The Deadly Danger of Trump's Anti-Press Rhetoric

To stay sane and productive I have been focussing relentlessly on work, family and surviving this pandemic. I have made a point of not reading articles about people ignoring the virus and going about their life as usual because apparently that Spring Break trip and/or visit to Red Robin or Applebee’s is worth not only risking your own life but those of your family and neighbors as well. 

I’ve avoided reading these articles because I know they will only fill me with rage and feed my misanthropy. I need to remain optimistic and hopeful, level-headed and calm and reading about assholes being fucking idiots to make some stupid point would only angry up the blood. 

Yet when I saw a Washington Post article about virus deniers on my Facebook wall it triggered my curiosity. Who were these people, I wondered, absent-mindedly. Then I read the article and found out: Trump supporters, not surprisingly. Of course! 

For the last four years Donald Trump has waged a one-man on the media, famously and repeatedly branding the non-far-right-wing media the “enemy of the people.” 

It has worked disconcertingly well. That’s partially because Trump can use his own political career as proof that the mainstream media’s predictions and confident assertions can sometimes be not just off but staggeringly, tragically wrong. After all, the media confidently predicted that Hillary Clinton would not only become our first female president in 2016 but win in a historic landslide. 

Then the mainstream media confidently predicted that Trump’s time in office would be short-lived, that he’d either be impeached and removed from office successfully or resign in disgrace due to any number of seemingly presidency-imperiling crises and controversies. 

In my very recent blog post “Why the End of the Trump Presidency Is, Sadly, Never the Actual End of Trump  about a recent Atlantic article with the adorably optimistic title “The Trump Presidency Is Over” I wrote about how, despite the writer’s claim that it was really over for Trump now that the coronavirus had finally revealed his fatal weaknesses for all to see, in a manner that was impossible to deny, it most assuredly was not over for Trump. 

Trump has very successfully brainwashed his cult into believing the words of a pathological liar and con man over those of journalists, experts and authorities. He’s trained his followers to believe that the media, with the notable exception of FOX NEWS, Breitbart and various other far-right-wing outlets, is inherently evil and dishonest, that it is an arm of the Democratic partly devoted exclusively to bringing down Trump. 

You can’t spend years and years and years angrily insisting that anything the mainstream media tells you is a mean-spirited and toxic lie malevolently dreamed up to hurt Trump and his administration, that they’re crazed hate-mongers peddling fear and lies and paranoia solely to hurt him, and then concede, reluctantly, that they happen to be right in possibly the most important story of the last 50 years, and that ignoring their words of counsel could literally lead to your preventable death. 

Trump has continually attacked the press as whole. He has consistently depicted them as useless and evil, power-mad and corrupt. In Trump’s eyes, the media is not an essential component of our culture with an important role to play informing the public about matters of tremendous importance, like fucking pandemics and global warming, but a pack of crazed attack dogs motivated by a vicious partisan grudge. 

So is it any surprise that when the media began reporting about the deadly dangers of coronavirus the uneducated, racist older Americans who are Trump’s loyal and dedicated base found it easy to ignore the dire warnings of the media as yet another case of the bought and paid for Liberal media shamelessly over-hyping a problem to make Donald Trump look bad? 

It doesn’t matter that even Trump has been forced to acknowledge that the coronavirus is a very real, very serious problem, albeit one that could be safely blamed on the Chinese, the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi. The damage was already done: people have undeniably died because they assumed that coronavirus was just more Liberal fear-mongering. Many more people will die because of Trump’s arrogance and entitlement before this is over. 

The media has an invaluable, essential role to play in this crisis giving people the vital information they need in order to not die. Trump has made that job infinitely harder than it needs to be by brainwashing his followers into seeing everything the non-far-right-wing media reports as strident, libelous, vicious partisan anti-Trump propaganda.

Trump’s anti-press rhetoric has always been irresponsible. It’s always been dangerous and deeply unAmerican. But in a time of great danger and peril it has become deadly. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place in a time of great peril by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course you can and should buy The Weird Accordion to Al over at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews

And, if you want to contribute to the Happy Place without Patreon you can always PayPal me at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net