1600 Daily is a newsletter well known to journalists and political wonks (and almost nobody else) as a little slab of PR: It tells you the President’s schedule and who he’s meeting, his upcoming policy pushes, and ends with some positive coverage. Today’s edition, however, was sent out by somebody who didn’t read past a headline.
1600 Daily included a link to the Washington Post‘s “ComPost” blog. In case you hadn’t guessed from the title, it’s the Post‘s comedy section, where they goof on the news, led by Alexandra Petri. Petri weighed in on Trump’s budget with the headline “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why.” This is the opening paragraph:
Some people are complaining that the budget proffered by the Trump administration, despite its wonderful macho-sounding name, is too vague and makes all sorts of cuts to needed programs in favor of increasing military spending by leaps and bounds. These people are wimps. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has called it a “hard power budget” which is, I think, the name of an exercise program where you eat only what you can catch, pump up your guns and then punch the impoverished in the face. This, conveniently, is also what the budget does.
All that’s left to figure out is how the heck this even happened. Others have pointed out the link, one of two in the newsletter, was paired with a brief recap of Trump’s remarks at a Thursday St. Patrick’s celebration and have speculated that some PR intern, desperate for any positive coverage, jumped the gun. Past newsletters have focused mostly on links from right-wing sites like Breitbart, and we suspect this will be the case for the rest of the administration.
(via Gizmodo & Washington Post)