She neglected to add the word “again.”
This statement by Wallace—a former
Republican operative who worked in the second Bush White House and helped run John
McCain’s presidential campaign against Barack Obama—should become the normal
response from all of the news media whenever Trump gets in front of a
microphone and starts rattling off a succession of lies…which is to say, every
time the president speaks in public.
Giving Trump free air time to lie to
the American people is what got the racist con man elected in the first place,
and it’s what he’s counting on to win him a second term in office. “You just
say it,” he once told a confidant, “and they believe it.”
Or put another way, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep
repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (For the record, the
author of that statement was Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Nazi
Germany. The rest of Goebbels’s quote goes like this: “The lie can be
maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the
political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes
vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent,
for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth
is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Does any of that sound familiar? How about “repressing
dissent” and that “enemy of the state” business? Where else have we heard those
words?
So here’s the problem. Before
running for office, Donald Trump was a popular TV reality show producer and
host who is very comfortable in front of a camera, but was considered a joke as
a presidential candidate. The American news media—desperate for readers and
ratings—covered every word of his campaign for the sheer stupidity of it and,
in doing so, unwittingly gave him the credibility he needed to be accepted by
that 35% of the population who hates the government, opposes abortion, fears
immigrants and wants to preserve white supremacy.
The media created Trump in the name
of ratings (read that “revenue”), and three years later, other than Nicolle
Wallace and a handful of others, it still hasn’t figured out what to do with
him. But I have some ideas.
On January 14, 2017, I wrote this in
the shieldWALL blog:
If you saw the news conference, you know that Trump opened up by
calling out CNN for reporting “fake news,” and then refused to recognize (Jim) Acosta
when he tried to ask a question. This is setting a dangerous precedent under
which Trump will never have to answer a question he doesn’t like. He’ll just
“suspend” reporters one at a time until there is no one left to make him
accountable for the decisions he makes as president.
He’s not even in office yet and Trump is already taking the First
Amendment and grinding it up under his heel, and the worst part is, the media
is letting him get away with it. For my money, I don’t know why the rest of the
reporters in the room didn’t get up and walk out the second that Trump shook
his finger in Acosta’s face and said, “I’m not going to give you a question.”
Trump is nothing if not a creation of the news media. He’s the monster
to their Dr. Frankenstein. They built him in the lab during the long campaign
by giving him hours of free air time to ramble on at rallies unedited and
uncut, and then appeared shocked when their monster got loose and started
pillaging the countryside and killing sheep.
I’d suggest the reporters who cover Trump need to get organized, find a
way to cover each other’s backs and stop trying to “normalize” the
alt-president. He may love to discredit the media, but he’d be nothing without
them. The reporters who cover the White House are going to have to stand
together or they are all going to fall separately until there is nothing left
but Twitter rants from Trump’s golden realm.
So here’s my idea:
Back in the day, before the 24-hour
news cycle, the media used to show up for events such as a presidential rally, speech
or press gaggle the way they do now, only the event wasn’t broadcast live or posted instantaneously on the internet. The
press would photograph the event, take notes and return to the office to edit
their coverage and write stories about the actual news—if there was any—that was
generated by the event. If, say, a president would stand outside the White
House for 20 minutes and spew lie after lie, the resulting story would say so. If
he told the same lies day after day, that would be reported as well. The more
lies he told, the shorter the stories would be. No news, no story. Period.
Get the picture?
There are a dozen or so Democrats
running for president. How many of them get wall-to-wall coverage every day? How
many of their rallies are covered live? Did I hear someone say “zero?” This is what the media should do with
Trump. Take a cue from Nicolle Wallace and monitor the president’s statements
but report them after the fact if there’s any actual news to report. If not, just
ignore him and report on events that are real, honest-to-goodness news and not
a fantastical narcissistic campaign stump speech repeated over and over again.
Lie. Rinse. Repeat.
If Trump wants to do something
presidential, send a reporter. Otherwise, if he has a campaign message he wants
to deliver, let him buy an ad like everybody else. He certainly has plenty of
money to do that, since he apparently pays no taxes. No president of either
party should be allowed to put the job aside and spend every minute of every
day either watching TV or running for re-election, and especially not a
president who’s bat-shit crazy.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Donald
Trump is the president of the United States. He was elected to the job and you
can’t just ignore him. That would not be normal.” Am I right?
Well, Trump is deep into his third
year in office, so tell me one thing about this presidency that IS normal. Just
one thing. Anything, large or small, significant or otherwise. I’ll wait right
here.
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