“Personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled,” Mr. Trump told Times reporters in a wide-ranging interview. “Because you should have taken it all the way; I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”
“I think he’s a person I know well,” Mr. Trump said. “He is a good person.”
.. But the president has a particular rapport with Mr. O’Reilly, whose hectoring braggadocio and no-apologies nostalgia for a bygone American era mirror Mr. Trump’s own.
.. Mr. Trump called it “locker room talk” and apologized for the remarks. Mr. O’Reilly, on air that evening, allowed that the tape was “an embarrassment” for the Republican nominee. But he also criticized The Washington Post, the newspaper that published the footage.
.. But Mr. Trump’s advice to his friend on Wednesday — that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t have settled” — was consistent with the never-back-down ethos of a president, and former real estate magnate, who relishes the counterattack.
.. Fox News’s prime time and morning hosts are blatant champions of the administration — to the extent that NBC News’s chairman, Andrew Lack, recently compared the network to “state broadcasting.”
.. Mr. Murdoch’s former wife, Wendi Deng, is so close with Ivanka Trump that the president’s daughter became a trustee of the Murdoch children’s fortune.
.. Mr. Murdoch, meanwhile, had mentored Ms. Trump’s future husband, Jared Kushner, in the art of media moguldom after his purchase of The New York Observer in 2006.
.. Mr. Trump’s kind words for Mr. O’Reilly on Wednesday seemed a reciprocal gesture of sorts, from a leader who values loyalty.
Trump Ruins Irony, Too
I’ve been mildly obsessed with air quotes and their cousin, scare quotes, for years. They are typically used when a term appears in quotation marks for reasons other than being a direct quotation
.. they indicate “epistemic uncertainty.”
.. We use air quotes for many reasons. There’s the conspiratorial use, as when Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Obama’s legitimacy by referring to him as the “quote ‘president’ ” during his campaign. That, you might say, is old-fashioned, street-fighting politics.
.. If everything is air-quotable, then what does anything really mean?
.. The writer Greil Marcus argues that such scare quotes “are a writer’s assault on his or her own words.” They signal writers’ fears, he says, of the very words they’re using.
.. He and Mr. Spicer are employing ironic techniques not comically but cynically — to destabilize meaning.
.. “Air quotes eliminate the responsibility for one’s actions, one’s choices.” In the president’s hands, air quotes are apparently a way to push an alternate reality — one that’s often defined after the fact.
.. Mr. Trump’s most recent air-quoting supports his basic critique of elites — that we in the media, or in cities, or in blue states, take things too seriously. Of course he doesn’t really grab women’s genitalia. That’s just locker room talk. He “grabs” women’s “genitalia.” Of course Mr. Obama didn’t wiretap. He “wiretapped.”
.. The paradox is that President Trump has turned an invention of the urbane and educated against them. He has weaponized irony.