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What the press isn't telling us: this could be the last Thanksgiving in America as a democracy [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-22
Thomas B. Edsall has a guest column in The New York Times that for once is well worth reading. Edsall is an aggregator — he finds a topic and then collects assorted views on it. This time around he’s come up with a must read from Brian Kiaas and launches into The Roots of Trump’s Rage. (Full access through the link.) Along the way Edsall quotes Trump at length and questions the choice of the media to give Trump so little attention when what he is threatening is so dire. Here’s the headline and summary from Klaas that got Edsall’s attention:
The Case for Amplifying Trump's Insanity The "Banality of Crazy" has warped American politics, as few voters recognize just how deranged, delusional, and dangerous Donald Trump is...because the press rarely reports on his routine insanity.
Klaas is frustrated that the press is giving Trump a pass, and is failing its duty to provide the public with information that shows just how dangerous he is. The essay is a must-read indictment of how badly the press is failing. READ THE WHOLE THING.
Edsall picks up this from Klaas that summarizes the situation:
Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.” “One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).” Klaas asked: What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets? How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II(which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016? The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
emphasis added
(Klaas has written about this just recently in The Atlantic: “Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley — The former president is inciting violence against the nation’s top general. America’s response is distracted and numb.”)
Edsall goes on to directly quote people who were warning about Trump 8 years ago, like the experts on mental health who put together:
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President - Updated and Expanded with New Essays
He’s not hiding it — so why does the press not want to say it?
Edsall quotes Trump from a number of recent speeches. It’s a chilling compendium that shows how Trump has only gotten far worse since 2015. The Trifecta referred to in the title of Edsall’s commentary are three things that are driving his descent. Summarizing the mental health experts he quoted (their opinions are devastating), it comes down to these three things:
Malignant narcissism
Psychopathy
Paranoia
The stress of his legal challenges along with his deteriorating health and mental decline are making them all worse. But — the press isn’t covering this the way it should, and Klaas argues why it matters. In his commentary Klass breaks down the relevant voting groups: dedicated Tumpers who are unflinchingly loyal, party die-hards who will vote for anyone with an “R” by their name on the ballot, Anti-Bidens who want another choice than Joe, and Fence Sitters who are swing voters.
The last two groups are key — they are persuadable and there are enough of them to decide the outcome of the election. These are the people who really need to hear how dangerous Trump has become, and why the constant emphasis on Biden’s negatives, omission of his positives, and non-coverage of Trump matters so much.
Everything Klaas is complaining about is captured by an article that ran in The NY Times yesterday:
Ignore Trump? Democrats Now Want Him Plastered All Over the News. The former president has been relatively quiet, out of the headlines and off mainstream social media. Democrats are hoping that more attention on him can help turn around President Biden’s fortunes.
The thrust of the article by Reid J. Epstein writing from Washington is that people are tired of hearing about Trump, that they are turned off by stories about him, don’t really see him as much in social media, he’s not newsworthy. Meanwhile Biden’s campaign is struggling and trying to put Trump in the spotlight is evidence that they’re in trouble trying to run on Biden’s record. It’s dismissed as trying to ramp up “the Trump outrage machine.”
Several voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020 and are now leaning toward Mr. Trump said they had not followed the ins and outs of the former president’s post-White House activities and tended to discount and brush aside his past scandals. “I know a lot of people get mad about what he said years ago about ‘grab them by whatever,’” said Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. “That was kind of aggravating. But, you know, that was years ago. And that’s how guys talk in a locker room. I don’t think he really would do that. I think he was just saying that.”
So, because Trump is no longer president, isn’t tweeting at 3:30 in the morning, isn’t showing up for debates with other candidates, isn’t holding press conferences in the Rose Garden, the press isn’t obligated to report on what he’s doing and saying, and there’s no need for voters to hear about him. Even though he has a lock on the nomination at this point and an iron grip on the party and the right wing media machine?
Never mind that Christian Nationalists are embracing him and his agenda, and can’t wait for him to rise again. Never mind that billionaires are putting their money behind Trump. Never mind that voters get nothing but negative stories about politics instead of the things that are actually working for them. Never mind that a majority of Americans don't like Republican plans for the country — the press won’t cover that.
(Klaas calls out The NY Times by name:
There’s a puzzle at the heart of Trump news and it’s this: why doesn’t the press go FULL BLOCK CAPITALS when a leading presidential candidate, yet again, incites violence? If Joe Biden called to execute shoplifters, do you think there’d be a big headline in the New York Times, or do you think you’d have to scroll well past the articles on pumpkin spice lattes and DogTV to find out about it? We all know the answer.
I wrote this comment on Edsall’s essay:
There’s one huge problem with this: it should be on the front page, not buried in the opinion section. There should also be questions about all of the people who have jumped aboard Trump’s bandwagon and their enthusiasm for his agenda. Mar-a-Lago just hosted a gathering of Christian Nationalist leaders who can’t wait for Trump to rise again. Billionaires are pouring money into Trump’s campaign. Trump’s blessing helped Mike Johnson become Speaker, and confirmed the MAGA grip on the party. At the state level the red states are enacting an extremist agenda and defying the will of the voters. Trump won’t have to worry about how to steal the 2024 election with their help. While all this is going on, the press obsesses about Biden’s age and popularity, while burying news about what his administration has accomplished. There is never good news for Democrats and nothing but good news for Republicans. It says something that this essay has to quote someone in London to make these points. The last two paragraphs of this essay should be posted in every newsroom across America.
Here are those two paragraphs:
Klaas of University College London concluded that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that should dominate all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses: The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.
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[1] Url:
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