Trump the Dictator
is No Longer The Donald
He was The Donald and everybody was entertained by him even if they saw him as a harmless carnival act and it seemed that everybody tuned in to the interviews with him leading up to the 2016 election because as trump is, you could always count on him saying something outrageous, whether it was factual, made-up or outright lies, from his claims about eyewitnesses who saw dancing Muslims on the rooftops in Jersey City after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to his front row seat for the birthers who claimed that President Obama was a Muslim, was not born in the U.S. and didn’t qualify as president. It could be his scurrilous comments about a news reporter’s bleeding or his never ending allegations about fake news and finally during the debates, the childish nicknames he gave his opponents and the scorching ridicule as with his utterly absurd claim that the father of GOP candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination in some obtuse and totally fictional way.
It could be midway on the Opra show or maybe he made a surprise call in to CNN as he collected billions of dollars in free publicity. After all, he was The Donald, and all the media outlets knew that he could be counted on for headline material and pity those outlets that ignored him and didn’t report on his latest harebrained allegations. He never let us down and was always quick with a quip that would elicit at “I don’t believe he said that” reaction.
Many of us saw him as the court jester, the clown and we’d laugh at his crazy comments because everybody knew that his chances for election were about as small as the brain between his ears. We turned to be the idiots while trump showed that he was as crazy as a fox, as in Fox News.
He was everywhere, getting free publicity on the daytime talk shows, on the evening news shows, and of course, his ubiquitous presence on Fox News (a really bad way to explain the essence of Fox). The tracking firm mediaQuant reported that trump got $4.96 billion free media in the year leading up to the 2016 election.
But that was then and this is now and he is no longer the comical Donald but a ruthless, corrupt, would be dictator who was nearly kept in office by his support of an attempted rebellion at the capitol. Trump has shown his true colors, there is nothing comical or interesting about him, he is a racist, misogynist, xenophobic, corrupt liar and this go around there should be no free rides from the media. He has nothing new to say, we’ve heard it all before and it is not news.
Typical of trump, he is holding a so-called “news conference” from his garish Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Fla., on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks on the capitol by supporters who he goaded on with constant, baseless claims that widespread voter fraud had robbed him of reelection. A news conference is only credible if there are real reporters who ask real questions and get answers. The likelihood of that scenario with trump is zero, unless the reporters are Donald Jr., Ivanka, Tiffany, Barron, Eric or his lovely plasticene wife, Ivana, or maybe his son in law, that icon of nothingness, Jared Kushner. Maybe even Steven Bannon will show up to ask some really tough, pithy questions.
Trump’s “news conference” will be nothing more than a soapbox for his rants about all of his delusions from the 2020 election, to the deep state, to fake news, witch hunts and too many other subjects to name. There will be no honesty, no regrets about why he fomented the Jan. 6 insurrection and then did nothing to stop it; there will be no backing off his election fraud claims, no admission of anything even approaching guilt about anything.
I do understand that in a perverse way, this blog is playing into the game plan of Gen. Bone Spurs. My goal is not to give him publicity about anything other than to point out the absurdities of his plans. Hopefully, none of the major media will staff the “news conference” and trump will be alone with his propaganda parrots from Fox, et al. If he was still president, it would be difficult to ignore him. But he isn’t and no responsible media should feel a responsibility to report on the event simply because he is a past president. In fact, that gives the event even less credibility.
So trump will claim the election was rigged; the House Select Committee investigation into the insurrection is a fixed witchhunt; the attempted coup was totally blown out of proportion and was not serious; that anyone who is not a trumper is nothing more than a RINO, an acronym for “Republican in Name Only”; and that he remains the true representative of patriotic Americans.
Wake me when it’s over. I have better things to do than to listen to the threadbare rantings of a bitter, selfish old man.