We’re at a crossroads of democracy, friends. We all sense that. It’s fairly obvious. A lot has been said on this blog and elsewhere about how the GOP is Dr. Frankenstein to Trump’s monster. Yes, indeed. But you want to know who is even more so Dr. Frankenstein? The media. Donald Trump is a creation of the media. He knows how to play them. They know how to play their part and go along. He gets press, notoriety, which is his goal and they get eyeballs and clicks, which is theirs, and meanwhile, democracy is hanging onto the edge of the tub for dear life before it circles the drain. And it could do so.
The tragic part of all this, is that the media knows. It has always known. Read this Vanity Fair article from 1990 which is an in depth piece on Trump. The author commented about “wandering down to the pressroom” on a day when Trump was giving testimony in a case which had to do with his egregious exploitation of his workers, getting construction people to work for $4.00 an hour on a job that should have paid $20. Vintage Trump. Here was what she heard.
The reporters sounded weary; they had heard it all before. ”Goddamn it,” one shouted at me, “we created him! We bought his bullshit! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”
I thought about the last questions Donald Trump had asked me the day before on the telephone. “How long is your article?” “Long,” I said. Trump seemed pleased. “Is it a cover?” he asked.
That’s it in a nutshell. You will never hear it explained any more succinctly than that. “We created him! We bought his bullshit!” And on the other side of town, or the country, wherever, Trump is lapping it up and asking, “How long is your article?” That’s the dynamic. That’s the unholy marriage, right there. And so the only question that needs to be asked now, is what is going to change in 2024, if anything? Jennifer Rubin’s take is that step one is to report MAGA is a cult, which it is.
Now let me make it crystal clear why I think this is so crucial: if the media would stop normalizing Trump, stop pandering to him, stop insulating him as it has insulated no other political figure in our nation’s history and just say the truth TRUMP IS A CULT LEADER AND MAGA IS A CULT, then we would know what we’re dealing with. And we could act accordingly. Ask any physician, you can’t cure an ailment unless and until you’ve got a diagnosis. And all the media has done for years now is talk about the actual fact, that it’s a cult, in editorial terms, while pretending that having a cult party and a cult leader running for president is somehow the norm.
And that’s where the culpability of the GOP comes in. It’s up to the GOP to police its own party and offer up its best candidates. They have utterly failed and that’s why the TV game show host cult leader clown is running their show. On to Jennifer Rubin’s views:
Instead of reporting Trump’s wild assertions as legitimate arguments, media outlets should explain how Trump rallies are designed to instill anger and cultivate his hold on people who believe whatever hooey he spouts. How different are these events from what we see in grainy images of European fascist rallies in the 1930s? (When Trump apologists insist that tens of millions of people cannot be part of a cult, it’s critical to remember mass fascist movements that swept entire populations.) The appeals to emotion, the specter of a malicious enemy, the fear of societal decline, the fascination with violence and the elation just to be in the presence of the leader are telltale signs of frenetic fascist gatherings. Trump’s language (“poisoning the blood”) even mimics Hitler’s calls for racial purity.
Rubin’s thesis here is very simple. It’s a real forest for the trees kind of thing. We’re looking at a cult. It acts like a cult, walks like a cult, talks like a cult. It listens to its leader say the most asinine things like water destroys magnets and windmills drive whales insane (when not causing cancer in humans) and they take all that in without batting an eyelash. Yet for some reason, we don’t call it a cult.
Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and how MAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.
“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”
Plenty of experts are available to dissect the phenomenon. Expert Steven Hassan, for example, explained to the Atlantic’s Peter Sagal that, as Sagal wrote, “the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his ‘BITE’ model of cult mind control — behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.” Sagal continued, “Like all cult leaders, [Hassan] argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions — not just fear but also joy.” (Another expert, Daniella Mestyanek Young, explained: “The first rule of cults is: you’re never in a cult. The second rule of cults is: the cult will forgive any sin, except the sin of leaving. The third rule of cults is: even if he did it, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”)
And here’s where we get to the worst of the worst. Right here.
A message from a mentally sound, serious leader (President Biden) cannot be equated with the message of an authoritarian who seeks absolute power through a web of disinformation and, if need be, violence. (When the media doesn’t grasp this, we get laughable headlines such as: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024.”)
THERE IS NO BOTH SIDERISM HERE! There is no equivalence here! We’ve got one functioning political party and a cult — and presumably, some Americans, perhaps more than we know, who are unable to join the cult, thank God, but can’t bring themselves to reconcile with certain Democratic policies, so they don’t want to vote for Joe Biden. So that takes us up to 2024 and the election and here’s how simple it gets:
2024 is not about policies. 2024 is a referendum, plain and simple, on whether America continues as a representative democracy, a republic, based upon the Constitution — or whether we embrace autocracy and put a charismatic cult leader back in the Oval Office, a place he should have never been to begin with.
This is how basic it is. Jennifer Rubin is right. Trump is the leader of the MAGA cult and once that one fact, that single fact is reported accurately and truthfully, this madness in America can end.
