Breaking down news: Goodbye to all that

Such is the charge, contained in a dossier compiled by a Limey spook (who is now on the lam), which has been doing the rounds in Washington for months. No one published because the contents were unverified and possibly unverifiable. This has become commonplace — everyone has the story, but all hesitate to publish for want of verification. Until someone takes a deep breath and cuts loose. BuzzFeed took the creative route of publishing the story, while declaring that parts could not be verified. It also pointed out factual errors in the document and took the precaution of putting online a PDF of the dossier, so that readers could assess it for themselves. But Trump went ballistic regardless, calling BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage”. “Which is wildly unfair”, retorted the listicle giant’s Capitol Hill reporter, “as we are a succeeding pile of garbage”. In the finest tradition of capitalism, the site has monetised the insult. It has started selling ‘failing pile of garbage’ T-shirts.

The Sun reports that the only interesting video of Trump in Moscow shows him with a bunch of Miss World contestants. He owned the event at the time. The Kremlin has issued an official denial of the “dossier”, which Trump could have quietly cited and waited for the story to die down. Instead, he had a go at CNN, which also ran the story. “Be quiet… You are fake news,” Trump told a CNN reporter at his Manhattan press conference, a public ticking-off that is guaranteed to keep the issue ticking.

In the fakery department, the sky’s the limit these days. On Christmas eve, in response to a fake news story by the legendarily unreliable AWDNews (which is running the Trump-CNN faceoff on its ticker, by the way), Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif rattled his little nuclear sabre at Israel. This week, there are allegations that Pakistan’s test of the submarine-launched Babur-3 hypersonic missile was a triumph of mousemanship rather than military engineering. A satellite imagery analyst and observer of Pakistani and Chinese strategic systems has alleged that in the official footage, part of the flight path was created with the help of a video editor. Pakistani officialdom has been more circumspect than Trump and did not join battle with the media, or in the media. The issue died down in a couple of days, and even the whistleblower has moved on to images of Hatf3 deployments and the Chinese stealth fighter. That’s the fabled J20, whose invisible shadow had hung over Obama on his last foreign tour, to China, and which was revealed to the world shortly thereafter at the Zhuhai Air Show, where it set off car alarms in the parking lot on account of flying too low under the radar, so to speak.

Slate has resurrected a dreadful 2003 documentary, Born Rich, which had slumped well under the radar in the 13 years since it appeared on HBO. In it, Ivanka Trump joined her peers in trying to explain what it is like to be born into opulence in a culture which venerates obscene personal wealth. It was made by another peer, Jamie Johnson, an heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune. The mystery of maximum moolah has been a winning formula for American television, pioneered by Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which aired from 1984 to 1995, with the sybaritically aspirational tagline of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams”. Trump had appeared in a 1994 episode, dug up by Trevor Noah’s Daily Show last year, in which he made bizarrely misogynistic remarks about his baby daughter by Marla Maples.

In the 2003 documentary, the other daughter — who may soon become first lady — offers thought-provoking anecdotes. When she was nine or 10, her father apparently pointed to a homeless man outside Trump Tower and told her, “That guy has $8 billion more than me.” This was an allusion to the load of debt that the Trump empire had accumulated, and underlines his stoicism in bearing the rich man’s burden. Neither Trump seems to be aware that the homeless man may not have even had $8 in his pocket. The nine intervening zeroes exactly represent the disquiet that was audible — and palpable — in Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago.