Maybe Lay Off the "Lamestream Media" Talk Until This Is Over, Eh Trump?

Here’s a crazy idea: why don’t YOU, the President offer some of that hope?

I know it is futile and delusional to expect Donald Trump to behave like anything other than a petulant, spoiled, inexplicably rage-fueled preschooler in the midst of the temper tantrum of a lifetime. But I will reluctantly and wearily concede that there is some strange, blinkered, nonsensically optimistic part of my brain delusionaly hopes that the sheer scope and immensity of the coronavirus crisis will instill in Trump a basic sense of decency. 

Nobody expects the coronavirus to transform Trump into a Churchill-like statesman but it does not seem excessively optimistic to imagine that this tragedy will inspire Trump to be slightly less of a perpetually apoplectic man-baby at war with a world he doesn’t understand but fears and despises. 

A glance at Trump’s behavior from the last few weeks, however, indicates that he’s as truculent and bratty as ever. A reporter recently asked Trump what words he would give to Americans who are overcome with fear and dread over the potential of dying a horrible death and he famously answered by, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”

JFK famously implored, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” FDR inspired a scared nation by assuring them “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Asked to comfort, console and inspire a nation and a world on edge, Trump sniped, “You’re a terrible a terrible reporter…it’s a very nasty question.” 

In another act of astonishing immaturity, Trump used his position as the leader of the free world and head of the Republican Party to hilariously pretend to be happy that 2012 Republican Presidential candidate and current Republican Senator Mitt Romney wouldn’t be dying of the coronavirus, tweeting of a Breitbart article about Romney testing negative for the deadly virus, “This is really great news! I am so happy I can barely speak. He may have been a terrible presidential candidate and an even worse U.S. Senator, but he is a RINO, and I like him a lot!” 

The gag, of course, is that Trump DOESN’T like him a lot, nor is he happy that he doesn’t have the virus because he obviously would like for Romney to die a horrible death, and for Romney’s wife to be a widow and his children to be without a father because Romney disagrees with Trump politically. 

And a whole bunch of Republicans who undoubtedly voted for Romney, and consider him a good, decent man (which, by Republican standards, he is) seemingly chuckled at the Trump’s bad-taste tweet, shook their heads and said, “That Trump! W/hat a scamp!” and then never thought about it again. 

When dressing down the journalist for having the audacity to ask him a question, Trump quipped that the “terrible reporter” who asked the “nasty question” worked for an organization he called “Con-cast” rather than “Comcast” on account of them being a con.

That is, of course, a cornerstone of the Trump insult arsenal. Just today, for example, he tweeted, “One of the reasons that Fake News has become so prevalent & far reaching is the fact that corrupt “journalists” base their stories on SOURCES that they make up in order to totally distort a narrative or story. When you see, “five sources say”, don’t believe the story, it is….” followed immediately by, “....very often FAKE NEWS. Lamestream Media should be forced to reveal sources, very much as they did in the long ago past. If they did that, the media would be trusted again, and Fake News would largely be a thing of the past!”

Despite everything I know about Trump, all of it negative, I still sighed audibly in disappointment that with the world on edge and stakes unbelievably high, the President of the United States is still throwing around the phrase “lamestream media” and getting into petty, one-sided war or words with people who want him to behave like a grown-up, like when he hilariously called Governor Whitner of Michigan “Half-Whitner” because she was frustrated by his response to the coronavirus. 

Trump keeps using and abusing the phrase “lamestream media” at a time when seemingly everyone other than Trump seems to agree that we should be coming together as one to face a threat unlike any our country has ever faced rather than getting bogged down in a thousand viciously partisan spats involving Trump and everyone he considers an enemy for a very simple and very unsettling reason. 

Trump keeps using “lamestream media” because it works. Horrifyingly enough, when Trump supporters hear him repeat that phrase for the hundredth time it causes them to lose respect for the media rather than a seventy-three year old man who thinks it is witty and insightful to employ the phrase “lamestream media” as a core rhetorical strategy. 

Before Sarah Palin and Donald Trump started throwing around the phrase I literally had never encountered anyone who used the phrase “lamestream media” in anything but a bitterly ironic and mocking fashion. How could you not? 

Yet Trump knows that if he just keeps repeating the same phrases over and over they will soon come to be seen as legitimate and true no matter how self-evidently false they are. “Crooked Hillary”, “Make America Great Again!”, “Keep America Great Again”, “Lock her up!” “Build a wall”, “Mexico will pay for it”, “Her Emails”, “Keep America great again!”, “lamestream media”, “Impeachment hoax”, “Russia hoax”, “fake news.”

Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump does not care if what he’s saying is true. All that matters is that he believes it to be true, and that makes it true, regardless of what Snopes or the fact-checkers at the Washington Post might have to say. 

Besides, if the fact-checkers paid to keep Trump honest are by definition “Fake News” and members in bad standing of the “lamestream media” than they CANNOT be trusted, so Americans should get their news from the only reputable sources: Breitbart and the Twitter feed of an accused sex criminal, fraudulent college proprietor, pathological liar and con man. 

Trump’s election suggests that the great meme war of 2016 and beyond was won not by web-savvy internet ironists filling the web with witty, sophisticated political satire but rather by the Ben Garrisons and racist 70 year old aunts of the world, whose web propaganda reflects not the world as we know and experience it but rather Trump’s fantasy world where he is the greatest man that has ever lived (way better than Jesus) and everyone else is a ghoulish swamp monster and Deep State apologist whose lives revolve around bringing down Trump through a never-ending crusade of lies and slander. 

Trump is never going to change. He can’t. He’s hard-wired to see change and maturity as weakness. 

But what do I know? I’m just another mindless cog in the massive misinformation machine that is the lamestream media. 

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