Trump’s most dangerous coup is still unfolding
Nihilists, dude
Welcome to a Sunday morning edition of Progress Report.
Cool guy alert: I spent my Saturday night here in New York City putting together a giant guide to voter guides, which will provide curated state and local election guides produced by dependable news outlets, progressive groups, and labor unions. Welcome to life uptown with a toddler and an obsession with down ballot elections.
It’s honestly a ton of work, but that’s price of democracy, unfortunately; in the age of digital disinformation, extremist infiltration of local offices, and misleading partisan ballot initiatives, it’s never been more important for people to have easy access to ideologically aligned and readily available election resources.
The guide of guides will be hosted in the next edition of the newsletter.
In the meantime, with the public’s eyes opening to the danger of billionaire plaything news media, tonight I’m excerpting my new, example-filled deep dive into the spellbindingly hapless approach that so many reporters have taken to covering Donald Trump’s violent black hole of a brain. Remember: supporting and growing independent media is the only way to avoid this apocalypse.
Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s regular minimum — and then added another 25% discount. As we continue to see, independent media is increasingly our main bulwark against fascism. Help us survive
How Donald Trump used the media to convince Americans that nothing matters
It should matter that Donald Trump last Saturday wandered away from his normal stump speech and into a long and uncomfortable tangent about golf and the evidently impressive nature of Arnold Palmer’s driver.
There’s no charitable read on a major candidate for president waxing poetic about a dead golfer’s genitalia: whether it was a sign of dementia or being demented, of forgetting where he was or just not caring, if Trump were anybody else, it would have been front page news and the dominant topic on cable for days on end. But because it was Donald Trump that said it, the New York Times just called the digression “golf jokes” and moved on, changing the description only under pressure from Twitter critics.
The edit was ultimately a Pyrrhic victory, because the same exact thing immediately happened with a new story detailing Trump’s admiration for Hitler, disrespect of dead WWII soldiers, and ripping off the mourning family of a Hispanic soldier who was killed in action while he was president.
Perhaps he now seems to meek to criticize for past misdeeds? Is it a perfect storm of misplaced pity that earns him so many reprieves?
Earlier this month, Trump, interrupted by two supporters passing out as he spoke during a rally in Pennsylvania, decided that instead of shutting down the event, the best course of action would be to spend nearly 40 minutes swaying and bopping to an eclectic playlist of old favorites.
If Joe Biden had done it, there would have been calls for his resignation. But for Trump, The Washington Post’s headline, calling the incident “bizarre,” was as far as any big paper or news service was willing to go. The Associated Press called it an “impromptu concert,” while the New York Times said Trumped “bobbed his head” during an “odd town hall detour.”
Two days later, after he restated his lies about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH and said that Jan. 6th insurrections had done nothing wrong during a tough town hall on Univision, the Times simply said he’d “defended or dodged” the questions. Politico wrote that Trump “stays in form,” recapping his statements as harsh, but never unusual. Hate speech, repeated often enough and as part of an ostensible campaign strategy, is now as easy to gloss over as neurons failing to fire in a collapsed star of a brain.
Normalizing nihilism
Trump’s lying and babbling are now delivered in bulk, at a record pace. His stump speech has devolved from a series of inane boasts and digressions into a meandering list of false memories, non-sequitur monologues, and bigoted slurs. Perhaps making an assessment of his verbal shockers is impossible when out of nowhere, Trump will do something like yell “they’re eating the dogs!” during a debate or preemptively blame the Jews for his failure.
It seemed for a fleeting moment as if media coverage had turned a corner when the New York Times finally published a story exploring Trump’s obvious cognitive and verbal decline. There was little follow up, but the story, by veteran White House correspondent Peter Baker, did deliver a moment of clarity and key insight into the way the mainstream media covers politics.
Describing Trump as seeming “confused and disconnected from reality” at a recent rally, Baker noted that the former president frequently appears to be incoherent during public appearances. There were rants that I had totally forgotten about, like the lecture he gave to a fly in the middle of a rally, reminiscences about Michael Jackson and Cary Grant, and whiffing on the names of states.
“It happens so often these days,” Baker asserted, “that it no longer even generates much attention.”
Never mind that as the lead correspondent at the most influential and consequential newspaper in the world, Baker has a whole lot of influence over the amount of attention that is generated by Donald Trump’s mentally incompetent babbling and fundamental indecency.
To be fair, Baker also wrote about Trump’s steepening cognitive decline a month earlier, his entry a late addition to the initial conversation around “sanewashing.” In that piece, Baker transcribed several of Trump’s digressions, explaining that “most voters have not been exposed to Mr. Trump’s stream-of-consciousness style at much length lately.”
What happened in the month between those stories being published? Did the broad public suddenly become so inundated with transcripts and full-length videos of Trump’s mid-speech dips into dementia that they became old hat? Or did Baker project his own exhaustion with Trump’s asinine rants onto a far less informed public?
I’ve been bored by ongoing stories as a journalist and tempted to ignore new developments, but doing so for Trump’s sundowning would be quite hypocritical after the media’s obsessive attention to President Joe Biden’s cognitive acuity, its fixation on every misstatement and gaffe, fueled public concern that he was never able to shake.
Oppose fascism? Not worth the headache, I guess…
Even more dangerous than the downplaying of Trump’s mental lapses is the ongoing failure to adequately cover the high crimes that he has committed while semi-lucid.
On October 3rd, a judge unsealed a 165-page filing detailing the government’s case against Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Special prosecutor Jack Smith assembled a dark narrative of an angry president, well aware that he’d lost a hard-fought election, breaking the law and unbothered his supporters’ attempts to assassinate VP Mike Pence. It was explosive stuff, yet the bombshell fizzled.
According to the press watchdog Media Matters, the nation’s five largest newspapers published a combined 26 stories about the new evidence in the week that followed the unsealing. For context, those same newspapers published 100 articles about Hillary Clinton’s email server in the week following James Comey’s decision to reopen the FBI’s investigation.
Naturally, the same newspapers expressly refused to publish anything from a trove of hacked Trump campaign emails, deeming them irrelevent despite months spent running stories based on the Clinton campaign’s hacked emails.
My suspicion is that news outlets simply did not want to deal with the inevitable right-wing backlash and lawsuits that Trump would pursue against them — this is a guy who continues to rage and threaten to take away the broadcast licenses of both ABC and CBS over simple fact-checking during debates.
This is an excerpt from my latest piece for Courier Newsroom and its network of state-focused news outlets. To read the rest, click here…
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Nicely outlined.
I think you hit the nail on the head by mentioning the medias fear of being endlessly targeted by irrational followers.
It reminds me in my field of mental health of the caution we use when approaching an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic. We naturally take a lot of proactive responsibility.
Thanks very much again!
Great article- the mainstream media has failed the public and democracy time and again. I almost hate the weather forecast- 80 degrees in Indiana at the end of October but never a mention of climate change! Trump and his sidekick, the biggest threat to democracy since Adolph Hitler and The Washington Post and LA Times are too cowardly to make an endorsement for President. Is it time for public ownership (not government) of major media? Can Progress Report and like reach enough of the public? The only laugh will be if Trump wins, is that he will crush those cowards if they don't bend to his dictatorship. Of course, being cowards they will bow.