Our Addiction to Trump

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: May 8, 2018 at 11:04:03 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Our Addiction to Trump
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Our Addiction to Trump
> By Nicholas Kristof
> May 5 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/opinion/sunday/trump-obsession.html>
>
> We in the commentariat complain about President Trump, but we’re locked in a symbiotic relationship with him.
>
> News organizations, especially cable television channels, feed off Trump — like oxpeckers on a rhino’s back — for he 
> is part of our business model in 2018. As long as our focus is on Trump, audiences follow.
>
> It’s not optimal to have as president an authoritarian who denounces journalists as enemies of the people, but he has 
> given us a sense of mission and a “Trump bump.” Every time he denounces us we get more subscriptions.
>
> (If you’re reading this, President Trump, I’d appreciate a good, thunderous excoriation. You’ve gone after Maggie 
> Haberman, Don Lemon and Chuck Todd, but you’ve publicly denounced me only once — and so incoherently that I couldn’t 
> print out a quote to impress my kids. Next time you’re on Twitter, how about firing off something concise like: 
> “Crackpot Krisitofff is the WORST lying reporter at the FAILING NYTimes EVER!!!”)
>
> Yet I worry that our national nonstop focus on Trump is helping to usher America into a hole: a Trump obsession. The 
> danger is that Trump sucks up all the oxygen, so that other issues don’t get adequate attention.
>
> In America today, it’s all Trump, all the time. We’re collectively addicted to him. The nonstop scandals and outrages 
> suck us in; they amount to Trump porn.
>
> As president, Trump is enormously important, but there’s so much else happening as well. Some 65,000 Americans will 
> die this year of drug overdoses, American life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row, guns claim a life every 
> 15 minutes and the number of uninsured is rising again even as a child in the U.S. is 70 percent more likely to die 
> before adulthood than one in other advanced nations. Those issues are rather more important than the question of 
> whether Stormy Daniels slept with Trump.
>
> Or look abroad. In Myanmar, the government is engaging in what many believe to be a genocide against the Rohingya 
> minority. Gaza is erupting, and there’s heightened threat of a new war in the Middle East. The U.S. has been 
> complicit in Saudi Arabian war crimes in Yemen. The carnage in Syria continues.
>
> The world’s progress against malaria, which kills almost one person a minute, has stalled. A fifth of children under 
> 5 worldwide are stunted from malnutrition. Bill Gates and others warn that one of our top risks is a pandemic for 
> which we are ill prepared.
>
> Progressive snobs like me bemoan Trump’s inattention to these global issues, but the truth is that we don’t pay 
> attention, either. At cocktail parties, on cable television, at the dinner table, at the water cooler, all we talk 
> about these days is Trump. So we complain about Trump being insular and parochial — but we’ve become insular and 
> parochial as well. We’ve caught the contagion that we mock.
>
> I’m addicted myself, which is why I write so much about Trump — or catch myself on a date night with my wife engaging 
> in horrified conversation about Trump.
>
> In fairness, there’s good reason we’re all Trump addicts: President Trump truly is THE story in America today. He is 
> systematically undermining American institutions and norms that underlie democratic government: courts, law 
> enforcement, journalism, the intelligence community, truth. He is also being investigated for possibly obstructing 
> justice and colluding with a foreign power’s attack on our electoral system. Epic battles will follow.
>
> Two thousand years from now, historians may be lecturing on Trump the way they now discuss, say, the challenge to 
> Roman institutions from Caligula.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-a538de84&post_id=20180508133550:3E3A0596-52E6-11E8-9F0E-8714A8FA1673
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com