The frustrating thing about telling the truth is knowing that you’re right, but that it ultimately may not make any difference to the people who need to hear it the most.
Welcome to my job amid the last 11 years of Trump's blight on all of our political norms — most significantly in the way he’s abused the members of the media.
Trump hates a lot of things about himself, which is why he overcompensates by bullying and scapegoating others so that his failures — from a plane to his failing health to America’s anti-climactic 250th birthday celebrations — are never the story, even as he remains the center of attention. It’s a deft game he’s been playing for a long time, along with his long MAGA con, and Trump couldn’t tell anyone any truths on purpose if he tried.
However, he still manages to tell on himself even as he’s trying to cover up the truth, bragging instead about how a female reporter couldn’t possibly come close to acing a cognitive test like he did.
But why so many visits, Paw Paw? Why do you need so many cognitive tests? Because boasting that you still know the difference between an elephant and a squirrel isn’t the flex you think it is. But if anyone pushes back too hard with the questions, they’ll end up on his Enemies List, or in court.
This is fully unacceptable, just like everything else he’s been allowed to get away with, up to and including his vandalism of D.C. to make us look as weak as possible on the world stage on our 250th birthday.
Back when his reign of terror first began, Trump’s tactics were exacerbated by the rise of social media as a campaign tool. The one thing Trump’s been truly successful at doing is using Twitter as a literal bully pulpit to slow-boil his cult into believing that only the things he says are true, all while also poisoning them against the traditional media he’s now taking over. Trump’s lies were elevated and shared across multiple platforms by paid agitators bolstered by targeted algorithms; those self-proclaimed “influencers” care more about the extra digits in their bank accounts than anything else and have lost sight of what it means to be an American (if they’re not made in a Russian bot farm, that is).
Without social media, Trump would’ve remained the joke candidate he was back in 2015 and would’ve been trounced in the primary, if he even lasted that long.
Instead, here we are in a culture that now celebrates meanness instead of rising above it, with the MAGA cultists in Congress covering up multiple scandals to keep themselves on Trump’s good side. Self-proclaimed “patriots” have been so entrenched in this decade of deception that what started as leaning into lies and propaganda has become a campaign to fully disrupt our democracy and force us into fascism.
At the same time, Trump’s targeting of specific individuals in the media has crossed the line, from verbal abuse of reporters as non-responses when he doesn’t want to answer them, to threats, doxxing, and now lawsuits over the lingering questions around his health amid multiple scandals.
Trump is now going after several journalists from the New York Times who dared to report accurately on his Qatari Bribe Jet, which was meant to be a stand-in for Air Force One but had to be grounded after it was learned it lacked the proper security and technology to shield the Airborne Oval Office from attacks.
This fact was just too much for the Thin-Skinned Vulgarian, who sent federal agents with subpoenas to some reporters' homes, demanding they appear before a federal grand jury investigating “a potential crime.”
Are you feeling Orwellian enough? The crime of reporting the truth.
Which I do here, and elsewhere, as do plenty of other people who make their living in the truth-telling news space. I guess some of us just fly under the radar more than others, said the woman who’s approaching her 11th anniversary of being blocked by Trump on Twitter.
Trump’s compromised DOJ told the BBC that it's “investigating illegal leaks,” adding, "Reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are."
Sure, they aren’t. Let’s ask Brian Tyler Cohen how he feels about being one of the three journalists currently being doxxed on the official White House website because he reported on Trump’s health. That’s something other members of the media should be asking Trump about while standing as one. While also asking about the plane, his health, and the Epstein Files. Because that’s their job.
If Trump and his staff keep hiding the truth, the media should be pushing harder to get at it without being threatened by the government. The White House Correspondents Association has already issued a statement declaring its solidarity with the reporters named in the Trump subpoena (Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt):
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also issued a statement regarding the subpoenas. “Donald Trump’s war on the press is looking for another victim, this time the storied federal prosecutors' office in Manhattan,” said group president Bruce D. Brown. "The subpoenas it issued to journalists at The New York Times break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted. When Jay Clayton appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, members of both parties must not let him escape accountability.”
We are supposed to have full transparency when it comes to the presidency, and yet whenever anyone reports the truth about Trump, he attacks them. It should never have been tolerated in the first place, but ever since they gave him that first inch in 2015, he’s taken everything — except responsibility for anything.
