reflectivepundit

Trump Clone DeSantis is an even Greater Threat than the Original

By Brigitte L. Nacos

While I took a healthy break from following political news developments on a 7/24 basis during the last several weeks, I could not miss that media figures and their sources have become increasingly obsessed with reporting on alternatives to Donald Trump, most of all Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some pundits have even given advice on how DeSantis should compete against his one-time mentor. But if the pundits expected that the Florida Governor would finally come out swinging at Trump and give the media an opportunity to dramatize the beginning of a bruising battle between the two competitors, the ill-fated Twitter Space announcement was a disappointment. DeSantis did not mention Trump’s name. Not once.

At this point, Trump has a healthy lead in opinion polls ahead of second-place DeSantis—all other declared and undeclared candidates are polling in modest single-digit numbers. Previous campaigns have shown that the early survey results can drastically change over time. What individual candidates do or fail to do matters but so do unforeseen developments and events (Perhaps the preponderance of Trump’s legal problems?).

For now, news reporting on the DeSantis campaign seems quite benign. And the commentariat focuses on the expected battle between the quasi-incumbent Trump and the challenger DeSantis. So far, though, almost all pundits failed to ponder the substance of the two politicians’ agenda and whether DeSantis would be a less threatening president than Trump. An exception was Gail Collins of the New York Times who said earlier this month in a published conversation with Bret Stephens, “If I was locked up in a room and forced to choose between DeSantis and Trump, I’d beat my head against the wall and then pick The Donald.”

I agree with Collins.

Both men are power-hungry narcissists with strong authoritarian, indeed fascist traits manifested in their admiration for strongmen and their plan to expand their own executive powers---if they win next year. The socially challenged, super-tense and angry looking and sounding DeSantis lacks Trump’s relaxed reality show personality. But whereas the political opportunist Trump changes his positions or forgets about them in the chaos he tends to create, DeSantis is a hardcore ideologue with Far-Right principles and the discipline and lack of empathy to adopt extreme and inhumane laws and enforce them. This he has shown relentlessly in Florida. And now he promises to bring the same “Blueprint Florida” to the rest of America. In the Twitter announcement show he spoke repeatedly about “woke” threats, such as the “woke mob” and “woke mind virus.” I assume, his banning of books and freedoms of certain expression comes in reaction to what he called last night “woke ideology.” Whatever that is.

The ruthless culture war that DeSantis is fighting in his Floridian empire has impressed moneymen in the powerful White Christian Nationalism movement. While they love Trump for all he has done for their reactionary agenda, they now want Trumpism without Trump to defeat Joe Biden and the rest of evil Democrats next year. Their super PAC has gathered hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee that DeSantis will be well financed throughout the primary season.

DeSantis is as arrogant as or perhaps more arrogant than Trump. Whereas it took the formation of the MAGA movement and the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy theory for Trump to give his nod to his supporters’ claim that he is the “The Chosen One,” yesterday’s DeSantis ad claimed that God made this fighter and sent him to govern.

Thus, Never Trump and Never DeSantis. The clone is an even greater threat than the original.

CNN Offers Donald Trump Once Again Free Propaganda Time

Brigitte L. Nacos

CNN has offered and Donald Trump accepted the cable network’s invitation to a May 10^th townhall meeting in New Hampshire 18 months before the 2024 presidential elections and more than 9 months before the start of the primary season. The rationale for the deal is clear: With ratings down, CNN expects from Trump’s performance a huge audience and great media interest, while Trump wants to show Fox News that he has alternative means to spread his propaganda.

Free mainstream media.

Although there are two other declared contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump will be the only one in the 60-minute show that will be moderated by CNN morning show co-host, Kaitlan Collins. Some Republican and Independent audience members will get an opportunity to ask Trump questions.  

In 2015 and 2016, CNN was instrumental in over-covering Donald Trump’s toxic campaign performances and bringing the outrageous and scandalous news about the TV reality star turned presidential candidate to American and global audiences. The payoff came in form of  high ratings, high commercial rates, and healthy profits.

It seems that the CNN bosses have forgotten the frequent attacks on the network, its star correspondents and moderators by first-time candidate and later president Trump. They also must have forgotten that Donald Trump plotted with others to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and incited the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 by his supporters.

For years, Trump called the mainstream media “the enemy of the American people” and news organizations and individual journalists “liars.” That is an old trick of autocratic strongmen who violate the laws and conventions of liberal democracy. Not for the common interest but their own corrupt interests.

