Hop into your wayback machine, and set the date to March, or April, or May of 2016. What was every liberal, and progressive, and pretty much anybody with an IQ higher than the temperature reading in their freezer bitching about? Trump of course. Specifically the almost loving fetish that the media had with every breath that Trump took.
If Trump belched after lunch, Anderson Cooper was there with a mint. If he farted, Andrea Mitchell was there to wax poetic about the fragrant bouquet. And if he took a leak, Sean Hannity was right by his side to shake. It was ATATT, All Trump All The Time.
This was exactly what Trump wanted, because it allowed him to do two things. His early morning call ins to the AM shows, and 5 AM tweets allowed him to set the narrative, preempting more honest and unbiased coverage throughout the day. And it sucked all of the air out of the media room, everything else dies from a lack of media oxygen. Trump literally was Big Brother, all knowing and seeing, omnipresent. Everyone and their mother tried to break through the Trump monopoly on brainless noise, without success.
But, with his idiotic “zero tolerance policy,” Trump has done something that I honestly didn’t think was possible. He preempted himself. He created a wall of noise that drowned even himself out. Up until now, if the news went against him, be it Michael Cohen, Robert Mueller, or anything else, he said or tweeted something stupid, and watched the media chase the bright, shiny ball down the street.
Not this time. Yesterday both CNN and MSNBC cut away from what used to be an automatic bulk time filler, a Trump speech to cover developments on the border. Blarah Flackabee Slanders spent a week being pilloried every day at the press briefing on the immigrant kids issue, regardless of what Trump said and did, and MSNBC showed cell phone footage last night of DHS Secretary Kirstjen “I Am Robot” Nielsen getting heckled out of a Mexican restaurant. Trump has finally created the ultimate distraction, it drowned him out.
And because he’s such a dipshit, he can’t run from this, nor can he fob it off on anybody else. Trump voluntarily took ownership of it. He thumped his chest, and bragged about what a hardass he was on the border. He can’t blame the Democrats, nobody is buying it, and even GOP legislators are refusing to take the fall, stating the obvious, that Trump created it, and Trump can stop it. And the network anchors pop up in Brownsville and McAllen, filling the airwaves with immigration attorneys, and social workers, decrying the inhumanity of it all, and psychologists, somberly intoning on the long term damage to babies and toddlers from the separation.
And signing a stupid Executive Order is not going to stop the tidal wave of coverage. Simply because Trump was interested in optics, and not logistics. It is clear that the administration made absolutely no effort to track either the parents nor more importantly the children as they transitioned from agency to agency, so that there was an efficient way to reunite the kids with their parents, regardless of the eventual legal outcome. It will take weeks, if not months, for those parents to be reunited with their children. Sadly, some may never be reunited, the kids have been eaten by the system. And in some cases the parents have already been deported back to their country of origin, with the children somewhere up here. How do you reunite them? As more of these parents are released, the airwaves will be filled with sobbing mothers, angry fathers, and indignant attorneys, all slamming the government for the intolerable delay in reuniting these parents with their children.
And let’s not forget about the lawsuits. One Guatamalan woman has already filed a federal lawsuit, demanding to be reunited with her child, and asking for punitive damages, and pain and suffering compensation. As more of these parents are bonded out, the lawsuit floodgates will open. Maybe only small, local advocate groups cared enough to help with the actual immigration work for these helpless families, but the legal vultures will swoop down to feast on the government carcass on behalf of these separated immigrant families. For a cool third of the settlement of course.
Trump has lived by the media sword, and now he’s going to die by the media sword. And don’t think that the media doesn’t want it’s pound of flesh. They were skewered and roasted in the campaign aftermath for their slavish devotion to covering Trump, here’s their chance to balance the scales again. And they’re already taking it. Trump finally found someone who could drown Trump out in the media, and it turned out to be Trump. With a huge assist from the very immigrants he has spent the last two years belittling and dehumanizing. Payback can be so appropriate sometimes.
