President Trump's chief media fluffer has resigned

By Katie Rife  |  August 25, 2017 | 8:16pm
Aux News Donald Trump

If you read the Vice News story that came out earlier this month about the twice-daily briefings of positive press that are prepared for the terminally insecure, potentially pathologically narcissistic man currently serving as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military and thought to yourself, “how can anyone stand to do that job?,” the answer is, apparently, “temporarily.”

CNN, among other news outlets, reports that Andrew Hemming is the latest member of Trump’s communications team to resign. Hemming’s official title was “White House director of rapid response,” but his chief duty, according to Politico, was to seek out and disseminate positive (or “real,” in Trumpspeak) stories about Trump. “At the White House, he worked from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. every weekday and was a regular in reporters’ inboxes, blasting out stories favorable to the administration,” Politico writes, adding that Hemming was paid the relatively paltry sum of $89,000 a year for the task in a recent profile.

To make things worse, that same profile says that, in the first few weeks of the Trump administration, Hemming was diligently sending out his daily dispatches of Trump-friendly news clips to an email list of thousands of reporters and TV talking heads, unaware that they weren’t being read:

He’s always been a behind-the-scenes operative, associates said, but for the first few weeks of the administration, Hemming was toiling, perhaps for the first time in his life, in total obscurity. Hemming would blast out his carefully curated clips, sometimes multiple times a day, with the goal of driving more positive news coverage.

But for weeks, sources inside the White House said, no one informed him that the White House IT system could not handle an email going out to such a big list, and all of his emails were being blocked by a firewall and reaching an audience of zero readers.

There’s some sort of metaphor here, but we’re too mentally exhausted to know what it is. Hemming has yet to publicly comment on his resignation, which CNN describes as “mutual.”

 
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