No Empathy, Only Anger
Those seeking to support Trump’s party line need an excuse for their months of denial and deception—and they’ve found it.
On the evening of June 21, 1941, American Communists went to bed subject to one party line. At the sun set, Britain was fighting an imperialist war against Germany, about which the United States must remain neutral.
American Communists awoke on June 22, 1941, to discover the party line abruptly changed. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. Now the war was a struggle between democracy and fascism, one the United States must immediately join.
The personalities on Fox News executed a similarly abrupt and total pivot on March 13, 2020. The Washington Post produced a stark before/after anthology of the same hosts saying precisely opposite things a few days apart.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
Yet the many weeks of denial have had their effect. An Economist poll released March 18 found that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers took the virus seriously, half as many as among MSNBC and CNN viewers. For Trump’s sake, Fox risked the lives of its own audience.
Like the old Moscow-line Communists, the upholders of the Trump party line now need an excuse for their long history of denial and deception. They insisted it was not Trump’s fault that he, and they, squandered precious weeks and that his administration is suddenly dithering and failing. No, no, Trump’s failure was China’s fault! Did video evidence contradict the Trump party line? They accused anyone who recalled the truth of repeating Chinese propaganda.
The Trump party line swaps new lies for old. Whereas once the ideological enforcers called concern over the virus a hoax, now they say that it’s a hoax to remember they said it was a hoax.
Trump Is Counting on the Supreme Court to Save Him
The Atlantic has been pulled into the crosshairs of the new lies that replaced the old lies in a retweet by the president himself. In response to an article that documented how China’s official lying had aggravated the crisis in that country, and lamented that Trump’s official lying had done the same here, the president’s Twitter feed repeated a slur that The Atlantic “spews communist China’s propaganda.” This from a man who as a private citizen condoned the Tiananmen Square massacre, and who as president praised the mass-murdering Kim Jong Un as “one in 10,000.”
Trump wants Americans to call the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Trump’s new slogan aims at two goals.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
The first goal is to shift blame away from Trump’s failures and onto China’s. This goal is very unlikely to succeed. We all saw Trump’s catastrophic misjudgments inflict their toll in real time. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that decided to host a cash-for-access party at Mar-a-Lago for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend on the weekend of March 6–8, when a responsible president would have already begun modeling safe behavior. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that closed trans-Atlantic aviation and made no provision to receive throngs of returning Americans—exposing air travelers to hours of penned-in close contact with visibly sick people. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that urged Americans to buy stocks at the end of February, devastating the savings of anyone foolish enough to trust financial advice from Larry Kudlow, Eric Trump, or this president.
No, Trump won’t succeed in shifting blame.
It’s the second goal that could succeed. By revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!
A president who sincerely mistrusted China would not have to resort to name-calling after the fact. He would have acted decisively, in good time. Instead, Trump relied on China to do his job for him. Trump tweeted on January 24: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” It was Trump and Fox, not the independent media, who repeated Chinese propaganda and put Americans at risk.
A personal note: I was a target of one of Trump’s key media allies on Fox on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson. Carlson has played an interestingly complex role on the Fox network. On the one hand, he was the first Fox host to speak some measure of truth about the virus, on Monday, March 9, two days after the infection-spreading birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, Carlson is the most explicit of Fox’s race-baiters, the Fox personality furthest from traditional conservatism and nearest to the new alt-right. Carlson is the main voice on Fox for Russian state propaganda, not only about Ukraine but even about such boutique issues as Montenegro. Carlson escapes the dilemma by attributing Trump-administration decisions to everybody except Trump himself, even blaming the Vanity Fair reporter who interviewed him instead of the president of the United States. “If you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself.”
Anyway, the personal bit:
China’s ambassadors are already spreading the lie that the Wuhan virus originated here in America, maybe created in a lab by the Pentagon. Don’t be shocked if at least one American media outlet promotes that idea. Many of them are already parroting the rest of the Chinese Communist Party line. A week ago, aging propagandist David Frum of The Atlantic suggested calling the coronavirus, quote, “The Trump plague” instead of the Wuhan virus.
What’s notable here is not the reference to me, but that Carlson builds his case against America’s independent media by citing something that has not happened: no reputable media organization has repeated China’s claim that the virus originated in the United States. When I tweeted March 9, “Wuhan virus or Trump plague?,” I was referencing not Carlson’s fantasy about what the media might say, but the hard fact that Trump had exposed Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and other dignitaries to the coronavirus by proceeding with his weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Sadly, Carlson himself was one of those also exposed by Trump’s irresponsibility.
