Why Not Indeed?

 

Why Not Indeed?

 

I recently heard a commentator on MSNBC, whose name unfortunately I do not remember, recite this brief list of facts about Donald Trump:

 

·        He has said that General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed because he didn’t go along with some of Trump’s schemes as president.

·        He stirred up a mob and sent them to the US Capitol with a mission to conduct a coup against the American government and American democracy.

·        He approved of his mob’s chant of “Hang Mike Pence!”

·        All through the 2016 presidential campaign he had crowds chanting “Lock her up!” against Hilary Clinton though Clinton had committed no crime.

 

Then this commentator asked: Why aren’t these things the lead story on every news broadcast in the country? That is a very good question indeed.

The answer has to be because we have become numb to Trumpian outrages. We’ve been bombarded with them at least since he started to run for president in 2015. As the list above shows, it’s been one thing after another for years, and that list hardly covers every outrageous thing Trump has done or said. Yet it has been impossible for over eight years to turn on respectable TV news, i.e., not Fox News, or to read a respectable newspaper, i.e., not the Washington Examiner, and not hear or read about something new and appalling about the Donald. He generates reasons why he should never be taken seriously as a politician or even as a human being in an endless stream. We human beings can take only so much of the battering we constantly get from what news we do get about Trumps outrages.

Why our media fall short in reporting on Trump’s outrages is a good question when it is supported only by the few of Trump’s appalling outrages than this commentator mentioned. Yet, of course, Trump has committed far more appalling outrages than these four. Here are some of them in no particular order:

 

·        He has said there are fine people among white supremacist.

·        He has slandered the memory of Senator John McCain by saying that he, Trump, prefers soldiers who don’t get captured.

·        He has mocked people with disabilities.

·        He says he can grab women “by the pussy.”

·        He has cheated on all three of wives, once with a porn star and once with a Playboy Playmate.

·        He has lied so often that it is far safer to assume that anything he says is a lie than to assume that it is the truth.

·        He has done, and he continues to do, everything he can to subvert the rule of law in this country.

·        He has violated his presidential oath to protect and defend the United States Constitution time and time again.

·        He does not discourage his rabid followers from committing acts of violence against anyone he dislikes including, among others, his political opponents, local election volunteers, and legal system personnel involved in his multiple criminal indictments but encourages his mob to commit acts of violence against them.

·        He has been criminally indicted four times and has been charged with ninety-one felonies in those indictments.

·        He has recklessly mishandled classified government documents.

·        He has illegally withheld foreign aid money Congress had authorized in an attempt to force a foreign leader to undertake an investigation of the son of one of Trump’s political opponents.

·        He will take the word of Russia’s war criminal, fascist president Vladimir Putin over the findings of his own government’s intelligence agencies.

·        He organized and led a massive criminal conspiracy to subvert American democracy by overturning the result of a free and fair presidential election so he could stay in power.

·        A New York state judge granted summary judgment finding Donald Trump and his organization guilty of fraud as a matter of law.[1]

 

So, along with that MSNBC commentator I ask, why do our media so rarely highlight these and other Trumpian outrages?

Numbness is the only answer I can find. Yet our media treat him like a legitimate American politician, something that he obviously is not. He is  psychologically disordered personally and an American fascist politically. Our media have grown numb to him. They rarely tell the full truth about him. Our people have grown numb to him. Most of the truth about him just bounces off of us leaving no lasting imprint. Our country is in deep, deep trouble because of Donald Trump. Our politics may be so disordered that we will reelect him as president. I sure wish I knew what to do about it.

 

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[1] I used to be a civil litigation lawyer. I can tell you that motions for summary judgment are rarely granted. To grant such a motion, a judge must find that there is no material issue of fact with regard to a claim in the case. It takes very little for a party to establish that there is a material issue of fact. Most of the time, all you have to do to defeat a motion for summary judgment is submit an affidavit by your client saying something different from what the moving party’s papers say. In this case, Trump couldn’t even do that. That the judge granted a summary judgment against Trump on one of the state’s claims against him is remarkable. It establishes that the state has more than a slam dunk case against him. It’s got him dead to rights. The court found that the man is a fraud, something many of us have known for a long time.