Inevitable: Trump Campaign Now Selling Official Fine-Point Markers After Uproar Over Altered Hurricane Map

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2019/09/06/inevitable-trump-
campaign-now-selling-official-fine-point-markers-uproar-altered-hurricane-
map/

I’ve got to get better about predicting these things. In hindsight this
one was easy. We already know that Team Trump is pursuing a “max
trollishness” strategy in campaign merchandising, cranking out items like
Trump-branded plastic straws (paper straws are for left-wing wimps) and
funny t-shirts goofing on Chris Cuomo’s insecurity as the “Fredo” of his
family. Sometimes it’s about owning an individual lib, sometimes it’s
about owning the libs collectively, but either way the thinking is the
same — the Trump campaign is going to hawk stuff that lets the buyer
believe he’s irritating the left with his purchase.

So how could they pass on the opportunity to sell cheapie Trump-branded
markers? The campaign sold $670,000 worth of straws in their first month
of availability. They’re bound to make a killing on this too.


Brad Parscale
?
@parscale
Buy the official Trump marker, which is different than every other marker
on the market, because this one has the special ability to drive @CNN and
the rest of the fake news crazy!
#KeepMarkersGreathttps://shop.donaldjtrump.com/products/official-donald-
trump-fine-point-marker …


Official Donald Trump Fine Point Markers
Set the record straight! Get your set of Official Donald Trump fine point
markers today! Donald J Trump signature in gold Permanent ink fine tip
marker Non-toxic Set of 5 markers Proudly Made in USA

shop.donaldjtrump.com
8,406
8:04 AM - Sep 6, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
5,690 people are talking about this
Five markers for 15 bucks sounds like a deal.

If you haven’t followed “Sharpiegate” and don’t know why markers are
suddenly an item of interest for Team Trump, read this and this. He’s
still tweeting today that he was right all along that the hurricane
threatened Alabama at one point, even having his campaign tweet out week-
old CNN clips chattering about the state possibly being affected. It’s all
gaslighting, though: Alabama was out of the storm’s path by August 31st,
the day before Trump included it in his tweet about states that might be
affected. The worst ‘Bama faced by the time he tweeted was a small
possibility of tropical-storm winds in the southeastern corner of the
state. He gave the public outdated information, a minor mistake. But
because he’s Trump, instead of owning up to it he’d rather quintuple down
in Queeg-like fashion — even reportedly doctoring the map he showed off in
the Oval Office on Wednesday to include Alabama in the storm’s path.

It was Trump who used a black Sharpie to mark up an official National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map, which he displayed during an
Oval Office briefing on Wednesday, according to a White House official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the official
said of the map, which added Alabama into the hurricane’s potential
pathway inside the loop of the marker.

Several White House officials argued that media coverage of the Alabama
issue has been unfair to Trump, but one senior administration official
said that “as long as it’s in the news, he is not going to drop it.”

When he was asked after the Oval Office photo op who had drawn on the map,
he replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” A source told Fox
News yesterday that someone else had done it during a briefing but that
never seemed plausible, as he’s the only person in the administration who
cares that the earliest forecasts included Alabama in the storm’s path.
According to CNN, in fact, Trump saw Fox’s skeptical coverage yesterday
and called reporter John Roberts into the Oval Office to plead his case in
person that he’d been right all along. Now that the campaign’s markers
gimmick has given the media a new hook, there’s every reason to believe
he’ll still be tweeting about it on Sunday, stretching this story into a
full week. I figure we’ll get 10 minutes minimum on the subject at his
next rally, with “Alabama was in the initial projections!” a new MAGA
applause line.

Why has this moronic nothingburger dispute caused both sides to commit to
such a lengthy fight? Andrew Egger captures part of it: Trump is Trump,
and pushing back on him is just what anti-Trump commentators do now.

As the president’s interminable war with the Fake News drags on, it’s
become clear that our media is poorly equipped to handle stories where the
appropriate takeaway is obvious. The professional takester is supposed to
trim away the useless gristle of the news to reveal the juicy meat
concealed within—and further, to do so in a wholly original and non-
derivative way. That approach works well when the news is complicated—a
big new policy proposal to break down and chew over, say. It works less
well for stories whose morals are plainly visible to the naked eye—and
these are the stories that seem to occupy more of the news. The takeaway
from the Sharpie story is obvious: “the president is a media-addled old
fool who can’t be trusted to read a map, let alone operate our nuclear
arsenal.” How are 500 columnists supposed to pad that out to 800 words?

The unfortunate result has been that much anti-Trump punditry is simply
boring. If the humorists have trouble improving on the joke, we’re the
folks tasked with the unenviable task of explaining it. You could read a
thousand takes on Sharpiegate, but not a single one of them would approach
the near-transcendental, anything-is-possible high you got the first time
you saw Trump whip out that lunatic map.

If he’s going to go on being obviously wrong for days, people whose job it
is to point when he’s wrong are going to go on ad nauseam about it for
days too. I think this case is special, though, in that the sheer
triviality of Trump’s error and the petty lengths to which he’s gone in
refusing to admit to it have paradoxically led his critics to dig in
deeper than they might on a matter of greater import. It’s practically a
test of wills now: Can he wear down his critics into letting this matter
drop through the sheer persistent force of relentless gaslighting even
when they have him dead to rights on the facts? He tweeted bad information
last weekend, he briefly panicked a state, and instead of admitting it
he’d prefer to fight a week-long media battle replete with outdated maps
intended not so much to prove that he was right as simply to make the
other side give up in exasperation and let him declare victory. Can he get
his antagonists let him win even when he’s so plainly wrong? That’s why
they’re holding out. They don’t want to let him.



--
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.

Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

The Obama-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS)
approved Uranium One in fall 2010. With a little luck, we'll see
compulsive liar Hillary Clinton in jail before she dies.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.