Trump’s dangerous, I get it, I get it, really, I do

By David Sherman

The former U.S. secretary of State perhaps said it best, “He’s a fucking moron.” Needless to say, Rex Tillerson, like everyone else whose nose was not bronzed by fealty, has been vapourized, relegated to contribute to the ever-growing library of books attesting to Donald Trump, the president who wasn’t.

Lest we forget, every day, in every way, newspapers and cable news, save for the spineless, spray-haired, bosom-enhanced fops at Fox, we are reminded how moronic is the caustic, bankruptcy-prone real-estate failure.

But, alas, it’s becoming a tad redundant. How many times per day must we be reminded of his lack of ethics, empathy and brains?

The Scottish, I believe, unrestrained by attempts at journalistic integrity – no, it’s not an oxymoron – said it best. Here’s a sample of comments from his visit to trumpet the glories of his golf course, prior to his election.

Social media scorn included, “Weasel-headed fuck nugget;” “Go away you hamster-headed person of low intelligence and hooliganistic tendencies. Go boil your head.” “You couldn’t be more out of touch if Nessie bit you on the arse, you utter fool.” “Trump is a cockwomble.” “You incompressible jizztrumpet.” “Leather-faced shit-tobogganist.”

Now, Americans, when polled for descriptions of their narcissist-in-chief, were more restrained, at least for publication. Some actually said the word that most came to mind was smart, money or good, a testament to Fox’s reach. But, other descriptors include bigot, racist, dishonest, clown, disgusting, bully, arrogant, stupid, asshole and ignorant.

That about covers it, though there is room for misogynist, sexual abuser, accused rapist, and, well, there’s no end to the dictionary of pejoratives to describe The Donald, as former president Barack Obama called him, prompting Trump to try to blow up everything Obama did. And, of course, also blame Obama for everything he himself screwed up.

So, The Donald’s shortcomings are legion and legendary, his incompetence unparalleled. And, as heretical as it might sound, maybe it’s time to diversify, to move on.

Can the press reduce the redundancy? They’re fervent enmity is fertilizing the fat orange tree of a man and obscuring the forest that is the rest of the world.

They’re forgetting the lesson of the last election. Going back five years, which feels like 50, Trump was a joke. Newspapers printed his every folly, newscasters chuckled at the preposterous idea he could even win the nomination. If you thought he could take the presidency, you might as well believe in the tooth fairy. They were so busy laughing, Trump got the last laugh.

The media was a herd that went to the slaughter, pandering to the majority that found him a buffoon, ignoring that real America was burning like those underground coal fires that smoulder for decades and few see.

Now, they’re doing it again. Thousands of hours of cable news and hundreds of thousands of column inches are spent chronicling Trump’s daily failures and his ruthlessness, cronyism and lack of literacy. Each day, each page of the major news outlets, each hour of the legitimate cable news shows, hammer home his complicity in the raging growth of the virus. It needs to be said, it needs to be repeated. But it has been, over and over and over again.

Yes, Trump is the bottomless pot of gold at the end of the journalistic rainbow, a daily river of extraordinary, mind-bending behaviours and sound bites. So much so, that much of what he does and says doesn’t qualify as news any longer. It’s another day at the office in the town of Bizarro, once known as Washington, D.C.

The Trumpet is getting what he lives for. The media is his oxygen, the more coverage he gets, the more his ego inflates, the more he can play “poor me.” He thirsts for ink as he does well-done steak and diet Coke.

But, it’s time to move on. Resources spent on reporting and critiquing every ridiculous Trumpian utterance can be used to chronicle other aspects of life around the globe, good, bad and ugly. There are other stories to be told. Opiate addiction, poverty, racism, ravaging unemployment, income inequality, how are people eating, paying their rent, their mortgages? What about all the Donald is doing to undermine law and the environment under cover of Covid? What social illnesses push people to trust Trump? What planet spawns Fox personalities?

Endlessly banging the addictive Trump incompetence drum lets him play the martyr, build his base, bore his detractors. How many stories can you read with Trump in the headline? If news coverage is Trump’s oxygen, depriving him of some of it might help him suffocate.

His failures in January and February and March are history. It’s time the press minimized its presidential obsession and moved on to cover the present and what the future may look like, a future, if the wags look beyond Washington, will not include The Donald.

If the media can tell us of topics other than his crimes, his image among his voters and his sycophants might shrivel and his bloated body might sooner be buried in the dust bin of history, left for biographers to disinter.