Read: This is how Donald Trump will be remembered
While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. A virus is the ultimate outsider, but it’s not a very satisfying target for rage. Only human beings will do, human beings marked in some way as different: by nationality, by ethnicity, by race.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an early visit to a Washington mosque. He spoke feelingly against bigotry, and helped curb the rash of hate crimes that erupted in the fall of 2001.
Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse .
<<>>>>><<<<>>>>>><<<<<<>>>>>>><<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>?
The New York Times
Opinion
Of Course Trump Deserves Blame for the Coronavirus Crisis
Last Friday, Representative Andy Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote a letter signed by 56 colleagues urging Donald Trump to invoke a law called the Defense Production Act in the fight against coronavirus. Passed during the Korean War in 1950, the law lets the president direct manufacturers to make supplies necessary for national security. “It very clearly allows the president to use the same powers for a public health emergency,” Levin told me.
At a time when the coronavirus pandemic is leading to a critical shortage of tests, ventilators, respirators, I.C.U. beds and protective gear for medical professionals, it seemed like an obvious move. “He has the power to get what we need,” said Levin. “And this is tens and hundreds of thousands of lives at stake in real time here.”
Finally, on Wednesday, Trump invoked the law, and it briefly looked as if things were going to get moving. But later that day, he tweeted that he’s holding off on actually using the powers the law gives him: “I only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future. Hopefully there will be no need, but we are all in this TOGETHER!”
Levin was incredulous. “The worst-case scenario is right now,” he said, adding: “This is something that is completely beyond partisanship. It’s an all-hands-on-deck crisis.”
With the world plunged into the most terrifying emergency in living memory, some people, and not just right-wing hacks, are saying that now is not the time to talk about the malfeasance of Donald Trump.
Barack Obama’s former political guru David Axelrod, commenting on a planned Democratic ad blitz hitting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, tweeted that “now doesn’t seem the moment for negative ads.” On Wednesday I appeared on MSNBC with Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who acknowledged that Trump made a grave mistake in initially downplaying the severity of the coronavirus. But, Hogan said, “We can’t waste a lot of time, you know, finger-pointing and talking about what mistakes the president made or anybody made in Washington. Let’s talk about what we can do right now.”
I understand this impulse. Those in the trenches fighting the pandemic can’t afford to waste time inveighing against presidential inadequacy. The rest of us are dealing with extraordinary personal upheaval and ever-present fear. In the four years that Donald Trump has dominated the national conversation, he’s gnawed away at the sanity of those of us who see him for what he is. In this new, even more dystopian era of coronavirus, it would be nice to be furloughed from having to think about him.
But while the calamity we are experiencing is not Trump’s doing, his dishonesty and incompetence have exacerbated it, and continue to do so. To point this out is not to dwell on the past but to confront the scale of our present crisis. Trump has been giving daily televised briefings in which he overpromises and spreads misinformation. He makes bad decisions and reverses himself only under the pressure of bad press. That makes frankness about his catastrophic ineptitude imperative.
Listen to our podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt
Because of Trump’s disdain for expertise and his obsession with loyalty, we entered this crisis with a government from which many competent professionals have been purged, and whose political appointees tend to be lackeys and mediocrities.
As has been widely reported, Trump’s administration dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security office, which was responsible for planning for disease outbreaks. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years, and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money,” he said at a briefing last month.
On Thursday The Times reported that Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of simulations last year about a pandemic respiratory virus originating in China that ultimately infected 110 million Americans. The exercise “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” Yet there’s little evidence of a serious push to increase America’s readiness.
When this coronavirus emerged in China, Trump’s instinct was to treat it as a public relations problem, insisting repeatedly that it would “go away.” South Korea and the United States announced their first coronavirus cases at around the same time; while South Korea ramped up the production of tests, the United States dithered. As Reuters reported, South Korea, a country of around 51 million, has tested 290,000 people. In the United States, a country of 330 million, only 60,000 tests had been conducted as of Tuesday.
Trump’s decision to ban some travel from Europe might have made sense, but the mistake-ridden Oval Office address announcing the move caused mass panic among Americans abroad. No one made adequate preparations to get hordes of travelers returning from coronavirus hot zones through security quickly, leading to crowds of people waiting as long as seven hours at some airports, a situation that seemed bound to spread infections.
Steven Teles is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches a class on policy disasters. He points out that most government decisions never reach the president’s desk, but that people in the bureaucracy tend to respond to the president’s priorities.
