In a recent mini-post, I faulted the mainstream media for allowing its fixation with whataboutism and contrived “balance” to get in the way of honest reporting about President-elect Trump and the unique threat he poses to the Republic.
Indeed, it occurs to me that the best media coverage of Trump’s complex relationship with our better angels comes from columnists like Tom Friedman and David Ignatius who have the wit, grit and editorial flexibility to give this newly overstuffed Il Duce of ours the kind of three-to-four-dimensional treatment he deserves.
When you have a viper in your midst you ignore or minimize its lethal potential at your peril.
Not surprisingly, for daring to question the quality of much of the latest reporting about Trump — much of it so uninflected as to take the edge off his craziness — I have been treated to a digital drubbing by Maga faithful.
One of them damned me online, with estimable economy, as a “Trump hater.”
My response — since I feel bound to add to my own misery in the name of a good cause — is offered in the following six paragraphs:
Hate has nothing to do with my views of Trump. They derive from my love of country, my respect for democratic norms and a deep visceral fear of what he represents in both departments.
Put me down as an unapologetic Boy Scout, even if I was once in the CIA and remain a journalist.
I also have dwindling hope of salvation via the “free” press.
Media coverage of Trump’s cabinet nominees has already devolved into a recitation of granular particulars that is about as instructive as counting the warts on the backs of toads.
What Trump is doing, behind all the endlessly chronicled pre-inaugural chaos, is creating a court of oligarchs and moral eunuchs – oligarchs to control the money ministries and thus the flow of wealth to themselves, a sure guarantee of their loyalties and Trump’s own enrichment, and moral eunuchs to head the security, justice and social welfare ministries so there will be no one preventing him from warping the commonweal to his will.
Our enemies rejoice because they recognize a fellow traveler in Trump whose only lodestar is the transactional.
So that’s it, folks, all the indignation I have the energy to muster, given my dwindling faith in our intrinsically flawed constitution with its implacable deference to the electoral college and the two-senator-per-state rule, each of these non-democratic provisions a concession to the original slave holders, and each now lovingly enforced and curated by a deeply partisan Supreme Court.
Metaphorically (and sometimes in reality) my doors are bolted these days against potentially trigger-happy Trump avengers, callow young reporters and middle-aged scriveners-, editors-, and media owners-turned-sellouts.
These latter three, if you ever wind up in the wrong (exclusive) cocktail party or board meeting and confront them face to face, will doubtless defend their exquisitely honed fair-and-balanced ambivalence as the only thing that makes any sense in the current economic environment — exactly what Fox News has proven to be infinitely profitable, 24/7.
Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Robert Iger, Brian L. Roberts, Elon Musk and their like must be all basking in their newly reinforced power over what we know, what we think we know, and what we will never know we don’t.
They are every bit as terrifying as Trump himself, and equally unaccountable.