Lugenpresse
Little Hitler is ranting about the media at his Nazi rally. I heard him squawk “But despite all their lies” before I turned the sound off. He’s a fascist piece of crap and he’s going to keep on with this shit until he gets it, or drops dead trying.
In his speech, Mr Trump said he wanted to speak to Americans “without the filter of fake news”.
Describing the media as “dishonest”, he repeated his assertion that some outlets “don’t want to report the truth” and were making up their stories about him.
“We will continue to expose them,” he said, pledging to “win, win, win”.
In his speech, the president also:
- Repeated his campaign pledge to keep America “safe” and said the country would “have strong borders again”
- Said Americans would have “a great healthcare plan” and Obama reforms would be repealed
- Stressed that the White House was running “so smoothly”, dismissing claims that his administration was in disarray
It is unusual for a sitting president to hold a rally in the style of those held during election campaigns.
Yes, it’s unusual for a sitting president to carry on like a fucking Nazi.
Throughout the week, Mr Trump launched attacks on the media while indicating his excitement at facing crowds in Florida again.
On Thursday, he held a 76-minute press conference where he told reporters their level of dishonesty was out of control, citing coverage of his campaign’s alleged contacts with Moscow.
Because he’s a Nazi.
What I really don’t get is why the press conference seems to be a watershed moment where people are finally realising that Herr Bäbyführer is a delusionally pathological liar. What I’ve read of the transcript doesn’t strike me as anything different than things he’s already said, both in style (such as it is) and in content; is it simply the fact that he was directly attacking the press to their faces, rather than using them as catnip for his supporters in a rally? Seriously, we haven’t had any new information about the big stupid baby’s character or convictions for…years, I guess, and yet his first solo press conference is this big zeitgeist-changing event? I really, truly, honestly don’t get it.
Maybe it’s just the culmination of everything, the crapstone of the shit sandwich pyramid that has been the first month. And maybe the effect is already fading, as we move on to the fresh horrors of the weekend and beyond. But I hope it sticks.
I don’t think it’s that it’s new. I’m not even sure most people are treating it as a watershed event. It’s more that it’s a convenient package, plus it’s a more extended public meltdown than he’s staged since starting to pretend to be president.
But psychologically…I’ve mentioned often that I can never get used to him. He surprises me afresh all over again, even though he’s only doing what he’s always doing. I guess I find it hard to understand people who don’t learn anything at all from mistakes.
I suppose that’s true, and I certainly don’t want citizens to stop being outraged by the course of events, but I guess I want the *press* specifically to get over their outrage and focus on actually doing their jobs. The facts of the matter are clear and indisputable by everyone outside the Info Wars ecosystem, and what remains of the Republic will only be saved if the press can break the outrage cycle it’s subjected itself to, wherein every fresh occurrence wipes the collective memory banks of everything that came before and by the time the current outrage would have been hashed out, there are a dozen fresh outrages, too numerous and frequent to give any the proper justice to.
I am personally outraged every time I see a transcribed word or, as rarely as I can manage, hear a recorded utterance of Herr Bäbyführer, but I am not a professional reporter whose job it is to hold the man and his cronies accountable, to get off the outrage carousel and stop playing the administration’s game. They’ll be called fake news and liars no matter what they do, so there is literally no incentive for them to keep trying to treat the administration as though it’s even trying to be normal. They have a profession, if they can manage to revive it, and succumbing to the outrage that regular citizens are obliged to feel should not be within the scope of that profession.
Hm. I’m not sure. That is – of course the press should do its job, and journalists shouldn’t be solely expressing outrage…but I think there’s a purpose to reporting on all the specific outrages. A lot of people voted for Trump thinking he was kidding, he was exaggerating for effect, he’d get serious when he had to, etc etc. I think those people need to learn about the outrages. Trump’s much-vaunted “base” is small. The non-base voters can potentially change their minds.
Then again it’s possible I’m just missing your point.
I think it’s more likely that I’m missing my point—or, rather, that I don’t have a coherent one. I’ve just seen a lot of reports over the last couple of days about how Herr Bäbyführer has gone ‘off the deep end’, especially at the presser on Thursday, which left me bemused. I’m not opposed in the least to cataloguing the litany of horrors, but framing each horror as though it were a unique aberration and deviation from the norms of politics is an ineffective way to communicate the truth of the unremitting clusterfuck that is the current reality in Washington.
Every day, often every hour, is going to bring a fresh hell. It’s important to catalogue them, yes, but it’s equally important to contextualise them. This is how Herr Bäbyführer has operated, in public, for the past eighteen months, and it is how he’ll continue to operate until his body fails him or the American body politic rejects him. There is no deep end; there is only the abyss. There is no ‘new low’, no scandal, no sexy soundbite that a reporter is going to uncover and become famous. There is only the grim reality that Washington DC has been taken over by a sinister cabal of Nazis fronted by an ignoramus incapable of finishing a single thought but incredibly good at generating scandalous headlines that do nothing to diminish his appeal among the rubes and even less to blunt the lobotomy currently taking place under the cabal’s watch.
I don’t know what an effective press looks like in the (outr)age of Herr Bäbyführer, but I do know that the scandal-cycle that has served the media so well for the past few decades has no effective way to cope.
This is actually true. I think that one of those outlets is called Breitbart. Fox News is another.
Seth, I agree with you in theory, but the problem is, the press is currently a business that is controlled for the most part by a handful of large corporations who are mostly interested in making money. Scandal sells, and they promote what sells. There are some outlets that report staid news without all the scandal, but those tend to be small magazines with small subscriber bases that already mostly know that sort of stuff and agree with them.
The only way to reach what you’re looking for is to have a press that isn’t soaked in the profit making motive. I fear that is a pipe dream, at least until we get a populace who values news for the sake of information rather than entertainment. Which we probably won’t get as long as the press is feeding them news in a reality show model…infotainment. So we’re caught in a truly vicious circle. The main rule for these folks is “don’t bore the base”. Make money while you can, because tomorrow they may turn on you.