“What an executive can do is to inject energy and a general sense of direction to people who are going to make decisions without them pushing them all the way up the chain of command,” Teles told me. He suspects that when books are finally written about this debacle, a big part of the story will be that much of “the government didn’t get sufficiently energized early enough because there wasn’t a signal from the top.”
There still isn’t. Trump spent his news conference on Thursday attacking the media and putting the onus on governors to acquire medical supplies. “The federal government’s not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping, you know, we’re not a shipping clerk,” he said.
He also touted an anti-malarial drug, chloroquine, saying that it “was approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.” In fact, the F.D.A. has not approved chloroquine for treating Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Though doctors can prescribe it off label, it’s not yet established that the drug works for this purpose.
It can become tedious to dwell on the fact that the president is a dangerous and ignorant narcissist who has utterly failed as an executive, leaving state governments on their own to confront a generational cataclysm. But no one should ever forget it.
Soon, even if the pandemic is still raging, there will be an election, and the public will be asked to render a verdict on Trump’s leadership. Being clear that people are suffering and dying needlessly because the president can’t do his job isn’t looking backward. It’s the only way to move forward.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
&&&&&& &&&&&& &&& Some!
{The ironic twist between the latest Gallup pole , finding a favorable view of Trump’s handling of the epidemic, stands in stark contrast with the opposite descent opinion:}
IDEAS
Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This
The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.
REUTERS
The president of the United States is a menace to public health.
I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also true. I am not referring to Donald Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Justice Department, shield his criminal associates from legal peril, or funnel taxpayer money to his tacky hotels and golf courses, although all of these things are reason enough to oppose the president.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest.
Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.
Fear of a Counterrevolution
Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And—we’re—we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine,” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.
Kori Schake: The damage that ‘America First’ has done
Except Trump was not preparing. He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time. In February, while Trump was lying to the public about being “close to a vaccine” and that cases “were going to be down to close to zero,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier was telling reporters that Americans should get ready for “significant disruption to our lives.” The day after Trump told the public that “it will go away,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that “we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now.” Trump wasn’t trying to maintain firm resolve in the face of a crisis. He was lying to the public about the dangers it was facing in order to preserve his public standing.
Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond. Trump has dealt with the pandemic with all the competence you would expect from someone whose main experience is pretending to be a tough businessman on television. The administration failed to ramp up testing capacity in time to determine the scope of infections, while lying to the public that “millions of tests” were available; it failed to mobilize federal resources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Disaster Medical System, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump declared a state of emergency only on March 13, reportedly concerned that doing so earlier “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” As of Tuesday, according to The New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers was “still awaiting orders.”
In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.
Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed that the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.
Derek Thompson: The coronavirus will supercharge American inequality
Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.
The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.
A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.
Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”
Read: Red and blue America are experiencing the same pandemic
Trump and the conservative media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told The Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”
Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgement that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.
It’s true that the media often make mistakes; they are, after all, made up of human beings. Media conventions can be subverted, facts can be misunderstood or misreported, sources can mislead, reporters can succumb to confirmation bias, and editors can fail to see the big picture. For the most part, though, these outlets are trying their best to inform the public.
Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president. Many conservatives don’t distrust the mainstream media because they are biased; they distrust the media because the media do not tell them what they want to hear, and their own outlets have trained them to believe that the truth can only be exactly what they want to hear.
Nor can mainstream media bias explain why many Trumpist media outlets, supposedly so much more committed to the truth than their mainstream counterparts, consciously endangered their audience by disregarding and dismissing public-health warnings. Fox News told its audience that the coronavirus was a minor problem their heroic leader was quickly resolving, while quietly having its staff follow the very precautions its hosts were ridiculing on air. The mainstream press didn’t force Fox News to do that.
The coronavirus pandemic provides a rigorous case study in the priorities of most of the conservative press: Faced with a choice between informing their own audiences about dire threats to public health and propping up a Republican president, they chose the latter, because informing the public is not their job. The job of outlets like Fox News is to ensure that the conservative masses believe that their leader is infallible, even if it causes them tremendous personal harm.
As cases began flooding into hospitals and medical facilities all over the country, the president shifted his tone, finally recognizing the reality of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that threatens both the health and livelihoods of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump declared that “this is a pandemic,” and that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
Wajahat Ali: Where are the masks?
Predictably, Trump drew praise from some cable-news personalities for doing a passable job of portraying a president on television, even as the administration’s failures continued to exacerbate the personal and economic toll of the pandemic. This is somewhat understandable; Americans want to believe that their leaders are competent, engaged, and concerned about their well-being. Recognizing that the presidency is occupied by an incompetent narcissist whose major life accomplishment is parlaying an inherited fortune into reality-show celebrity is rather less comforting, but it is the world we live in.
