Jack Shafer: Media Analysis For People Who Think Maureen Dowd is Too Deep and Too Funny

Above: Jack Shafer (Michael Palin) interacts with a pompous yet naive schlub who expects to learn something from Politico’s media critic (John Cleese)

Jack Shafer — the only pundit with the courage to tell it like it is, that everything about the media’s coverage of the 2016 campaign was just fine — has one MOAB take:

Observers have been waiting for more than a year for Donald Trump to stop acting like a beer hall bouncer and start acting more presidential. On Wednesday, that wish came true, as Baby Donald completed his transformation into a standard chief executive of the United States by espousing many of the hallmark policies one would have associated with President Hillary Clinton.

Really? Hillary Clinton advocated putting neoconfederate reactionaries on the Supreme Court, taking health insurance away from 25 million people to pay for upper-class tax cuts, more upper-class tax cuts, issue racist travel bans, defunding Planned Parenthood, and gutting the EPA? I did. not. know. that. Actually, I still don’t know that.

Hillary Clinton’s presidency would have been a family affair, with Bill and Chelsea mobbing the White House with their advice; Trump has seated daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner at on his roundtable and acts on their guidance.

Hillary Clinton is married to a former president of the United States and has a Graspingly Ambitious daughter who will be totally running for some unspecified political office any day now, which when you think about it is just like Donald Trump making his completely unqualified children and in-laws prominent jobs in the West Wing while some of his other children continue to run his business so he can extract bribes more effectively.

Hillary Clinton would have gone to war with the Republican Congress, vowing to campaign against them once they refused to pass her legislation; Trump has come close to realizing that goal, telling the leader of the troublesome House Freedom Caucus, “Mark, I’m coming after you.”

“Come close” — now that’s how you bullshit.

Elsewhere on the Clintonification front, Trump through his legislative bungling has preserved Obamacare, which he vowed to repeal

Yes, trying and failing to repeal the ACA while threatening to damage it administratively makes him pretty much exactly like Hillary Clinton.

and is ready to make common cause with Democrats to pass an infrastructure pork bill.

LOL sure keep waiting for that (and also “pork bill” okay.) Jack Shafer received his MA in political science from Trump University, just like Hillary Clinton.

When not drawing on Clinton for inspiration, Trump has turned to Barack Obama. Before and during the campaign, he criticized Obama for golfing instead of tending to whatever crisis in high fermentation that moment. “I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” Trump said last August. He’s taken a mulligan on that pledge as president, exceeding Obama’s devotion to the links with gusto. According to a Palm Beach Post tally, Trump played 14 times during his first 82 days in office while Obama averaged about 9.3 trips to the courses every 82 days for his entire presidency.

Republicans used to speciously criticize Obama for playing golf, Trump plays golf all the time, which shows that Trump is like Hillary Clin…have I reached my minimum word count yet?

To his credit—or detriment, depending on where you stand—Trump has remained stalwart on several of his signature issues. He’s taken decidedly anti-Clinton policy moves on abortion, immigration, environmental regulation, illicit drugs and crime.

Don’t forget the Supreme Court. And taxes. Anyway, when you ignore the many issues where they’re different really Trump is the same as Hillary Clinton. Jack Shafer does not have any cheese at all. Not a scrap. He was deliberately wasting your time.