‘I assumed the ratings would be higher’: Trump’s flagrant Friday night news dump just got more flagrant

It’s Friday night. A Category 4 hurricane is about to slam the Texas coastline, and President Trump directed the Pentagon to ban transgender people from joining the military and pardoned a politically radioactive convicted former sheriff. News also broke that one of his more controversial advisers, Sebastian Gorka, is leaving the White House.

This isn’t your average sleepy Friday news dump — a trick newsmakers use to bury unpopular news by releasing it when most people aren’t reading news. This is a flagrant attempt to hide a series of politically fraught (but base-pleasing) moves under the cover of an August, Friday night hurricane.

And on Monday, Trump made his news dump even more audacious. He claimed he did it precisely because of the hurricane, but not for the reason we’re assuming: “In the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally,” he told reporters at a news conference Monday with Finland’s president.

Uh, what? Trump pardoned former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio as the nation’s eyes were on a hurricane because he thought more people would hear about it? That defies common sense. News networks and newspapers only have so much bandwidth, and Trump forced them to choose between coverage of Trump’s remarkable pardon and a remarkable hurricane.

It’s already transparent as day that Trump is doing controversial things he knows are controversial, and he would prefer the public and the media not focus on it. Rather than acknowledge that, or even dodge it by giving a typical politiciany-non-answer, Trump tried to defend it by insulting thinking people everywhere.