Yet the incentives for the president and the conservative media have not changed. All that has changed is that it is now in the president’s personal and political interest to cushion the terrible impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a positive development as far as it goes, in that, for the moment, the national interest and Trump’s interests are one and the same. But Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality persists, and where maintaining the image of the infallible leader conflicts with the needs of Americans affected by the pandemic, the former will take precedence. The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
Having failed to will the coronavirus pandemic into nonexistence, the president, his party, and his propaganda machine will seek to rewrite history to render the false impression that Trump was aware of the threat of the pandemic all along, and that he acted decisively to address it. The truth is that, in the weeks and months Trump and the conservative press were busy pumping stocks, juking stats, and misleading the public, valuable time to prepare for the pandemic was lost. Americans, both those who get sick and those whose workplaces and businesses will close as a result, will suffer dearly.
A global pandemic would have been a challenge for any administration, for any government. But the scale of this tragedy was not inevitable. America’s shuttered storefronts, overflowing emergency rooms, and shattered families are the toxic fruit of a political culture in which Donald Trump’s image, as the avatar of the will of the people, matters more than actual people do.
ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved
{ But then again, the purpose of the purported coming cash outlays, probably rests more on political considerations then acts of human kindness, causing oh luv opinion turn on a whim}
((((())((((()))(())())(((()))(((((((((((((()))()()
Another tirade against media;:
Trump viciously attacks NBC News reporter in extended rant after being asked for message to Americans worried about coronavirus
New York(CNN Business)In an extraordinary exchange on Friday, President Donald Trump viciously attacked an NBC News reporter who asked what his message would be to Americans who are frightened by the coronavirus pandemic that is spreading across the country.
The exchange, which occurred at the White House’s daily coronavirus task force briefing, began when NBC News reporter Peter Alexander asked Trump whether he was giving Americans “false hope” by touting unproven coronavirus drugs.
Analysis: Trump acts like he wants the US press to be more like China’s
Toward the end of the exchange, Alexander cited the latest pandemic statistics showing thousands of Americans are now infected and millions are scared.
Alexander asked, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?”
Trump, shaking his head, ripped into Alexander in response.
“I say that you are a terrible reporter,” Trump replied. “That’s what I say.”
The President proceeded to launch into an extended rant against Alexander, saying he asked a “nasty question” and assailing NBC and its parent company, Comcast.
“You’re doing sensationalism,” Trump charged. “And the same with NBC and Comcast. I don’t call it Comcast. I call it ‘Con-Cast.’”
“Let me just tell you something,” Trump added. “That’s really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.”
Moments later, Kaitlan Collins, a White House correspondent for CNN, asked Trump if it was appropriate to embark on tirades against members of the news media during a public health crisis.
“You see yourself as a wartime President right now, leading the country through a pandemic that we are experiencing,” Collins noted. “Do you think going off on Peter, going off on a network is appropriate when the country is going through something like this?”
Trump defended his verbal assault on Alexander, saying he’s “not a good journalist” and launching into another rant against him.
“Coming together is much harder when we have dishonest journalists,” Trump said.
Alexander said in a statement that he was “trying to provide the president an opportunity to reassure the millions of Americans, members of my own family and my neighbors and my community and plenty of people sitting at home, this was his opportunity to do that, to provide a positive or uplifting message. Instead, you saw the president’s answer to that question right now.”
“The bottom line is, this is a president whose experiences in life are very different than most Americans across this country right now,” Alexander said. “Not a person who likely worries about finances or had, not a person who in the course of his life is worried about his future, not a person who is worried about where to find a paycheck for his bills or for his rent and as evidenced by the president suggesting that an opportunity to provide for American some reassurance about how they should feel right now, the president instead took it out on me.”
Alexander’s NBC News colleague and host of “Meet the Press” weighed on the matter, praising him for his “professionalism.”
“I wish people on the on the other side of the podium had the same professionalism as well, so thank you, Peter,” Todd said.
After striking a somber tone earlier in the week, Trump in recent days has returned to his usual attacks against the press.
At Thursday’s coronavirus press briefing, Trump smeared The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
“They’re very dishonest,” Trump claimed.
Trump then praised a far-right media outlet, saying it is “very good” and noting, “They treat me very nicely.”
The right-wing personality from that media outlet falsely said major newsrooms had “teamed up” with the Chinese Communist Party to attack Trump.
The person then asked, “Is it alarming that major media players that just oppose you are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels?”
