America has attained peak gaslight. It happened when the President of the United States tweeted a report by Breitbart that a poll found "the media failed to gaslight public about Trump campaign spying."

While the big focus this week is on the funds raised by the 2020 Democratic presidential primary contenders, the real story is in the war chest accumulated by the incumbent, and what his campaign is doing with it. Following Q1 Federal Elections Commission filings by the Democrats, the party's story is the dominance of funds raised by Bernie Sanders, and secondarily by Kamala Harris. But it is two relative newcomers -- Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg -- that analysts are trumpeting as the story within that story.

The perceived credibility of major U.S. news organizations has been trending downward since the 2016 election, but most of it has been driven by sentiment from Republican voters. According to the latest tracking from Morning Consult, the share of Americans rating nine leading news outlets as credible has dropped an average of five percentage points over the past three years. Among Republicans, it feel an average of 12 percentage points.

When does a hard-to-pronounce brand name change from a liability to an asset? When pundits and the news media give an assist by providing mnemonic devices on the proper way to say it. That's what's happened to Pete Buttigieg in the weeks since he emerged as a serious Democratic presidential contender.

He began his first full day in office by declaring war on the media, and now the President is circulating an "enemies list" asking "the enemy of the people" to bar his most vociferous political opponents from speaking on their airwaves. In a memo first circulated in a tweet by Axios National Political Reporter Jonathan Swan, the reelection campaign's Director of Communications Tim Murtaugh asked TV news producers to bar:

It's known as "Greener's Law," and it is one of the most fundamental principles of media spin, especially the political kind: Don't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes is learning, the same thing applies to milk in the Twitter age.

As an easy way to save time and words, this week's column is about Donald J. Russia.

When he gave a keynote at CPAC last weekend, it was the first time a President said "bullshit" during a nationally televised address. Why does this matter? Because Presidents are supposed to use their "bully pulpit" as a platform that lifts us up, not one that brings us down into the gutter.

The Blaze's audience has surged 143% over the past year, catapulting it to the second biggest right-wing political news source in the nation, behind a long-dominant Fox News, according to an analysis released today by TheRighting. But the real story is the erosion of Breitbart News, which plummeted 11%, falling to fourth place, behind The Blaze and The Washington Examiner.

Just as CNN is exhibiting the greatest improvement in trust among American news watchers, the network announced a new political editor with a perceived right-wing bias will lead its coverage through the 2020 election. The appointment of Sarah Isgur Flores, who served as Department of Justice director of public affairs under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and more recently as senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, triggered immediate tweetstorms of "what is CNN thinking," but it also signals yet another incestuous convergence between political operatives and political reporting that could have been taken from a discarded episode of Aaron ...