This groveling surrender to Trump might be the worst of all
Let’s start here today: Our legacy media is dead.
For some, this pronouncement is long overdue, and might be best labeled “old news.” For people like me, who spent their professional life in a newsroom as part of a team that turned around timely content called “real news” to their readers, while also calling power into account, this declaration officially wipes out everything I once believed in and held dear.
Watching our old, tired legacy media like The New York Times and The Washington Post cover this Russia charade, mislabeled a “summit,” and Trump's meeting with European leaders in Washington this week has completely knocked me over the edge. I’ll let you tell me how badly the gushing toothies on TV are botching this up, because I quit watching their 24/7 screeching with any regularity years ago.
We have reached the point where these incompetents can’t even get the nut of the story right. It’s no longer news that the nuclear-powered narcissist, Donald Trump, is posturing to get every spotlight turned in his direction no matter how big or small a story. Yet the media comes running with their hair on fire every time he beckons.
However … It IS news — URGENT NEWS — when European prime ministers and presidents drop everything they are doing and fly into the United States with their hair on fire to oppose the actions of its unstable, authoritarian leader, and back the man who is fighting for his life and his country’s democracy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It’s news because THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.
Yet, in their breathless play-by-play coverage you never saw it reported that way. Instead, here is what we got all day Monday and into Tuesday as these incompetent morons, who dare to call themselves “journalists” were led around by their noses, which are always in the general vicinity of Trump’s two-ton ass:
"Trump just said this!"
"Now Trump said that!"
“Trump is doing this!”
“And now Trump is doing that!”
"What will Trump do next????”
There was literally no fact-checking, nor important context. They just repeated his endless bullshit that was all designed to go absolutely nowhere, because the most important person in these negotiations wasn’t even on location. And why should he have been? Russian President Vladimir Putin had already emasculated the President of the United States after getting red-carpet treatment in Alaska on Friday, and had gone home to Russia to resume bombing the bejesus out of Ukraine.
So Trump did what he does best, and spoke on behalf of Putin, while arguing against everybody else.
It was appalling.
But there was our legacy media, who somehow thought reporting all that bullshit in real time was some sort of journalistic feat, when in reality they just come off like a bunch of drunken parrots.
Things are no better than they were on Thursday, when it comes to Russia’s inhumane, illegal attack on Ukraine, they are miles worse. Because God only knows what the two most dangerous leaders in the world talked about while the cameras were mercifully shut off during their dangerous, private meetings the past five days.
I can guess it sounded something like this:
PUTIN: “Never forget who put you in office, Donald.”
TRUMP: “No worries there, sir. I got everybody, but mostly the idiots in the media, eating out of my hand.”
Here is the vitally important context I didn’t read ONCE in all the legacy media’s atrocious coverage of this sh–– show the past 24 hours:
“Putin, who Trump actually asked for help in the 2016 campaign …”
Or
“Putin, who Trump has repeatedly fawned over, even calling the murderous dictator among other things ‘a genius' …’”
Or
“Putin, who Trump surrendered to in Helsinki in 2018, when pressed if there was Russia interference into the 2016 election, when his own Republican Party had determined there was …”
Or
“Putin, who after winning the 2007 Time Magazine Man of the Year Award, received a letter from Trump that gushed: “As you probably have heard, I’m a big fan of yours!”
Or
“Putin, who allowed Trump to host his Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow in 2013, and received yet another note from Trump which read: “Will you become my new best friend?”
I could go on and on here, but you get the point, even if the dangerous dummies in our legacy media don’t: Any relationship Trump has with his BFF Putin is at best suspect, but most likely is completely compromised.
Shouldn’t readers and viewers be aware of this right off the top and reminded of it repeatedly?
And what of the 50-plus times Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he would end Russia's attack on Ukraine during his first 24 hours in office. I read scores of stories in the legacy media Monday, and this was never reported even ONCE. Further, he was not asked about this even ONCE in those weird sit-downs with the press in that grotesque, golden room, where his tie drags on the floor and he does that weird accordion thing with his hands.
They aren't even bothering to try to hold this lying SOB accountable anymore.
And what about that lying? Because it is all this blabbering loudmouth does.
In just the last 10 days he’s told preposterous lies about Russia, the 2020 election, Jeffrey Epstein, jobs, crime, inflation, Project 2025, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and mail-in voting.
Add this to the tens of thousands of times he has lied in his professional life about all things big and small, and you’d think he would have lost ALL benefit of the doubt 10 years ago.
Instead, our legacy media still hangs on his every word.
It is ABSURD.
They don’t even make lying a small feature of the story, when in fact all his lying IS THE DAMN STORY.
There is not one report or story about about Trump that should make it past the third paragraph without this being inserted for context:
“Trump, who has a long history of lying about <insert subject> …”
WHY isn’t this being done?
Here is the thing that should keep us all awake at night: If Trump, a convicted felon, can wipe out the truth — and he is well on his way — he can wipe out everything this country was founded on, and begin working to wipe us out, and everything we once stood for.
This is exactly what Putin, and every other fascist leader on earth wants.
It can never stop being headline news that Trump is the most notorious liar in the history of the United States.
It should have never become headline news that our legacy media decided to quit reporting that.
But here we are, and neither one should ever be trusted again.
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
Governor of California Gavin Newsom talks to U.S. President Donald Trump in Los Angeles, California. REUTERS/Leah Millis