The game’s all changed
Considering that we’re only a few days into the new year, two out of three ain’t bad. On New Year’s Eve, I wrote an op-ed urging the Resistance to begin aggressively using three words in reference to Donald Trump: senility, treason, and impeachment. I’m pleasantly surprised to find that the mainstream media and the public at large are already embracing two out of those three words in headlining fashion.
We can thank Trump’s Tuesday Twitter meltdown, demented even by his standards, for the sudden explosion in popular talk about whether he’s mentally incompetent. Remarkably, various major media outlets are finally talking about it as well. The media seems more willing to finally acknowledge his longtime mental illness, and less willing to talk about his increasing signs of senility on top of his mental illness, but it’s a start. Even the reporters in the White House press briefings are beginning to ask the Press Secretary questions that are little more than a dressed up version of “Is Trump insane?”
We can thank an increasingly desperate Steve Bannon, of all people, for the sudden popular embrace of the idea that the Trump-Russia scandal is treasonous. We’ve been using that word for the past year because the evidence has made clear that Trump and his co-conspirators had treasonous intent when they conspired with Russia to rig the election. Now that one of Trump’s own former top people is using that same word, suddenly the media and the general public are asking the question of whether Trump committed treason.
Correctly framing the question is half the battle. We’re now at a point where the general public is actively debating whether the President of the United States is mentally incompetent, and whether he committed treason. When that’s the overriding conversation, there’s no recovering from it. If the average American is even so much as asking those questions and thinking about the answer, it means the perception has stuck. Four days into 2018, and the game’s all changed already. Now we just need to get the general public talking about impeachment.
