This past Saturday, Donald Trump held what amounted to a campaign rally for a carefully filtered group of 9,000 supporters in Melbourne, Florida. The rally was in an effort to rally his supporters to ignore the bad news swirling around both his botched administration and the repeated allegations of treason. The news came after Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, resigned in disgrace.
According to leaks, and what we saw out of this and the press conference, Trump is incredibly unhappy with the beating he’s been taking from multiple news organizations, as well as the lack of loyalty implicit in the leaks. The slow pace with which he’s been hiring new people for his administration as well as his anger at the 9th Circuit Appeals Court similarly demonstrate that he places loyalty to him over competence.
And all these leaks are likely true, and not “fake news” as Trump has defined it because he’s said that “The leaks are real, but the news is fake,” which similarly means that he defines that term as “news that is harmful to the administration.”
The show Fox and Friends is rather loyal to him, if not the network at-large with the exception of Shepard Smith and Chris Matthews, therefore it’s “real news.” The same goes for far less credible outlets like Breitbart, Info Wars, and real “fake news” like the ones created by Macedonian teens like the Pope endorsing Trump or the Clinton Pizza Sex Ring.
This is incredibly dangerous territory for the country, independent of Trump’s competence or lack of thereof because the earliest stages of a dictatorship involve trying to delegitimize press at all critical of them. Late in the campaign, the phrase “lüdgenpresse” started cropping up at Trump’s rally’s, a Nazi slur that means “lying press,” with subtexts directed against those who opposed “the will of the people” as defined by the Nazi party. Trump starting to use the concept to his own ends should be a serious red flag, something noticed by holocaust survivors and their children with first or secondhand knowledge of fascism.
It’s hit the point where he’s taking campaign donations on his website, which also hosts a “Media Accountability Survey,” which is unscientific before getting into the questions because it’s accessed by people on his mailing list and by those who go to the site. That’s what’s known as a “self-selected sample” because the sample isn’t randomly selected from an entire population, but rather from a group chosen because they lean towards certain answers. Here, the survey is targeted at people who already believe every lie he spouts, in order to fabricate evidence that “the people” buy the “lügdenpresse” line of attack.
And related to the campaign donations, didn’t he say he was self-funding that thing early on in that horror show? And now that he’s set to make millions by forcing government agencies to rent space in Trump Tower and the Mar-A-Lago, the latter of which is more or less selling direct access to the President of The United States, why does he need campaign donations now? I mean, he’s legally allowed to do that because he filed his 2020 run immediately after his inauguration, but it’s still shady.
Right now, though, people critical of Trump are at a serious disadvantage, and I’m not sure even protest will work on these people. “Paid protestors” is a rhetorical device that seriously infuriates me, as it places the protesters as the moneyless underdog in opposition to the elites, even when the self-described victim is a rich senator, Goldman-Sachs banker or a billionaire President that lived in a tower with his name on it with gold letters before winning office. But, somehow, it works, even on the largest protest in United States history, the Women’s March on Washington at about 500,000.
Legal challenges might work, but we’re dealing with the lawyer power of the Attorney General’s office, Trump himself, and that of the Republicans colluding with him. Knocking him or those Republicans out might prove harder than expected because Trump appears to believe three to five million people voted illegally, when the voting problems are indeed the other way around, with photo ID laws making things harder for poor people or minorities, as statistically those two demographics are linked, to participate. Getting my own hands on a replacement card after my learner’s permit expired was hard enough, and I’m both reasonably well-off and the whitest person on the face of the earth. Less polling places in predominantly poor/minority neighborhoods create long lines that discourage or prevent people from making their voices heard.
The best way to get him out is to continue holding the line until the Intelligence community can provide proof of that link to Vladimir Putin and the Republicans in Senate are going to be forced to impeach him, before running away from his most toxic policies as hard as they can. Unfortunately, doing so will cause a constitutional crisis, centered around the question whether or not the entire administration will be swept out and an emergency election held. No matter who wins that, it’d undoubtedly be an improvement over this garbage. And Donald Trump will face his last surprise, sooner or later.
Logan Graham is a junior studying media arts with a focus in games and animation at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. How are you feeling about Trump thus far? Let him know by emailing him at lg261813@ohio.edu.
