If you’ve read anything I’ve written, ever, you’ll know that I dislike Donald Trump. It’s nothing against him personally…I just think he’s intellectually and emotionally unfit for his office and was probably elected on the back of illegal and yet-to-be-uncovered electoral malpractice.
Every other day, some new scandal breaks; there are so many reminders of his unfitness that we honestly can’t keep track, unless you’ve attached a person to doing so professionally.
Remember cabinet members charging taxpayers for private flghts?
Remember Ivanka Trump sitting in on meetings with the heads of the Japanese government while Trump Org. business interests were being pursued in Japan?
Remember Trump firing James Comey, then telling the Russians that firing the “nut job” would ease pressure?
Remember when the Trump White House leaked information on unmasking to Devin Nunes?
Yeah…all those things have happened, and been forgotten, simply because we can’t keep up with it all; that’s before we even get to inappropriate touching and his poor reading skills.
To me, though, that’s the thing…there’s so much wrong with the current presidency that we shouldn’t have to reach or contrive to find reasons to shake our fists at him, or to generally disapprove of the words coming out of his mouth.
Unfortunately, that is where we are now in the media and in the “news”: we reach and contrive, and increasingly so lately; I’d actually started writing a thing called “CNN is a middle-school gossip,” that wanted to get at the “why” behind Pulitzer-potential stories like “Tillerson Refuses to Answer if He Called Trump a Moron” (Oct. 16th) and “Clarence Thomas calls Neil Gorsuch ‘outstanding.’ (Nov. 2nd). I couldn’t decide which of the dozens of not-particularly-informative-news headlines to pull from and write about.
Recently, it was all about Trump and Lavar Ball. If you weren’t following the news, three UCLA basketball players, including LiAngelo Ball, were arrested for shoplifting from a Louis Vuitton store in China, and could’ve faced punishments ranging from aggressive deportation to 10 years in jail. President Trump told us so, so it’s definitely true.
The thing is, whether or not the President’s claims of potential punishment were true, doesn’t really matter. The president – much as I dislike some of his ways – took moments out of an extraordinarily busy schedule to act on behalf of American boys, and he made a phone call with Chinese President Xi to secure their release. Of course, he’s still Trump, so he then demanded thanks from Lavar Ball after said Lavar asked “who?” when a reporter asked about him showing gratitude to the President.
Now look, my stance is he should’ve thanked the President. Whether Trump’s phone call was the key to the release for not; whether he likes President Trump or not: the man is the President of the United States, and he took an action on your behalf. Showing some thanks is simply the polite thing to do. Unfortunately, this incident involved two self-promoting loudspeakers, so what we got instead was a “thank me!”-“screw you!” back-and-forth that fed the most absurd TV interview I’ve seen. (Other than Kellyanne Conway’s debut of “Alternative Facts”.) Seriously. You should watch the whole thing.
Then this – again from CNN – submitting that one of the President’s tweets on the issue was racial dog-whistling.
See, now that’s just ridiculous. Comparing Lavar Ball to Don King isn’t racial dog-whistling. It’s comparing one black braggart profiting off the abilities of others to another, due to similarities like the color of their skin, their relative lack of innate talent, and their general volume when speaking indoors.
That it came from the President of the United States, who has a history of racism, STILL doesn’t make it racism. It doesn’t even make it “racial dog-whistling,” unless you yourself believe that simply alluding to blackness is on its own racial dog-whistling. I do not.
Not everything a racist does to the targets of their hatred is racism. If a white supremacist declines to hold a door open for a black woman walking behind him, that isn’t racism itself…it’s just shitty behavior, same as if a Black Lives Matter leader ALSO didn’t hold the door open. And no, I don’t think it’s different when one person does it vs. the other, unless we can prove intent.
The issue with all this is that it isn’t helping. The Trump Administration is the most dysfunctional and disjointed in the last four decades: they need to properly interrogated and pushed; they don’t need stretch accusations. Looking for false gotchas in every Trump administration appearance or text isn’t news, and isn’t holding the powerful accountable. It’s tabloidy distraction.
“News” like this is not opposition, and it isn’t helping. It’s just causing more Brian Ross situations, and increasingly reasonable accusations of “fake news.”
The news – and all of us, really – would be better served sticking to the “facts” so out of vogue now, and leaving the random aspersions to actual fake news.