![]() And in promoting the book, Obama will sit down with Winfrey, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, among others. Obama does make reference to the way that he drew on celebrity figures to help propel his rise, including Oprah Winfrey, and how his White House embraced showbiz talent, with the likes of Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan performing as part of a regular PBS concert series. And the more oxygen the media gave them, the more newsworthy they appeared.” Certainly, they made little to no effort to categorize his theories as beyond the pale-like alien abduction or the anti-Semitic conspiracies in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (He’d usually reply with something along the lines of ‘Well, we know they were born in this country.’) But at no point did they simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist. ![]() They all made a point of expressing polite incredulity, asking Trump, for example, why he thought George Bush and Bill Clinton had never been asked to produce their birth certificates. “Outside the Fox universe, I couldn’t say that any mainstream journalists explicitly gave credence to these bizarre charges. He also singled out NBC’s Today, “the same network that aired Trump’s reality show The Celebrity Apprentice in prime time and that clearly didn’t mind the extra publicity its star was generating.” “What I hadn’t anticipated was the media’s reaction to Trump’s sudden embrace of birtherism-the degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim,” Obama writes, adding that it was not just Fox News that gave Trump a platform but ABC’s The View and CNN. But Obama still devotes a number of passages to Trump’s rise as a national political figure, and makes it clear the extent to which he believes that the Celebrity Apprentice host was aided and abetted by a political environment where entertainment and politics have linked. Promised Land is just part one of the Obama memoirs, as it goes through the death of bin Laden. Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he in fact had never been bigger.” Their publishers would vie to have him sit at their tables. The same reporters who laughed at my jokes would continue to give him airtime. Trump trafficked in a currency that, however shallow, seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day. What I knew was that he was a spectacle, and in the United States of America in 2011, that was a form of power. I couldn’t begin to guess what went through his mind during the few minutes I spent publicly ribbing him. He went on, “The audience howled as Trump sat in silence, cracking a tepid smile. Obama writes, “As the audience broke into laughter, I continued in this vein, noting his ‘credentials and breadth of experience’ as host of Celebrity Apprentice and congratulating him for how he’d handled the fact that ‘at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks….These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Obama needled Trump over the birth certificate matter, but also mocked him for Celebrity Apprentice. About halfway through, I turned my attention directly to Trump,” he writes. “When it was my turn to speak, I stood up and started my routine. Obama writes that he went to the dinner that night, “my face fixed in an accommodating smile, as I quietly balanced on a mental high wire, my thoughts thousands of miles away.” intelligence having been tipped to his whereabouts in Pakistan. That was a reference to what was going on in secret at the time: Plans for a raid to take out Osama bin Laden, with U.S. 2024 Premiere Dates For New & Returning Series On Broadcast, Cable & Streaming
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