Trump's War With The Press
Complicit with latest assassination attempt, we're reminded of Trump's most ominous adversary: corporate media
The year 2013 had its share of forgettable pop culture moments — Vines, twerking! — and in cinema, the release of two films with almost identical plots.
Olympus Has Fallen stars Gerard Butler as a secret service agent tasked with saving the president from a terrorist attack. Three months later, White House Down came out and tried to sell us on Channing Tatum as a Capitol Police officer protecting President Jamie Foxx (playing his version of Barack Obama) from the bad guys. Both films grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, proving Americans possessed a voracious appetite at that time for conspiratorial thrillers involving the federal government.
Those same fans who flocked to theaters 11 years ago don’t need to pluck down $50 for a movie experience today. They just need to open their phones.
What they’ll see happening in real time is much more disturbing than fiction.
Sunday, a man with a rifle was prepared to fire shots at former President Donald Trump while he played a round of golf. In July while at a campaign rally, another man did fire off rounds, his bullets actually hit Trump and killed a bystander.
In the span of two months, the current Republican nominee — who used to be President — dodged two lunatics with designs on killing him. This should be the biggest story in our country right now, with investigations in every major media outlet about the breakdown in our law enforcement and mental health institutions.
Any rational individual would put himself out of harm’s way — or at least leave the golf clubs in the garage — and suspend their campaign. It’s too f**king dangerous out there, man. But we know Trump is far from rational, and millions love him and hate him for that reason.
And the press, the corrupt national press that despises Trump with burning rage, won’t let this latest crisis go to waste.
It’s been over nine years, June 2015 to be exact, since Donald Trump — then New York City’s most famous landlord and television host — rode down a row of escalators and transformed from cultural personality to political candidate.
Yes, he picked fights with the Washington Establishment, campaigning on a “drain the swamp” ethos. The billionaire outsider, once inside, would clean out the bureaucratic waste and run public government like private industry. It worked. He won the presidency and executed many policy directives to the betterment of the country. Those gains were never reported with any heft or might as the establishment press attached the “threat to democracy” label the moment he arrived on the scene at Trump Tower that late spring day almost a decade ago. The D.C. press was never going to underwrite Trump; a loud, brash white guy, an “uprounder” who promoted the strength of the American economy and protectionism, an identity antithetical to the “downrounders” they endorse, who view America as systemically racist and owing reparations for past sins (AOC, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, etc).
After losing the 2020 election and a period of exile, Trump returned to politics and control of the Republican party. Predictably, the “American Hitler” rhetoric ramped back up from his opponents, eagerly amplified by Never Trumper Media, masking as “correspondents” for heritage press outlets.
The thousands who flocked to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention earlier this summer didn’t just bond over the city’s great restaurants. The one unifying message: Trump sucks. He’s a threat to our version of democracy — more government, more intrusiveness — so vote for our girl, Kamala Harris. Keep the good vibes flowing. Let’s eat!
All of this feeds into a now almost decade-long narrative about the chaos that surrounds Trump. He is the source of disorder, he alone the existential threat. Removing him from the political climate will calm our country and allow us to return to “normalcy.”
But it’s mostly all a big lie, sustained by a Corporate Media Complex in lock step with Trump’s political enemies.
Look at the man who allegedly fired shots at Trump Sunday. He had achieved some level of notoriety in press circles as a champion for Ukraine. Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old suspect, was interviewed in both Newsweek and the New York Times, portrayed as a crusader who traveled to Ukraine as a volunteer fighter. Certainly his social media anti-Trump blathering scored brownie points with reporters for those outlets. In April, he wrote in one post how “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose.”
Sound familiar?
The Never Trumper movement remains baked in egocentrism. So much of them have their own persona tied up in Trump, clouding reason and critical cognition. I mean, I didn’t like Obama’s policies but didn’t care what kind of person he was. But once someone gets too invested in a candidate as an individual, disagreement leads to ‘you are an idiot’ rather than ‘I didn’t vote for Trump, you did, OK, so what’ and let’s get on with our lives.
What these folks don’t see — or refuse to see, which is where the narcissism comes in — is the media’s role in this contentiousness.
Removed of legacy press coverage and the dozens and dozens of books — written with novelistic thriller prose — is how Trump is anything but an “extremist.” A passionless review of his 2017-2021 presidency would see how Trump employed a 1980s playbook developed by Ronald Reagan. Geraldo Cadava, a Northwestern University historian, wrote how Republican appeals around Trump’s administration centered on “religious devotion, a tireless work ethic, anticommunism, and the related belief in free-market capitalism as the best path to prosperity,” a message that boosted Trump’s appeal to Latino voters in 2020. Trump’s views on abortion and crime are more old school liberal. Is his immigration policy all that radical? Even the dumb things that he says lose impact without the media constantly baiting and distorting his words, spoken with an unpolished rawness that at times grates even his most avid supporters. Corporate media has sold enough Americans on the idea that Trump is the Chaos Agent and any new investigations, indictments — or shootings — become self-fulfilling prophecies he initiated.
60 Minutes spent half of their show this past Sunday on the events of January 6. Really? That’s a prudent use of company resources or is there another agenda?
We are long removed from Woodward and Bernstein and a journalist’s role in the uncovering of the lie. The new world order is to be in on the lie and weaponizing it against anyone who doesn’t go along.
I don’t know if enough Americans — those that plan to vote — will notice the ruse. They are too busy desiring “normalcy” (Harris) and rejecting “insanity” (Trump).
Watch Olympus Has Fallen or White House Down this weekend.
The terrorists are not in black ops gear toting around WMD’s. They wear Dockers, carry laptops and pretend to be fact checkers.
Have a suggestion for The Kerr Report? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.