Wednesday morning during an appearance on CNN’s New Day, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman reported that former President Donald Trump is putting the squeeze on conservative writers. Apparently, he’s hoping this will add legitimacy to his baseless “stolen election” nonsense, Mediaite reports.

As you may remember, Haberman reported Tuesday that Trump has been telling people he expects to be reinstated as President in August. something that New Day co-host John Berman described as “madness.”

Tuesday Haberman noted on Twitter that “Trump has been telling several people he’s in contact with that he expects he will be reinstated in August,” but she also added the caveat “(no, that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information.)”

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021

Haberman added a bit of clarification, noting Trump is parroting claims made by his former attorney Sidney “Release The Kraken” Powell and My Pillow fruitcake CEO Mike Lindell. Both have been amplifying evidence-free conspiracy theories about the so-called stolen election.

But that led Mediaite writer Colby Hall to note:

“However, the difference between Trump making these baseless and unhinged claims is that Trump ‘is a former president and the other is a future nominee.'”

At one point Haberman noted:

“If he ran for president again, he would still have a very good shot at the nomination. And this is something that some of his supporters will hear and take seriously when he says it.”

But she added ‘there is no legal mechanism by which this can happen.”

That’s the point where she noted Trump is pressuring right-wing writers to add legitimacy to his stolen election narrative,” or as she added, he’s “trying to flush into the conservative media ecosystem,” in the hopes of adding weight to the baseless stolen election lie. Haberman also noted there are some similarities between Trump’s efforts to strengthen these baseless claims and the time he tried to whip up public pressure to fire his then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and she reinforced the idea that he’s working now to promote the stolen election claim as a way to “legitimize it, to try to get people to call attention to it.”

I can’t help but think of the old cliche “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” It fits here. Trump’s been squeaking since forever.

But she also made a salient point about the current state of the news media. It’s a pretty schizophrenic situation and the split between the “media diet” (Colby’s term) has “gotten worse progressively over time.”

“Democrats who support Joe Biden don’t want to hear anything about Donald Trump, and because Donald Trump is not on Twitter anymore, they think, therefore, he doesn’t really exist, except he does really exist strongly in this right-wing ecosystem.”

Unfortunately, this is a worrisome trend. Readers and viewers who get their information from Fox News, Breitbart, OAN, and Newsmax are often gullible enough to believe the misinformation these places peddle. There is absolutely no legal way Trump can resume the presidency in August but I really don’t know what this portends for 2024.

It behooves us to remember this man conned his supporters into engaging in an attempted coup. Who knows what he might try next?

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