Report: TMZ's Chief Had a Secret Meeting with Trump to Get Tom Brady on His Talk Show
The Daily Beast has this sort of expose of TMZ’s Harvey Levin apparently running interference for Trump. They basically accuse him of taking control of any TMZ story that might look bad for POTUS and spiking it, promoting stories that make The Donald look good, discrediting anyone that accuses of him of anything remotely scandalous.
It’s the kind of revelation that should come as a shock to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to how news has been spun since the invention of the printing press. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were running against each other, Adams was called a “hideous hermaphroditical character” and Jefferson a “low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Franklin Pierce was a horrible president who only got elected because his buddy Nathaniel Hawthorne did him the solid of writing a glowing, lie-filled hagiography of him, “The Life of Franklin Pierce.” When Ted Kennedy got kicked out of Harvard for paying someone else to take his Spanish test, the Globe staff held meetings to discuss how they should report it, and they decided that Page 52 between the Greyhound race results and tire ads was perfect.
So anyone with a primate brain shouldn’t be surprised at the revelations. Apart from this one little nugget unearthed in all the dirt:
In March 2017, Levin met with Trump in the Oval Office for an hour in a meeting that was left off the president’s public schedule. The White House would later say the pair discussed “future opportunities,” while The New York Times reported that Levin had asked Trump for his help in snagging Tom Brady as a guest on OBJECTified.
A source told The Daily Beast that was not the only favor Levin called in to Trump.
“That is when he placed a call to Netanyahu to get him to come on Harvey’s show,” the top-level TMZ staffer said, referring to the Israeli prime minister who went on to appear on the season premiere of OBJECTified in October 2017.
OK, now you’re talking. Here’s something that interests me and it’s not even a scandal. This is how the world works in the 2010s, in three short paragraphs.
If future historians a thousand years from now want to find out how we were governed in our times, this is all they need to know. A sitting President of the United States had a secret meeting in the Oval Office with a guy who runs a gossip site famous for paying paparazzi to chase celebrities up sidewalks to ask them questions about other celebrities. And the purpose of the meeting was to get POTUS to line up the world’s greatest quarterback and a controversial world leader to the gossip mogul’s talk show. It’s perfect proof that the walls between reality, reality TV, government, sports, and entertainment have collapsed into dust and now are all one in the same. We’re living in The Truman Show, except Jim Carrey is also running the world.
And I seriously wouldn’t have it any other way. My president, one of my go-to gossip sites, the president of the country where WWIII will probably break out and my favorite athlete, all packaged together in microcosm of our times. And it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that going on OBJECTified (whatever the fuck that is) was not worth it for Tom Brady but it was for Netanyahu. The world might be going straight to Hell, but at least I work in the handbasket.