halt the administration's travel ban would, along with the entire "court system," be responsible for a potential terrorist attack.
The dynamic in the White House mimics Trump's personality, one former campaign official told CNN. He is someone who can lose interest quickly and turn to the next issue without much thought.
It's most apparent on Twitter, where the President will bounce between a variety of often unconnected agenda items and personal grudges.
Speaking on Monday, Trump built on this construction, placing the press in cahoots with the judiciary -- another willful enabler of global terrorism.
"You've seen what happened in Paris and Nice," Trump said during a visit to US Central Command headquarters in Tampa. "All over Europe, it's happening. It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported, and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that."
Those reasons -- whatever the President thinks they may be -- remained unspoken.
What "you understand" could be anything, though the clear implication was that a monolithic media dedicated to repelling Trump, and thwarting the popular will, had launched a campaign to hide reality and cover-up for terrorists. For fans of the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones and his Infowars, the fundamental argument was familiar.
Pressed to provide material proof of his claims, the White House released on Monday evening a list of 78 attacks it said "did not receive adequate attention from Western media sources." Among the incidents listed were the killings in Orlando and San Bernardino, California -- two bloody domestic attacks that received wall-to-wall coverage online, on television and in newspapers and magazines for days on end.
Over the past week, top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway has also muddied the waters in what increasingly appears to be a concerted effort to stoke anxiety over the presence and entrance of refugees into the US.
The "Bowling Green" yarn was delivered in the midst of a pitched debate over Trump's travel ban and suspension of the US refugee program. Days earlier, the White House -- acting within their rights -- had fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration after she instructed federal attorneys not to defend the executive order in court.
The attack fit into a consistent narrative of undermining or seeking to delegitimize political opponents or groups operating outside the administration's narrative framework.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer kept up the drumbeat on Monday, telling Fox News that nationwide protests against Trump and the travel ban were being organized and subsidized by some unnamed benefactor.
"Protesting has become a profession now," he said, without proof. "They have every right to do that, don't get me wrong, but I think that we need to call that what it is: it's not these organic uprisings that we've seen through the past several decades."
He offered no evidence and there would have been little time for protesters to plot the demonstrations; Trump's executive order was, according to the President's own tweet, purposefully delivered as a surprise.
"If the ban were announced with a one week notice," he wrote, "the 'bad' would rush into our country during that week."
With a grassroots protest movement dismissed, the nation's highest ranking law enforcement officer's loyalty questioned and the media accused of conspiring to cover up terror attacks, the Trump administration's reality is on a collision course with a divided nation.
CNN's Dan Merica contributed to this report.
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Donald Trump's universe of alternative facts - CNN