So, trump is quite bad — and we can imagine it getting even worse, if, say, the Russia investigation finds even more.
So, why can’t the country do better at responding to trump as a scandal, a threat, a danger, an aberration? Why can’t more Republicans and others unite to treat him as toxic?
I’d suggest a reason is that day in and day out, year after year, the right-wing media has overwhelmed its audience with ‘alerts’ and ‘threats’.
Bill Clinton is a danger to the Republic. Barack Obama was a danger to the Republic. Hillary Clinton was a danger to the Republic. Nancy Pelosi. George Soros. Radical Islamic terrorism. Illegal immigrants. Big government. Social Justice Warriors. Gun grabbers. Liberals who are at war with Christmas.
Whether by design or not, I’d say that the right-wing media is having as one of its effects ‘scandal fatigue’.
It’s a sort of ‘boy who cried wolf’ situation. Because they’re taught to be enraged at how not every Democrat threatening the country has yet been removed from power day after day, little things like trump not being a totally, politically correct politician is just something they can’t really be bothered to worry about. Maybe he’ll at least ‘shake things up’— hear that phrase before?
I view this as a sort of ‘public opinion’ control or manipulation.
A better response would be for the country to be able to say, the president being this ill-motivated, this corrupt, this incompetent, is a threat to the country for us to unite against.
In the past, the country was better able to unite on occasion, it seems.
A scandal could mean a public reaction and backlash. Exposing the ugly side of food production fueled regulation and the progressive movement for government oversight. Pollution and the environment became a cause by the late 1960’s and we got the EPA and more oversight. Richard Nixon Watergating was not acceptable and after winning 49 states the previous re-election he was forced out.
But in addition to the corruption of our economics, our democracy, Republicans have corrupted the topic of scandals. Looking for revenge for Watergate as if they’d been wronged, we got Monica.
We got Benghazi and e-mails. We got Obama doing hundreds of non-scandals attacked as the worst thing a president ever did.
And the country largely just has scandal exhaustion from the artificial, phony, corrupt scandal agenda right-wing media barrages them with and they can’t get concerned about a trump.
And this is part of the road to a broken dysfunctional democracy breaking and being corrupted.
To the rule of law being eroded, to the public good being ignored in favor of the corrupt — as we watch campaign service by Joe Arpaio rewarded with a pardon.
When Nixon had his Saturday Night Massacre, it was viewed as a constitutional crisis and spurred the investigations.
If it weren’t for the Mueller investigation, we effectively wouldn’t have oversight over trump currently. The Republicans have shown they put party ahead of the country.
My point is to be aware of this as one more harm of the right-wing media industry, and one more reason for people to be encouraged not to partake, and to oppose that industry.
Of course, we’re doing the opposite, always deregulating them, allowing more consolidation and power to them.
Democracy or fascism — becoming more a choice we’re making wrongly all the time. And scandal fatigue helps prevent the public acting like a democracy.
So, the need to fight the media problem? Add that to the list the public can’t bother with. Oh, and net neutrality, while the people’s infrastructure is dismantled. Fox raised more issues with Democrats!