Instead of rebuking the right-wing personality for the question, Trump on Thursday boasted that he had canceled the White House’s subscriptions to the country’s major newspapers.
“It amazes me when I read the things that I read,” Trump said Thursday. "It amazes me when I read The Wall Street Journal which is so negative and The New York Times, I barely read it. We don’t distribute it in the White House, and the same with The Washington Post.
© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Propaganda- the age old machine
The New York Times
Opinion
Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda
Then contrast them with the leadership shown by Andrew Cuomo, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel.
President Trump at the coronavirus briefing at the White House on Friday.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.
We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.
Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now — the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.
If the public wants factual news briefings, they need to tune in to those who are giving them: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose addresses appear with English subtitles on Deutsche Welle. They should start following the many civic-minded epidemiologists and virologists and contagion experts on Twitter, like Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Yale’s Nicholas Christakis, whose threads have been invaluable primers in a time of awful confusion.
These are people with a high tolerance for uncertainty. It’s the president’s incapacity to tolerate it — combined with his bottomless need to self-flatter and preserve his political power — that leads, so often, to his spectacular fits of deception and misdirection. At his Thursday news conference, a discussion of chloroquine and other experimental therapies formed the core of his remarks, when those drugs and therapies are untested and unproven and, in some cases, won’t be ready for several months, as NBC’s Peter Alexander pointed out the following day.
“What do you say to Americans who are scared?” Alexander pressed.
“I say that you’re a terrible reporter,” Trump answered.
Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.
Compare this to Cuomo, who takes questions at his news conferences calmly and systematically — and, more to the point, has a substantive response when asked the same questions about anxiety. He hears it. He relates to it. He says it’s real.
“People are in a small apartment, they’re in a house, they’re worried, they’re anxious. Just, be mindful of that,” the governor said Friday. “Those three-word sentences can make all the difference: ‘I miss you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I’m thinking about you.’ ‘I wish I was there with you.’ ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this.’ ‘I’m sorry we’re going through this.’”
On Friday, Cuomo said something else that was quite striking, as he was issuing his executive order for nonessential workers in New York to stay home, other than to run errands or exercise outside. “If someone wants to blame someone or complain about someone, blame me,” he said. “There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”
Cuomo is nothing if not politically shrewd. He knows full well how this comment compares to Mr. Trump’s “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.
Having each of his cabinet members fulsomely thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for his “farsightedness” before each of their remarks: Check. Making sure each one stays on a message, even if that message has nothing to do with his or her purview: Check.
(Alex Azar may have been the worst offender, speaking Friday to the urgency of closing the southern border. He’s the secretary of health and human services, not homeland security. Yet he was parroting Trump’s message about the coronavirus, one specifically tailored to the base: We’re keeping brown immigrants from spreading it.)
How about Orwellian doublespeak? Ooooooh, check. Trump and his team are continually deploying words and phrases that disguise a reality that suggests the opposite. Vice President Mike Pence talks about a “strong and seamless” partnership with the states, when at the same time Mr. Trump is trolling the states, telling Cuomo to get his own respirators.
Pence speaks relentlessly of a “whole-of-government approach,” when in fact the government is hollowed out — defunded to fight pandemics, denuded of experts — and broken in shards, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidelined in this fight, and the president’s task force now mutely competing with a shadow group run by the president’s son-in-law.
On Friday, Trump said he cherished journalism, and his secretary of state complained about disinformation on Twitter. There are simply too many two-plus-two-is-five moments to count.
But most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to a halt, Trump cut him off.
“What’s the rest of your question?” he snapped. “We know that. Everybody in the room knows that.”
Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.
So I listen to Justin Trudeau, a sci-fi experience, a dispatch from an alternate universe that prioritizes the needs and anxieties of the middle class. He speaks about immediate concerns: The kids will be all right. There’ll be food. You won’t be booted out of your home. Not how our president is speaking right now, but it’s a road map for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 to follow.
And I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement.
Then he spoke from the heart. One of his daughters was in quarantine. “To tell you the truth, I had some of the best conversations with her that I’ve ever had,” Cuomo said. She was alone for two weeks. “We talked about things in depth that we didn’t have time to talk about in the past,” he continued, “or we didn’t have the courage or the strength to talk about in the past — feelings I had, about mistakes I had made along the way that I wanted to express my regret and talk through with her.”
He was expressing fallibility. Imagine that.
March 21, 2020
© 2020 The New York Times Company
{However he is only an actor playing a difficult script of catch-22. He is The Fall Guy, that is becoming more and more convincing.}
