Sorry, not sorry — not one bit

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2024 (622 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has been fascinating to me that not a single reporter, anchor or commentator on American television media or, for that matter in print as far as I’ve seen, has so far even obliquely mentioned the gigantic, rotting elephant in the Trump room.

The man has spent his entire political career encouraging and embracing political violence, which has sparked a level of verbal savagery never before seen in American politics, addling people’s brains beyond the pale, and giving psychologically unbalanced people a tipping point to descend into violence of their own.

And finally, somebody tried to kill him.

You could very easily say he brought this on himself. There has been barely an indirect reference to it from the anchors or the pundits. But is it not an extremely uncomfortable truth that should be discussed in public, loudly, by the media?

It’s the latest example of a complete failure by media in the U.S. to do their jobs, which used to be — back when I was a very green, very idealistic little Canadian reporter — to report the facts fully, accurately, honestly, and to note, very loudly and indignantly, when the emperor has no clothes.

The slide into the slime began decades ago, as American networks chose to turn news services into profit centres instead of hewing to the philosophy of pubic interest.

Social media accelerated the pace, and the reach, of an astounding spread of ignorance.

And it is easily arguable that the coarseness, the verbal abuse, the stunning level of rampant stupidity on social media these days has been directly fuelled by Donald Trump’s own mouth since the moment he stepped into the political spotlight in 2015.

One of his Republican candidates, a preacher in North Carolina, told his flock in church a couple of Sundays ago, “Some people just need killing.”

In a post that was later removed, Trump tweeted to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, even as they rioted in the Capitol, that they were “very special people”and he loved them. The people he loved so, and directly incited to riot, were responsible ultimately for the deaths of five people, including four police officers so traumatized that they killed themselves within months.

Hundreds were injured, including 174 police officers, by the mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” that Trump sent to the Capitol. You can be pretty sure that had they gotten to Pence, they would have done exactly that. The gallows they erected outside the Capitol building was not a stage prop.

Yes, the United States went through a spasm of violent political assassinations in the 1960s. Yes, at least seven of the past nine American presidents have been targets of assaults, attacks or assassination attempts, including Gerald Ford (twice in 1975), Ronald Reagan (a near-fatal shooting in 1981), Bill Clinton (when the White House was fired upon in 1994) and George W. Bush (when an attacker threw a grenade that did not explode toward him and the president of Georgia during an event in Tbilisi in 2005).

But at no time in history before now has a pathological, narcissistic, liar, cheat, rapist and fraud run for president, spewing non-stop vicious abuse and lies to his adoring, incredibly gullible public, after demonstrating in a disastrous first term that he has no patience for the democratic process and no capacity to govern even remotely responsibly.

Commentators who’ve made a living as apologists for Trump have urged avoiding laying blame on incendiary verbiage for the shooter’s decision to go after Trump, without mentioning the name of the man single-handedly responsible for that verbiage.

The pundits and anchors have been carefully parsing their way around the central issue, chattering on and on about party conventions as if they’re circus sideshows.

Jake Tapper described a speech by Pat Buchanan that was painted as “extreme.”

“It’s theatre,” a Republican pundit responded.

Maybe it is theatre. Maybe the shooting in Pennsylvania that killed an innocent man and badly injured two others was also “theatre.”

But it’s patently obvious that millions of deluded Americans fully buy into Trump’s inflammatory and consistent lying, and into his constant suggestions that the only way he can lose an election is if it’s rigged.

It’s becoming even more obvious that he won’t have to worry about that for a New York minute. Now he’s the Teflon Messiah, who survived a dastardly, no doubt Democrat-inspired assassination attempt.

When Joe Biden suggests Trump is a threat to the American democracy, is he wrong? When he suggested in his Sunday evening speech to the nation that everybody needs to “cool it down,” was he wrong?

Well, Joe Biden may insist that his campaign now take the high road.

But I would wager my entire life savings, scraped together through 50 years working in mainstream media, that Donald Trump won’t cool it down. If anything, he’ll ramp it up.

And he’ll win.

» Judy Waytiuk used to be proud of being a journalist because she considered the media to be a frontline protector of democracy and truth. She’s no longer that naive. This column previously appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.