Donald Trump is bad at so many things. Empathy. Hair care. Not being a puppet for terrifying masters both domestic and foreign (co–Presidents Bannon and Putin, respectively). But one thing that Donald Trump is legitimately good at is manipulating the media. Throughout the entire presidential campaign, Trump proved, time and time again, that all it took to drive the news cycle away from whatever he didn't want news outlets to focus on was to be willing to look like an idiot about something else. (It's amazing what being born without the part of your brain that lets you feel shame can lead to.)

And though the idea of yelling online about how "THIS IS A DISTRACTION, THE REAL STORY IS (insert literally any one of the 75 things the Trump regime has done so far)" has become something of a mockable ploy, the sad truth is that Donald Trump is a downright genius at whipping up distractions. Take, for instance, this great report from Meet the Press this weekend, which discovers a shocking pattern about when exactly Trump decides to attack the press.

What makes this manipulation so successful is the fact that there is nothing, and I mean not a single thing, not even the discovery of evil aliens coming to Earth to eat us all, that the media loves more than writing about the media. So now that the media is on to the scent of the Russia story, Trump is trying to—ahem—distract them. What does this tell us? Well, if you ask me, this is just one more compelling piece of circumstantial evidence that the Russia stories are all true. We know now that Trump's campaign had repeated contact with Russian intelligence. We know Russia attempted to meddle in our election around the same time as those conversations. And we now know that anytime the media reports on those facts, Trump tries to make the news cycle about something—ANYTHING—else. It's almost as if he's hiding something, and it's only a matter of time until we know what.

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