I mentioned the other day that Trump was exceedingly good at identifying opportunities to shift the focus from himself onto others. Dreary dullards in the GOP and their sycophants find this vexing, but it is good politics. Progressives have sold bad ideas and bad candidates this way for generations. Obama got the White House without anyone knowing anything about him.

The interwebs brings word that Trump has banned the Des Moines Register from his Iowa event.

Donald Trump courted further controversy on Friday by banning the Des Moines Register from attending his Iowa campaign event Saturday, according to the Register.

The real-estate mogul and Republican 2016 candidate was unhappy with an editorial published by the newspaper that called on Trump to pull out of the race.

“We’re not issuing credentials to anyone from The Des Moines Register based on the editorial that they wrote earlier in the week,” Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told the newspaper.

He said he expected the campaign would reconsider for future events.

Lewandowski is a hardline libertarian-conservative, who reminds a bit of Lee Atwater. The world is a different place these days, but like Atwater, Lewandowski is good at getting under the skin of establishment types. This has the benefit of shifting the focus from the candidate onto his critics.

GOP voters loath the media so Trump scores points by zapping the media this way. More important, it raises a discussion of the media’s bias and honestly. There’s not a lot of time to mock Trump when the lead story is how the Des Moines Register is not playing fair.

The editorial section of the Register — Iowa’s largest newspaper — operates independently from the newspaper’s political team.

“As we previously said, the editorial has no bearing on our news coverage. We work hard to provide Iowans with coverage of all the candidates when they spend time in Iowa, and this is obviously impeding our ability to do so. We hope Mr. Trump’s campaign will revisit its decision instead of making punitive decisions because we wrote something critical of him,” the Register’s editor Amalie Nash said in a statement.

I’ve often wondered if the people working at these organizations believe this stuff. Maybe they do, but no one outside the press believes it. Even liberals admit that the main press is on their side. They just claim it is because the void where God used to be wills it. The vast majority of people think Amalie Nash of the register is full of it. Worse yet, they think she knows she is full of it.