Tuesday on The Beat With Ari Melber, the MSNBC host spent an entire segment building up the salacious claims made about the Trump White House in Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury.
Though most of the book is rehashed liberal hearsay and theories that have been floated about Trump for over a year now, the MSNBC host acted as if this book was both groundbreaking material and that it needed to be treated as cannon.
In his report, Melber centered on the claim from Wolff’s book that Trump did not actually want to be president, and was only running for attention to build his brand. As to be expected from the hard-hitting reporting characteristic of the network, Melber offered no real evidence outside the book to support this claim, until the very end, when he unveiled his shockingly stupid “proof:” Rapper 50 Cent had predicted the same thing, earlier this year.
Melber started off by noting that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch were quoted in the book. But that’s not all, he claimed. “[I]s there more evidence? I can tell you tonight, yeah,” the MSNBC host teased. He continued, comparing Trump’s wish to “lose” the election to the play and film The Producers:
The evidence that Trump was the Washington Generals, or as Wolff puts it in the book, The Producers. That's another plot where people win by trying to lose. Here's some evidence.
Melber then launched several half-baked reasons as to why Trump supposedly didn’t want to win (campaign spending, choice of staff, launching a network) that really just explained what we already knew: Trump was an untraditional candidate.
After this, he relied on the book’s “quotes” from a dead person (Ailes) and how Trump behaved on election night, as his final “proof” that Trump never wanted to become president:
We saw that in public. In private, the book says Ailes was recounting Trump's argument that he was excited to lose. “I don't think about it as losing, because it's not losing. We've totally won,” he allegedly said. And that attitude went to election day, the Trump campaign challenging early votes in Nevada...And then Trump won, he walked out on the stage that night and was the first candidate in a modern era to get on stage at a victory speech and then ask a staffer to speak...Literally dragging Reince there. That may have been out of shock. Wolff writes that Donald Trump Jr. reportedly said that his father looked as if he had seen a ghost that night.
“Was this all an accident? Are we living through the plot of The Producers?” the flabbergasted MSNBC host gushed, throwing his hands up in the air, before he offered his final credible source for Wolff’s Book: 50 Cent?
Wolff's reporting does match what a lot a of people who knew Trump over the years said about this from the start. That it was not about making America great, it was about making Trump great. In fact, a musician and businessman, 50 Cent, has been saying that exact theory for months.
Melber then played two clips from 2017 where 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis James Jackson III, claimed that Trump never wanted to be President to begin with and won “by accident.”
On Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show at the beginning of the year, the rapper revealed his theory, saying, “He wanted to lose the presidency. He didn't want the job!”
Again, on a radio show in September he reiterated:
“His presidency is an accident. If you were a president by accident, you might do some of the things Donald Trump is doing. I think he was doing that to build his profile for a bigger deal on television and everything else,” he claimed.
The camera then panned back to the somber MSNBC host, who smugly stated that this was all the proof he needed for the veracity of Wolff’s book:
“Before this book, ‘He don't want the job’ was a theory. Now it's become an account backed by a lot of interviews. Maybe that's what scares the White House so much right now,” Melber gushed.
Fact-checking loony liberal theories with more unverifiable theories? No wonder the majority of the public doesn’t trust the media.
