For a decade now, U.S. news media have struggled over how to cover the maelstrom that is Trump and Trumpism. Trying to treat it all as normal news, when it’s anything but. For example, there was long hand-wringing over using the word “lie.”
News media are still flummoxed. Still striving to maintain a facade of normalcy about it all, speaking in measured tones even as craziness goes ballistic. We regularly watch PBS’s news discussion, “Washington Week,” and it can seem like a pantomime of dancing around reality. When the New York Times’s Peter Baker did utter the word “insane,” it seemed jarring.
But no such word was heard in May 2’s discussion of conspiracist Laura Loomer’s causing White House national security personnel firings.
We also watch Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Heralding itself as “America’s Only Source for News.” Tongue-in-cheek, but often that seems weirdly for real. They bring an unrivaled clarity to current affairs.
Recently Daily’s Jon Stewart shouted “Bullshit!” reacting to a clip of Trump talking. “It’s bullshit!” Now that was clear and accurate.
What was the subject matter? Doesn’t matter; with Trump it’s all bullshit. And not merely as a tool, not a device, nor even a strategy. It is the core of him. It’s who he is. It’s the core of his whole political project, of his regime. Like the proverbial turtles, it’s bullshit all the way down.
And it turns out there’s no penalty. Unlike past times when a lie was deadly for a political career. Now it’s the opposite: Trump proves it works (for Republicans at least). A lesson others take to heart.
It’s making us into a bullshit country. The public square inundated with echoing waves of bullshit. Voice after voice spewing it out. And so many, too, knuckle under to it, bending the knee. While hold-outs are targeted with persecution. Especially those daring to deny Trump’s biggest bullshit, that he won the 2020 election.
Our local paper, the Times-Union, like The Daily Show, does still stand fast in truth telling. But real journalism, all over the country, hangs by its fingernails. NPR and PBS are losing funding, their survival in doubt.
This is the picture of an entrenching authoritarian regime. The walls are closing in; the lights going out.
The Daily Show recently aired a clip of Trump interviewed in the Oval Office. Whose redecoration he was showing off — a phantasmagoria of crass vulgarity, bristling with gold bric-a-brac. In pride of place by his desk was a map with, in big letters, his mis-labeling of the Gulf of Mexico.
Also displayed (oddly enough) was the Declaration of Independence. Trump was asked what it meant to him. Clearly having no idea, he babbled some nonsense about “unity” and “love.”
Bullshit all the way down.