CNN’s bosses should know better. After all, the network was high up on Trump’s hate-the-press list that encouraged MAGA fanatics to threaten journalists covering Trump’s rallies.

Again and unfortunately profit imperatives matter more than the journalistic ethics rules of a free press. 

The Chutzpah of Tucker Carlson: Now the Fired Fox News Star Sells Himself as Truthteller

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After years of falsifying the truth and promoting non-factual tales and ridiculous conspiracy theories that contributed mightily to dividing Americans into hostile political camps, the fired Fox News star and darling of the hard-line MAGA movement Tucker Carlson sells himself as victimized truth-teller. And he promises to return to counter the “liars.”

“Both political parties, and their donors, have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state…,” he said in the first response after his fall. And then, in a first-rate propaganda trick he compares the honest people against the liars—the “us” versus “them” thing—and sends a message of hope to his fans:

"When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars, who have been trying to silence them, shrink and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some.  And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon."

In other words, Carlson tells his fellow “honest people” that he will not be silenced for long. The American cable channels with more extreme Far-Right ideologies than Fox News offer him options. And then there is the Russian government’s propaganda arm RT that invited Carlson with the tweet, "Hey @TuckerCarlson, you can always question more with @RT_com.”

More telling is that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented unprompted during a news conference on Carlson’s firing implying that it was a move by the US government. “Perhaps it would be useful to consider how things are with freedom of speech in the United States,” he said with a straight face.

To be sure, Moscow is not happy that their favorite American TV host lost his Fox News perch from which he dispatched anti-American messages that found their way into Russia’s government-controlled media.

If one had not witnessed the perennial truth-twisting by Carlson (and his like-minded colleagues), one would be shocked by the fired TV-host’s complaint that the U.S. looks now like a one-party state. Isn’t that what Carlson and his fellow autocrats in the Far-Right GOP movement see as model? He and they have not hidden their great admiration for strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Victor Orban.  

But, then, it is hard to understand the logic of these people. Instead, we need to remind us that  there are two  “realities” in American body politics with drastically different perceptions of what is fact and fiction.

Performance Artist Trump and his Big Helpers in the Mainstream Media

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In the United States of America, the loyal opposition is dead.

Instead of debating political differences with opponents in rational debate that differentiates democracies from autocracies, the leader of the Republican Party continues to up the ante of his usual crude rhetorical insults and degradation.

At a campaign rally in Ohio on the eve of the midterm elections, former President Trump called the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “an animal.” And, as he has done many times before, he also labeled her “Crazy Nancy.”  

Shortly after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former and would-be next president Trump contributed to instantly circulating right-extreme conspiracy theories, according to which the assault on the 82-year old husband of the Speaker was staged by the liberal cabal or the result of a gay relationship gone bad—all contrary to the police version supported by video footage of the break-in.

Trump did not condemn the attacker’s political violence; probably, because the perpetrator’s posts revealed the same violent far-right extremism that is at home in the MAGA cult and the community of QAnon conspiracy theorists—both Trump’s staunchest supporters.

The Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election is merely one big whopper among the ex-president's daily spoken and written lies.

Lies or not, the ex-president consumes more mainstream media news oxygen than most other politicians—on many days more than the sitting president.

The legacy news media, involved in sharp competition with each other and social media platforms, attract the largest audiences to their political reporting, when their infotainment stars unorthodox political performance artists—like Donald Trump. That’s appreciated by news organizations’ managements and stock owners. After all, higher audience ratings rake in higher profits.  

The key to Trump’s nomination and election victories in 2016 was not FOX News, the army of Far-Right radio hosts, his tweets, or his rallies during which he preached anger, hate, division, and—yes—violence. Instead, Trump’s biggest helpers during the decisive pre-primary and primary seasons were mainstream media organizations. The huge volume of coverage devoted to his rude speech during his performances and the attention to outrageous tweets he or his team posted gave him unprecedented free propaganda that was not available to his opponents.

After Trump announces his next presidential candidacy, we will get an idea whether the mainstream media will repeat their mistakes of Donald Trump’s first presidential run.

I am not optimistic that a self-correction is in the cards.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: The first World Wide Web War Is a Double-Edged Sword

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, every generation has utilized well-established and often brand-new communication technologies.

In the last fifty years or so, the breakthrough of live TV coverage over long distances resulted in news coverage of dramatic events that the whole world could watch. The horrific assault on members of Israel’s national team at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich was watched by an estimated audience of 500 million people around the world. The satellite coverage of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square catapulted CNN into a premier international all-news network. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 Al Qaeda’s leadership boasted that the size of the global news audience had set a new record. Carefully orchestrated by the Pentagon, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was reported “live” by news teams embedded in military units.

