Free Speech in a Donald Trump World – The Trump Grill Affair
Donald Trump is a vindictive little shit. That’s all there is to it.
Don’t believe me?
That’s fine. But let’s have a look at how he reacted to a pretty damn normal review by Vanity Fair of Trump Grill…
Screenshot of Donald Trump’s tweet… text: Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!
WAY DOWN BIG TROUBLE EVERYBODY WHO DOESNT LIKE ME IS TERRIBLE THEYRE ALL TERRIBLE WAAAAAAA :'(
Yeah okay.
Apparently Trump has nothing better to do than read Vanity Fair?
Anyways…
That big bad review of Trump Grill by Vanity Fair
The allure of Trump’s restaurant, like the candidate, is that it seems like a cheap version of rich. The inconsistent menus—literally, my menu was missing dishes that I found on my dining partners’—were chock-full of steakhouse classics doused with unnecessarily high-end ingredients. The dumplings, for instance, come with soy sauce topped with truffle oil, and the crostini is served with both hummus and ricotta, two exotic ingredients that should still never be combined. The menu itself would like to impress diners with how important it is, randomly capitalizing fancy words like “Prosciutto” and “Julienned” (and, strangely, ”House Salad”).
…
Photograph by Tina Nguyen.
The one thing required to save the meal—booze—turned into its greatest disappointment. Trump himself does not drink alcohol, a possible explanation for why the cocktails seemed to be concocted by a college freshman experimenting in their dorm room. The Tower was a tall glass filled with three types of rum and several types of fruit concentrate. (One person named it “The Cancun,” and slowly nursed the spring-break-colored drink over the next two hours like morphine.) The You’re Fired, an oversized Bloody Mary, appeared to be a chunky shrimp-cocktail sauce, heavy on the horseradish, mixed with ice and a lot of vodka. The Fifth Avenue—Grey Goose with Cointreau and a “splash of cranberry”—tasted like vodka mixed with Crystal Light, the ultimate drink for an 18-year-old pledging a sorority. The alternative to these cocktails—which we could not bring ourselves to finish over the course of two hours—was Trump’s own branded Trump Wine, which came with one red option and one white option.
As you can see the review is exactly what you’d expect from any reviewer from a popular media site at any newly popular venue. It is not unfair, it isn’t even rude, where are all the swears that should be there? I mean honestly… how could somebody find the review to be problematic?
And even if somebody did find a review of a restaurant to be problematic… it really doesn’t matter. Know why? Because every single person on this earth has different tastes. We like different things, we taste things differently, we smell things differently… it is all a personal experience. That experience is personal. It is an opinion. Nobody has to agree with your opinion. I do not like durian, my friend does… is he some kind of liar now? No. So don’t even try to make that kind of stupid ass argument.
But you know what…
This man is supposed to be our president yet he can’t even take normal criticism of a stupid restaurant that happens to have his name on it??? That is embarrassing. Not for the American people… his behavior is not somehow society’s collective fault. It’s embarrassing that a grown ass man behaves like a child throwing a tantrum.
Yeah the next four years are really going to go so well for free speech. We’ll have Trump attacking anybody who says anything he doesn’t like while the bureaucrats of the world simultaneously try to establish some kind of content standards on everybody to stop “fake news” but will actually only stop constitutionally protected speech that they do not like.
So that’s great.
Update – More commentary on the real threat of fake news (12/19/2016)
The coyoteblog.com (written by a businessman in Arizona who runs parks for states) has a thought or two about the real threat that fake news poses to the world… the political actions people want to use to stop it.
Politicians Are Going to Use “Fake News” Panic as A Wedge to Enhance Censorship
This is simply a terrible idea and demonstrates the point I made after the last election, that “fake news” is the new “hate speech” — in other words, an ill-defined, amorphous term that will be the excuse for censorship. Every politician thinks that every criticism of themselves is “fake news”.
