Dear Media: Stop Talking About Trump
After Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency on 8/8/1974, it took no longer than a couple of months for the media to start running pieces about his life after his resignation. Of one printed in The Washington Post, Hunter S. Thompson wrote the following in the 10/10/1974 edition of Rolling Stones:
Jesus! How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he’s lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.
Ever since Joe Biden became President on 1/20/2021 Donald Trump has been making the rounds in the media through various interviews. Newsweek documented every public statement Donald Trump has made since leaving office on 4/8/2021, and it’s mostly press releases with the occasional Fox News interview. He attacks Joe Biden, he attacks “RINOs,” (many of whom he worked with throughout his entire administration), and he asks for donations. Trump managed to take in $250 million in donations in between the election and the inauguration, and he has no plans of stopping that gravy train. Still, all of these statements, no matter how small, no matter how boring, no matter how obviously meant to cause a stir, still get massive play in the media.
Just yesterday, I turned on CNN to see them talking about Trump calling his own former Vice President Mike Pence “a loser” or something. He was invited on Fox to talk about the US-Mexico border crisis (which is also completely media manufactured, I should note) and has done basically nothing but attack Joe Biden and the “RINOs.”
Jesus! How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he’s mad at Biden and McConnell down there in Flordia? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.
Some media will at least acknowledge how bizarre this obsession is. On 3/28/2021, CNN’s Brian Stelter covered Trump’s interviews throughout conservative media, making note that the last one-term President, the first George Bush, was relaxing instead of going after the man who beat him. (Mind you, George Bush did attack Bill Clinton’s administration, specifically his policy on Haiti, but he did wait longer to do that than Trump did before he started going after Biden.)
Personally speaking, I would love Trump to just go fishing and never be seen again. Sadly, the media is doing everything in its power to refuse him the chance to do so. Donald Trump is doing this for the same reason Donald Trump does anything, for attention the media is gladly giving him. If Brian Stelter actually wanted Donald Trump to go away, he would, as the old phrase goes, be the change he wants to see in the world and not talk about Donald Trump anymore.
Of course, the main reason the mainstream media is doing this is because they want to present the current Republican Party as “the Trump party” as opposed to him being the logical endpoint of everything Republicans had been doing for decades. Here’s some utter nonsense The New York Times published on 4/9/2021 comparing the current Republican Party to how it acted a decade ago, specifically regarding its focus on “culture wars”:
It’s a strikingly different approach from the last time Democrats had full control of government, in 2009 and 2010, when conservatives harnessed the Great Recession to stoke anger about President Barack Obama and federal spending on their way to sweeping midterm gains.
The New York Times really wants us to believe that a movement led by Glenn “Obama is racist against white people” Beck, Rush “Obama started the recession as payback for slavery” Limbaugh, Bill “It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb” O’Reilly, and Sean “buddies around with Hal Turner” Hannity was only fiscal in nature.
How about the nonsense belief that Obama was not born in the United States which started with World Net Daily and Unfit For Command author Jerome Corsi? Donald Trump actually promoted the belief until September 2016, at which point he blamed it on Hillary Clinton (which actually does have some truth to it).
For that matter, how about the fear that Obama was a secret Muslim, because his middle name was Hussien? (As Collin Powell said on Meet The Press in 2008, even if he is, so what?) And the fears that Obama was actually gay, and many more nonsensical conspiracy theories that were so fringe nobody even remembers them anymore.
Trump was not even the first Republican President to have a cult around him. During the George W. Bush administration, anyone who didn’t support the Iraq War, the War on Terror, or the PATRIOT Act were all considered “anti-American” and “working for the enemy.” Looking back, it’s amazing how many of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld theories about terrorism were as valid as the Q-Anon theories about pedophiles.
Of course, once 2024 rolls around every candidate will be compared to Donald Trump. Some, like Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, and Josh Hawley will no doubt embrace the label, and maybe Donald Trump will even be invited on Fox News to tell his supporters which candidate is the most Trump-like. And the media will once again act like this new candidate is Donald Trump 2.0 and not just Ronald Reagan 8.0.
