Wednesday, August 31, 2022

So Why Does He Get All The Media Attention?

I don't think it's just right wing media that's propping him up. Drudge here has the virtue of being honest.  And over at the Bulwark:

I know what you’re thinking:

Who could declare him the rightful winner?
What is that process? What is the controlling legal authority?
How do you have a re-run of an election that took place two years ago?
When would this election take place? Does “immediately” mean tomorrow? Next week? Next month?
How would the nominating process work? Who would determine ballot access for candidates? Would this procedure violate current election laws? What would the campaign finance restrictions be like?

And then there’s the big question: Is this guy forking serious?

I don't need to include the tweet of the "truth" that Trump posted.  You know what Mr. Last is talking about.

That question is more important than you might think. Let’s move down the decision tree:

If Trump is serious, then he is cognitively impaired. There is no way to accomplish the “remedies” he proposes. The idea that someone could simply “declare” him the rightful winner of the 2020 election is preposterous. Who has that authority? Not Congress. Not the Supreme Court. Not the president. There is no piece of paper that can be signed and ratified that would accomplish this goal.

So either Trump does not have the baseline intelligence to understand how the government and the U.S. Constitution function—or he has suffered from some mental decline which has rendered him incapable of basic deductive reasoning.

In either case, even the most ardent anti-anti-Trumpers would be forced to acknowledge that under no circumstances should he be president again.

On the other hand, if Trump is not serious—by which I mean that he does not actually believe that either of these remedies are even theoretically possible—then he is advocating the overthrow of the legitimately-elected government of the United States and rejecting the Constitution.

Maybe this rejection is an expression of authoritarian aspiration. Maybe it’s nihilism. Or maybe it’s performance art.

But no matter what the motivation, the result is the same. It’s sedition. So anyone who wants to throw in with Trump on the “oh he doesn’t really mean it” tip is signing up for sedition and rejects the Constitution.

That’s it. Those are the only options.

I haven't heard much about Trump's "position" on mainstream meda (then again, I hardly "consume" mainstream media anymore.  No brag, just fact.)  But wait, I'll be fair:
NBC goes with the "Q-Anon" frame; if there's any mention of sedition, they buried that lede. And...that's it. I'm looking at Maggie Haberman's Twitter feed, the NYT report who has made Trump her specialty. She quickly posted about Trump's new Florida lawyer; posted a story about how the RNC is not paying for Trump's Florida lawyers (the search warrant case, I mean. So far Trump has four lawyers on that case, only two of them licensed in Florida), and on Trump's blizzard of "truths" in the past 24 hours? Crickets.

Again, to be fair, Ms. Haberman is not the whole of the NYT, and her tweets are her own to post and retweet.  Still:  deafening silence from the Time's premier reporter on the politics of Donald Trump.  And it's not like this morning wasn't a significant effort by Trump:
Nor do I think his insane utterances should be taken seriously.  But his insanity should be.  This is absolutely unhinged stuff.  As Mr. Last says, either Trump has proven himself completely unfit to hold public office or possess anything sharper than a rubber call, or he's thrown himself all in with the sedition camp that says he must be POTUS because he must be in power.

There's really not a third-course "objective" position to have on these statements.  Although I guess you can just say "Q-Anon" and "well, there he goes again," and leave it at that.  It makes sure Trump gets the media attention; and the journalists get the eyeballs.
Slate did manage to cover Trump’s meltdown without writing a heavy opinion column.
It’s not exactly Grey Lady worthy (not a complaint), but it shows what is possible.

You'd think that would at least interest the "political journalists" who take up so much space on cable TeeVee and Twitter. But, maybe not.

It's kind of a broken system, when you think about it.
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2 comments:

  1. The Thought Criminal8:39 AM

    The media, the NYT as much as CBS or NPR, have been playing the financier-Republican game of harnessing populist-racist white supremacy for so long it's the required in-house ideology of virtually all of the corporate media. Now the populist-racist-violent fascists have taken over the Republican Party but the owners of the media are still invested in the tax-breaks and other boons that came to them and those lower down in the media know which side their croissants are buttered on.

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  2. ntodd10:14 AM

    It's always ugly and dangerous when a narcissist begins to decompensate. The media are his flying monkeys.

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