Fran just wrote a piece via Twitter, of the reaction of reporters from Trump's press pool, covering Trump's bogus "birther" press conference. It wasn't pretty.
On CNN, both John King and Jake Tapper vented their displeasure at Trump's PR stunt at their expense.
John King was asked by CNN's John Berman, to comment on Trump's claims that Hillary started the controversy and he finished it.
King said, "I actually don't know what to say here. I had the great good fortune if you want to call it that of interviewing Donald Trump, the interview was he previously scheduled, on the very day Barack Obama released his long form birth certificate. On that day, Donald Trump said he had done the country a great service after he had done the country a great disservice by becoming the chief cheerleader for a fraud, a birther movement trying to delegitimize the sitting UnitedStates president."
He continued, "So I really don't quite know what to make of that except for that we got played again by the Trump campaign which is what they do. He got a live event broadcast for, what, 20 something minutes..."
CNN's Jake Tapper discussed the presser and said, "It's hard to imagine this as anything other than a political rick roll, the idea that we were told this was going to be Donald Trump addressing something that his top campaign advisers, many people in the RNC, want him to address and clear up, and then stop talking about, which is this lie that president Obama was not born in the United States, which has been discredited for more than half a decade now, but Donald Trump has been trafficking in it as recently as this year."
He continued, "We were told he was going to do that. Instead, they bring out a number of medal of honor recipients and military heroes instead and it was very clever on one level, on another level it does speak to the integrity of the Trump campaign. They told us something was going to happen and it's not happening."
Will the media finally stop covering every single word Trump utters during his rallies, broadcasting his empty podium segment after segment, and pretending that their motive is news rather than ratings?
Today's "birther presser" was a public embarrassment of the Beltway press corps on all levels, but most embarrassing of all is that they deserved it.
Has it really taken them over 400 days to realize what Trump has been doing to them? And whose fault is that?
