Now that Newsmax has finally admitted the obvious-to-everyone fact that it’s working with Donald Trump to promote his presidential ambitions, it just keeps sliding further and further into the tank for the guy.
In an April 20 column, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy is a big, slobbering wet kiss to Trump. He complained that it was “unfair” for news organization to examine “every little company that Trump has been associated with that had a lawsuit, bankruptcy, or other problem” because it ignores “Trump’s fantastic business success that has yielded him a multibillion-dollar net worth.”
Ruddy then asserts, “Make no mistake about it — Donald Trump is the real McCoy. … Trump holds a reputation as a pragmatic man who gets things done. He is also politically savvy — as he is demonstrating with a remarkable rise in GOP polls.”
Despite his fawning prose, Ruddy insists, “Newsmax has not endorsed any GOP candidate — including Trump — for president. We are giving all of these candidates a platform to talk to our readers about the big issues facing us.”
But Newsmax his done much more for Trump than give him a platform: Led by fluffer-in-chief Ronald Kessler, it has actively promoted the idea of him as president.
That PR-style promotion appears to be rewarded with closer-than-usual access to Trump. That is obvious in an April 21 article by Jim Meyers that furthers Trump’s side of the story in his feud with Karl Rove.
Meyers cites an anonymous “Newsmax source” who attended a meeting Trump had with “about a half-dozen heavyweight Republican donors in Manhattan — largely hedge-fund guys — about his political ambitions,” during which he “spent the first 10 minutes talking not about Obama but rather, about Rove, angrily referring to him several times as ‘the loser’ and the man who’s destroying the Republican Party.” Meyers also noted that Trump “donated mega-bucks to Rove’s political committees last year.”
So who was that mysterious “Newsmax source”? For all we know, it may be Trump himself. It’s clear that this story was written with the aid of Team Trump, and it’s unlikely to have run at all if Trump hadn’t signed off on it beforehand.
Has Newsmax given this extensive of a “platform” to any other Republican presidential candidate? Not that we’ve seen. Ruddy — who has not devoted any significant writing, let alone an entire column, to any other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate besides Trump — should stop the pretense that it hasn’t taken sides when it clearly has.