Fountain on the South side of the White House is dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day.(Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

Fountain on the South side of the White House is dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day.(Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

Journalists are instructed to make their headlines snappy, because readers don’t always get past them. One study found that six in 10 Americans read nothing more than headlines.

Add whoever does the White House “1600 Daily” link roundup to that list.

The White House sends out a daily summary of notable memos, tweets, videos, and media clippings that show Trump administration policies in a positive light. Someone ought to teach them, though, that when a headline sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Alexanda Petri is a humorist over at The Washington Post, where she turned the state of D.C.’s Metro system into gothic horror, penned a Cthulhu endorsement of Trump, and filled in the gaps on the epic love between Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus.

One of her latest stories: “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why.” If you only read the headline, it sounds pretty flattering towards the Trump budget—which would slash funding for at least 80 federal programs, including the Chesapeake Bay Program, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

But if you click through, and the White House provides a link to do just that, it quickly becomes clear the piece is satire.

For instance:

This budget will make America a lean, mean fighting machine with bulging, rippling muscles and not an ounce of fat. America has been weak and soft for too long. BUT HOW WILL I SURVIVE ON THIS BUDGET? you may be wondering. I AM A HUMAN CHILD, NOT A COSTLY FIGHTER JET. You may not survive, but that is because you are SOFT and WEAK, something this budget is designed to eliminate.

Or this explanation of cuts to the Department of Agriculture:

NO MORE OF THIS NAMBY-PAMBY “GATHERING” NONSENSE. We will be HUNTERS again. This is also why we are cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children: Let them FIGHT for their meat or have NONE.

So did someone just read the headline and think, “Yeah, this sounds good”?

There is another option, too.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

Update: Looks like the White House has deleted the link to Petri’s piece in the online version of 1600 Daily. It will live forever in inboxes, though.

Petri has responded with a column called “How the White House made me Real News.”

“I was as surprised as anyone to discover that I was Real News,” she writes. “Here I thought that I was toiling away in the Dank Cesspool of the Mainstream Media, but all along I was a Trusted News Source, just like Breitbart.com! I just needed to BELIEVE in myself more.”

She ends with this: “This is 2017 in a nutshell: You start with what you think is obviously a joke, and then a few days later it is being sent out from the White House.”

Filed Under: alexandra petri, donald trump, the washington post, trump budget, white house,