And now, as Thomas L. Friedman writes in today’s column in the New York Times, people around the world watch “World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web.”

Friedman is right, individuals with smartphones capture the cruelty of war, upload images of horror and bravery on TikTok and other social media platforms, and make all of this available to people around the globe. The gatekeepers of traditional news organization or the censors of authoritarian regimes are being bypassed in the social media world.

But whereas the pure multitude of pictures and video clips captured by Ukrainians on their smartphones writes a new chapter in war reporting, the same platforms are available to professional propagandists. In the current conflict, Russian propagandists spin the news in both traditional and social media in carefully tailored narratives that counter the episodic images of smartphone photography. And the Ukrainian authorities may spin as well.

In sharp contrast, the uploaded images and sounds of smartphone owners present brutality and violence in multi millions of snippets in social media. It is a double-edged sword: raw and unfiltered images on the one hand and one the other hand a complete lack of contextual information that would allow  assessments of the snippets on the screen.

I have been told in the last several days repeatedly that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a “media war” or was asked whether that is the case.

The conflict is a real war on real land and in real airspace. In spite of the attention to the compelling images on TikTok and other social media platforms, I prefer the war coverage by the well-trained journalists of the best traditional news organizations. They provide the context that TikTok and YouTube do not.

Shame on Mainstream Media for Publicizing another Trump for Political Office

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is well-document that the most influential organizations of the U.S. mainstream media—from CNN to the New York Times and Washington Post—singled out Donald Trump for the bulk of their election-related coverage. This was the case in 2015 before and in 2016 during the Republican primaries. The celebrity candidate, however rude and insulting, received significantly more and more positive coverage than his competitors on the GOP side but also with respect to Hillary Clinton. Only after he had won the presidential nomination, did the same news organizations finally scrutinize the least qualified and the most dangerous of all candidates. It was too late.

While these same newsrooms deserve credit for their watchdog role during the nightmarish years of the Trump administration, they seemed not to have learned from their past mistakes in 2015/16. Again, they help—unwittingly, I assume—to pave the way for another Trump’s political career.

I was shocked this morning, when I first saw on Yahoo’s home page a story on Lara Trump, Donald’s daughter-in-law, under the headline “Lara Trump for North Carolina Senate Seat?” The article originated in the New York Times and was, as the story revealed, teased by Donald Trump’s enabler-in-chief Lindsay Graham, Senator of North Carolina, who told FOX News that the pro-conviction vote by Richard Burr of North Carolina in the Senate’s impeachment trial “made Lara Trump almost the certain nominee for the Senate seat” in that state.

So, the ambitious Trump through marriage, whose political ambitions had already been covered quite generously before, won another plum piece of free media without saying a single word or doing a single thing—just like father-in-law Donald whose ample free news in 2015/16 freed him from pleading for donations or spending his own money.

The news media must not become the former president’s substitute for his no longer available Twitter account but treat him like any former ex-president, better less so, although the FOX News newsrooms and their competitors will be delighted to serve as his bullhorns.

Just as important, the influential mainstream media must refrain from providing free publicity to other members of the Trump Clan: his sons, his daughters, daughters-in-law, and son-in-law.

When it comes to Mr. Trump and his family, journalists, editors, producers—all in the mainstream media must act according to George Santayana’s aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I do not expect that they will.

Trump’s Hateful Rhetoric and Political Violence

By Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon

On September 29, 2019, with his impeachment looming, President Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) retweeted a warning by the Evangelical Pastor Robert Jeffress, “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Two days later, U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican of Texas, warned Democrats that their “coup” was “pushing America into a civil war.”[1] On far-right websites Trump supporters suggested drastic and even violent actions against the “enemy” within. Some warned that they may need to exercise their Second Amendment rights—in other words, take up arms against the traitors. Responding to one of Trump’s daily Twitter attacks on Adam Schiff, the leading U.S. Representative in the impeachment inquiry, his followers seconded the President’s rhetorical assaults. One male commenter attacked Schiff as “a co-conspiratory [sic] in a coup attempt. This is treason.” That same day, a 52-year old man in Tucson, Arizona, left a death threat on Schiff ’s voice mail. “I’m gonna f_ing blow your brains out,” he warned.[2] The would-be attacker told police officers that “he watches Fox News and likely was upset at something that he saw on the news.” He also stated that “he strongly dislikes the Democrats, and feels they are to blame for the country’s political issues.”[3] In his residence, the police found an AR-15 assault rifle, two pistols, and 700 rounds of ammunition.[4] Although these examples of hate speech and threats of violence seemed shocking, they were merely iterations of Trumpian rhetoric and signposts for significant increases in right-extreme violence and school bullying in the United States. Our research found that Trump’s online and off-line hate speech corresponded with his followers’ aggressive rhetoric, violent threats, and actual violence against Trump’s declared “enemies,” most of all, minorities, the news media, and oppositional politicians.

