Yes, the Melania Trump divorce thing is real

Attention Palmer Report readers: sign up for our free mailing list here
-----
Note from Bill Palmer: if each of you reading this can kick in $10 or $25, it'll help keep Palmer Report firing on all cylinders at this crucial time in our nation's history: Donate now


It happens every time Palmer Report, or any other non-major news outlet, gets ahead of the overall mainstream media narrative. Yesterday we brought you the story of how Melania Trump has begun feeding divorce talk to entertainment industry publication Hollywood Life. Sure enough, people on both sides of the political aisle began yelling “fake news” at our story, even though it’s easily proven to be legitimate.

For starters, a publication like Hollywood Life wouldn’t be pretending to have a source close to Melania Trump. If some readers aren’t sufficiently familiar with the publication in question to trust this, then it’s on them to do their homework, rather than simply shouting nonsense accusations at a news article. In addition, Hollywood Life has been publishing things from this source close to Melania for weeks. If this source were fake, or if the source were a friend of Melania who was speaking without her authorization, Melania’s spokesperson would have publicly pushed back against it by now.

Again, this is simply how these things work. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds of critical thinking to figure out that, yes, this divorce talk is 100% coming directly from Melania Trump. If anyone can’t follow logic this basic, they shouldn’t be commenting at all. Of course this does lead to the fair question of why the mainstream media isn’t covering this story. Hint: it’s for the same reason the mainstream media ignored Melania’s vanishing for the first two weeks.

Major media outlets have editorial relationships with political figures, their spokespeople, and so on. They don’t want to screw that up, and risk losing future inside access. It’s why they held off from covering Melania Trump’s disappearance for as long as they did. In the final week, major media did finally go wild with the vanishing Melania story, because they couldn’t credibly ignore it any longer. But sure enough, right after that, several major media outlets (including some left leaning ones) tried to make it up to her by publishing absurd pieces about her. It’s simply how these things work.

So why aren’t the major media outlets covering Melania’s divorce talk, considering they know it’s coming from her? You’d have to ask them. Maybe it’s because they’re upset that she gave the story to an entertainment industry publication like Hollywood Life instead of giving it to them. But so much of what the major media outlets do is based on timing things for maximum ratings impact and minimum injury to their relationships with the political figures who decide whether or not to give them inside access.

Ten months ago Palmer Report pieced together that White House Counsel Don McGahn was selling out Donald Trump to Robert Mueller. We didn’t have any unique sourcing on this; we were working entirely with publicly available information. The story was there for every major news outlet that wanted it, but none of them wanted it. Why? Perhaps they didn’t want to injure their relationship with McGahn, who appeared to be feeding them insider tidbits at the time – albeit tidbits that all made him look good.

None of this is to try to convince you not to trust what you hear from the major media outlets. They have their way of doing things, and while their behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing is often dishonest and sometimes repulsive, it does allow them to break certain major stories that otherwise would have never come out. But there’s a reason why every time Palmer Report is weeks or months ahead of the mainstream media on a story, we end up being fully vindicated for it in the end: the story was in plain sight all along, and for strategic reasons that have little to do with politics and everything to do with the business side of things, the mainstream media simply wasn’t ready to give it to you.

Attention Palmer Report readers: sign up for our free mailing list here
-----
Note from Bill Palmer: if each of you reading this can kick in $10 or $25, it'll help keep Palmer Report firing on all cylinders at this crucial time in our nation's history: Donate now