The system of political reporting in this country broke in 2015. Nobody reported truthfully on who and what Trump was. And, to some extent, you can’t blame the media. The Republican party bears responsibility for letting somebody totally unsuited and unqualified for the job of president to be elevated to the top of its ticket. The main responsibility will always lie with them.
But beyond that, it was incumbent upon the media to report Trump as the outrage to common decency that he was — and still is, even worse in fact. And it was incumbent on the media to report that MAGA is a cult. It did not happen then. It did not happen in 2020. Will it happen in 2024? Or are we going to play the same race horse polls game and normalization games, which is what political reporting is based on?
There is nothing normal about a presidential candidate with 91 felony counts charged to his name, who is already an adjudicated rapist, and whose other alleged rape victim chose to drop her case in 2016, due to death threats against herself and her family. Stop reporting any of this like it’s normal. It’s time to tell the truth. Donald Trump is a charismatic cult leader and MAGA is a cult. And the GOP has abdicated all responsibility as a conservative party and let Trump have their banner, to bastardize however he will. A vote for Trump is not a vote for the GOP, it is a vote for a cult to take over America. And Republicans are fine with it, they’ve given up. Democracy is only going to endure if Americans outnumber cultist crazies and the cowardly and the apathetic.
Ursula…keep beating the drum. Germany’s census in 1939 was over 79 million. Wrap your head around that number of citizens who went blindly along with a mass murdering maniac. Their number after the war, as I understand it, was around 65 million. That’s a lot of death and desertion. We already know millions more voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, AFTER watching this child killing fascist pig for four years. To expect the billionaire class who owns the media to suddenly value democracy and truth over money is a fantasy in my opinion. We need a goddamn miracle. We may need a gun at some point down the road if our citizens don’t wake up and vote democratic. Underestimating soulless fascists and what they will do is foolishness. Germany in the 30s and 40s should have taught us that after 400,000 of our boys died to stop them.
Hitler’s Germany was ridiculed by having to be occupied to this day.
Though they got over it for the most part.
If monsters are not handled and ridiculed while still on their feet
it’s not a complete victory. The maga base needs the same ridicule
for the same reasons. the bubble must burst.
I’ll tell you the one thing that gives me hope: When Trump gave his press conference in New York the other day, there were dozens of people. Not tens of thousands like would have been the figure if things were the way he depicts them, he’s a political prisoner, victimized by the government. That gave me hope.
Yes but NY really isn’t a drumpf stronghold any more. Might have been different had he walked out of a courtroom in, say, OK, TX or some other red state.
One can hope his allure is fading I guess. It would do the country a great deal of good.
I’m hoping that America is better than Trump. I became greatly disillusioned (to put it mildly) back in 2016 when he won. I didn’t think that was possible. But I realized the America I grew up in and the one in which I presently lived were two different places.
That this creature is even on the ballot is a horror. And he is a cult figure. Biden isn’t. Biden is a statesman. God help us if statesmen get defeated while cult figures win.
The sad thing is this country has always had powerful fascists. The media is part of the support structure of these fascists and is almost monolithic in how it covers the events of today and yesterday. Have any of them ever really acknowledged their part in promoting such a creature as Trump? I don’t think so. For that matter, how many Americans really acknowledge the harm done and being done to blacks, Native Americans or Latin America. Not many.
Perhaps half of Americans have a true struggle just surviving and those that are doing better than just surviving seem to easily fall prey to the old ‘less taxes’, ‘smaller government’ and ‘the welfare state’ tropes. Of course these are all based in racism and the media are scared of racist. They know the KKK never really died, it just became the Republican Party.
During the Ole Miss riots in 1962 the only death was of a journalist, a murder never solved. I saw MSNBC reporters during 2020 being shot with non-lethal projectiles and gassed by the fascists’ friend, the police. This cult is dangerous and reporters need to speak the truth about it just for their own protection.
I have never seen an election with this much on the line before. Or even anywhere close to this much on the line. That’s what terrifies me.
Started reading the Eric Hoffer book, The True Believer.
Wonder if Our Boy Steve Bannon read this as he was scheming for Trump?
“Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and how MAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible.”
They also spend WAAAY too little attention on why most people in this country can’t stand the SOB and hate his guts. Why don’t you get some sane people’s views on Trump occasionally, MSM?
Two problems. First, what passes for journalism these days is nothing more than parroting he propaganda the corporate owners that have begun monopolizing the media ever since Saint Ronnie did away with communication safeguards.
Second, as a result, schools of journalism have pretty much developed a “what’s the use” attitude, as their graduates have rough going to get a job they can afford to accept.
There isn’t room for the Edward R. Murrows, the Walter Cronkites, even the Woodwards and Bernsteins these days. We are back to as close to yellow journalism as corporation can come. That’s why Politizoom, Th Interceot, Alternet/Raw Story, the Daily Kos are so valuable at this point. The problem is that all these are a bit too challenging for the average MAGA proselylite because this group is not interested in thinking, jus being told what to think and what to do. The mob mentality has always been fertile ground for fascism, which, of course, they later profess to regret aftee they lose the battles and the wars. Common in both Germany and Italy after WW II was the phrase, “We had to join the party. We had no choice.” Everybody has a choice, and everybody who abdicates their choices has an excuse.