Media Mea Culpas: Journalists Ask "Is This All My Fault?"

Buzzfeed, not yet 10 years old, is on Donald Trump's blacklist.  The New Yorker, 91 years old, is not ... yet, but Trump has dubbed it "a failing magazine that no one reads."  Since it commenced endorsing presidential candidates as late as 2004 and all of those endorsements have gone to Democrats, it was probably already dancing on the edge of the wrath of the Donald.  Both publications have put forth mea culpas from former Trump acquaintances who felt the need to say something before the country embarks on a path to disaster.

McKay Coppins in Buzzfeed recounts that during the Detroit debate moderated by Fox News:

About 30 minutes into the debate, Kelly asked Trump to respond to a recent BuzzFeed News report about his position on immigration.
“First of all, BuzzFeed?” Trump said, waving an index finger in the air. “They were the ones that said under no circumstances will I run for president — and were they wrong.” My phone lit up with a frenzied flurry of tweets, texts, and emails, each one carrying variations of the same message: This is all your fault.

His fault!  Because of an unflattering article he wrote two years earlier that he and apparently others felt goaded Trump into making this run for the roses.

Tony Schwartz, whose name appears as co-author of The Art of the Deal and who shared in the profits, could no longer hold his silence on the fraud he helped perpetrate.  He told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

The two articles dovetail on the day when the Republicans open their national "dispersion."  A convention convenes members - brings them together.  This one is driving them away and apart.  "Convention" is oxymoronic and the event requires a different sobriquet.  Dispersion is the best I can come up with and fills a second bill since now begins the dispersion of the Trump image and message to the grand majority who have not followed the campaigns up until this point.

Both of these articles are must-reads.  They are on the long side and complex. But from his short-tempered testiness to his short attention span, from his mythomania to his self-serving mutability - it's all there in these articles.

Much of this will come as no surprise to Democrats, especially those who have been on board the Hillary bus from the beginning. The shallowness of character and purpose coupled with the profound level of underlying hostility - a clear and present danger -  at once shock and galvanize the reader to do everything possible to prevent Schwartz's prediction from being realized.