It’s time for a little old-fashioned courage
On Monday the Washington Post ran an article headlined, “It’s possible that Trump actually isn’t the hardest-working president in history.” That may be the most dispiritingly equivocating headline I’ve seen in a long time. I never before thought the Post needed help with a headline, but how about this, “Trump is the laziest president in history,” for starters? I’m only just getting warmed up.
Recalling a time when decades had names, like the “psychedelic decade” for the 1960s or the “me decade” for the 1970s, perhaps our new decade should be known as the “craven decade.” How much longer are we going to sit still for this tepid equivocation in the press? There are, as I write this, 167,749 dead Americans thanks to Donald John Trump. That’s 1,557 more dead today than yesterday. Perhaps it’s because it’s “possible” that Trump “actually” isn’t the hardest-working president in history?
Trump’s conscience-shocking indolence is obvious to anyone on Twitter. And it’s not only the amount of time he wastes, but what he does with it. Wallowing in his titanic self-pity, crowing about his “ratings,” blaming President Obama for his own incompetence, putting people’s lives in danger by hate-tweeting their names with a nod and a wink to his gun-toting base — it’s beyond shocking and beggars belief.
Damning with faint criticism isn’t the answer. We need men and women in the press who call this what it is, a homicidal criminal enterprise infesting the sacred house of the president, headed up by a child-raping murderer who praises and admires brutal dictators, allows Russia to put out contracts on the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan, still puts children in cages, shrugs at the more than 165,000 Americans coronavirus deaths and sends well-wishing messages to jailed child rapists.
A cynical part of me wonders if the ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate are less than candidly condemnatory because they don’t want it to end. Trump serves up a smorgasbord of shocking headlines daily by the double handfuls. A single 24 hour news cycle is good for thirty different stories. In Trumpian terms, “nobody has ever seen anything like it before.” No shortage of fresh corpses for the maggots of journalism.
Had not the press been in charge of the narrative to begin with we might not be in the mess we are in today. Had they not focused so irresponsibly on the false controversies of Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails, America might very well be leading the world in its pandemic response — all thanks to President Hillary Clinton. Their absence of humility in the wake of the devastation of this Trump outrage reminds me of the continued arrogance of the world’s banks after the economic devastation they visited upon us in 2008.
Greed for headlines has its consequential side, just as does greed for profit. Trump is a monster created by a Frankenstein press, and he’s not going to go away because of a sharply-worded letter to the editor. The world in general and America in particular needs to be educated to the reality that ignorance is fatal. Fatal not in the abstract but in the sense of potentially being life-terminating for all of us. Four more years of Donald Trump will mean, if not the physical end of your own life, then quite probably the end of the life of someone you know. It has now literally become that urgent.
So vote because your life depends on it. We need Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in this time of world crisis, and nothing less is going to do. Set aside your personal agendas and petty squabbles and join us. Let’s get this child raping, murdering monster out of office and safely in prison before it’s too late. The press isn’t going to do it for us, we have to vote. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.