William Southold, The Southold Report
Sometimes journalism can be a lot like sewing, I imagine. You have to recognize which threads to pull, especially if you want to see if something might come undone.
Here’s a thread I started to pull this morning. I got word of a young White House staffer who had been tasked with researching the top military base golf courses around the country. He was to compile a list for President Trump.
That seemed a bit odd to me. Why would the president need to know about military golf courses, I wondered. After all, he endlessly touts his own golf properties, and visits them often enough.
So, I reached out to a source of my own, someone who claims to know what’s going on in Trump’s White House, and has been fairly dependable so far.
Here’s what she told me:
“The president plans to start some saber rattling, hopefully just rhetorically, regarding some pretty thorny international issues, as part of his 2020 campaign. He came back from that speech at Florida International U where he called on Venezuela’s military to drop their support for President Maduro, or they could lose everything. He was pumped. He really liked the crowd response.”
“He’s going to campaign on it?” I asked her. “Acting tough?”
“You bet,” she said. “He’s already decided he’s going to be hitting the campaign trail hard, and he wants to give some hard hitting speeches from military bases from now on. He thinks it will bolster his image as a strong Commander-in-Chief. But he also wants to be able to hit the links as well, the next day, as he waits for reactions to roll in. And he doesn’t want any press pics of him doing that. It’s called message control.”
Good Lord. So there you have it. Is this what we’re in for - playing up possible military engagements as a campaign tool to rally support? And then kicking back for a cool one at the club house while he tweets out how great he was? I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time. And it certainly does sound like our president.
I don’t know. It’s only one thread now, my source has a pretty high batting average, but I’m going to keep pulling on it, see if anything unravels.
It’s the least a dedicated seamstress can do.
Central News Service, a division of Whole Cloth Entertainment, Inc. - bringing you all the news that is central to you, sort of.
(Image from The Dictionary of Neddlework)