Fake news about a fake orgasm

In an interview with one Molly Jong-Fast of the Daily Beast, disgraced FBI lawyer Lisa Page speaks. It’s an extraordinarily tiresome interview of the “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” variety; she’s “done being silent.” In case you want to avoid a click on the Daily Beast, Gregg Re reports on the interview in his account of it for FOX News.

The top line item in the Daily Beast and FOX News stories is Page’s complaint that President Trump humiliated her by faking an orgasm in her voice during his Minneapolis rally. The fake orgasm supposedly compelled her to speak out: “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

To paraphrase Churchill, “some orgasm, some back.”

I watched President Trump’s speech live in Minneapolis from a seat in the first row. I didn’t think Trump was imitating Strzok and Page in bed. I thought he was enacting a conversation between Strzok and Page, mocking the so-called “insurance policy” they had concocted with their colleagues in the summer of 2016 to pay off in the event that Trump was elected. As Ian Schwartz put it for RealClearPolitics, “Trump acted out in a mocking fashion how he believed the conversation went.”

Trump enacted both sides of the Strzok-Page conversation he imagined. Indeed, he devoted more attention to Strzok’s side of it. Was Trump imitating Strzok’s orgasm too? Page doesn’t say.

To support Page’s assertion that Trump was simulating Page’s orgasm, Jong-Fast links to another Daily Beast story that simply asserts it. We seem to be in a hall of fake news mirrors.

Maybe I’m missing something. We can go to the tape (video below).

As anyone who follows the news would know, Trump’s performance was closely based on text messages Strzok and Page had exchanged with each other. As he enacted their conversation, Trump conveyed the romantic ardor almost entirely in his rendition of Strzok. In Trump’s Reader’s Digest version of Strzok, Trump fervently states: “Oh, God, I love you, Lisa. And if she doesn’t win, Lisa, we’ve got an insurance policy, Lisa. We’ll get that sonuvabitch out. We’ve got an insurance policy.”

Trump commented in his own voice: “And we’re living through the insurance policy. That’s what it is.” I call that a bingo.

Fake news about a fake orgasm represents the reductio ad absurdum of the media in the Age of Trump.

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