New York Times columnist and author Maureen Dowd isn’t holding her tongue about the peculiarities of the 2016 election.
Dowd explained to HuffPost Live earlier this week that Trump is “an unbelievable phenomenon” who’s using the media for his own gratification.
“It’s like running for president is the new selfie. We’re in selfie nation. He’s using the press as a selfie stick,” Dowd told host Alex Berg. The columnist’s book released earlier this month, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, delves even farther into the absurdity of this election cycle.
Dowd told HuffPost Live she commends the press for its handling of “a 70-year-old who’s great at social Twitter and politics,” but also thinks the media is struggling to adapt to Trump’s unpredictability. She mentioned when Trump told the media last week that he was holding a press conference to give a birther announcement. Instead, he took them on a tour of one of his hotels.
“Afterward, [the press] complained that they were played as suckers by him,” Dowd said. “But if they don’t know that they’re going to go to a Trump Hotel and get out of there without doing an infomercial, you know, they’re lucky they didn’t have to buy timeshares. They should know that by now.”
Watch the full conversation with Dowd below:
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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