For the comprehensive research report on the links between Trump's aggressive words and the growth of right-extreme violence read our just published article in the online journal Perspectives on Terrorism.

Trump and his Base: Threat of Fascist “Mobilizing Passions”

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Fifteen years ago, in his excellent book “Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton wrote in the last paragraph of the last chapter, “Fascism exist at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States.” Today, American democracy may have moved into a higher stage of fascist infection.

I reread Paxton’s book after (1) I saw video clips of Stormtroopers in the streets of Portland, Oregon, grabbing non-violent persons and driving them away in unmarked vehicles; (2) I learned that heavily armed agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were the  “law and order” forces; (3) I read of the acting secretary of homeland security Chad Wolf tweeting that “our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch;” and (4) I heard Donald Trump refusing to answer the plain question, whether he would accept the election results in fall in case of his loss.

All of the above is straight out of the horror book of fascism and reminiscent of violence by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brown Shirts against political opponents during their respective leaders’ rise to dictatorial powers, and fascist leaders’ success to extend their staying power by all means.

While it seemed strange that the DHS, established after 9/11 to counter terrorism, never dispatched those agents to show their patriotism against violent right-extremists responsible for almost all domestic terrorism in the last several years, the U.S. President himself revealed that the storm trooper deployment was a partisan move to energize his movement in the forefront of the upcoming elections. “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters the other day. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

Just as the more than 140,000 Americans killed by the Trump virus have become our daily normalcy, the federal “law and order” violence in Portland and the promise of more of these storm trooper deployments did not result in massive public or elite outrage and protest. It seemed merely another illegitimate move by a president and his devoted servants.

Instead of providing a succinct definition of fascism Paxton enumerated what he calls “mobilizing passions,” among them the following:

• The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justified any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
• The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
• The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
• The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restrain from any kind of human or divine law…

We have not yet arrived at fascism as we know it from history, but we are witnessing in the age of Donald Trump demagogic populism with moves to illiberal democracy and now fascist traits as well.  

The acceptance of the unacceptable is the scariest aspect of the present political crisis. As Paxton notes rightly, fascist movements “could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites…party leaders, high government officials” …”and the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people.”

He ended the book with a somewhat optimistic chord. “We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past,” Paxton wrote.  

I do not share that optimism and fear that most Americans did not learn the lesson of earlier fascism.

 

Joe Biden and the TRUMP VIRUS

By Brigitte L. Nacos

During the 2016 primary season, then candidate Donald Trump got most of the publicity oxygen that the news media produced. At the expense of his Republican GOP and Democratic rivals. Ironically, he accused the news media then and ever since, wrongly, of anti-Trump bias. And worse.

Now, the very news organizations that Trump characterizes collectively as “enemy of the people” fall into the same trap: They report and magnify everything that the president says and tweets—including the daily diet of claims that are false and, yes, big lies.

In contrast, there is little coverage of the presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden. To be sure, he follows the stay-home and wear-a-mask advice of public health experts that Mr. Trump openly defies. But if fair and balanced reporting means to actively enlist statements and comments from the other side, Mr. Biden and his campaign leaders are merely a phone call, text message, or email away.

However, the current laying-low tactic will not work for long for a presidential candidate. Not even during a crisis period, when the opponent’s attacks relentlessly. For all the craziness that is coming out of Trump’s mouth and tweet production, he does control the mass-mediated narrative.

That must change, if the Democrats’ ticket has a winning chance in November. Biden and his campaign should take its cue from the Never Trump Group’s Lincoln Project. Most of all, from their compelling documentary-like videos.  

Biden’s campaign needs slogans that can compete and beat the catch words of the Trump campaign.

Here is the thing: Trump’s politics of denial was responsible for the long delay in preparing and instructing the health care sector and the American public for the most devastating crisis since WWII. Yes, the virus originated in China. But Covid-19 deserves the name Trump VIRUS because this president’s alternative reality and alternative facts lulled adequate preparedness. As research shows, he is responsible for thousands of deaths.

In his book “Time to Get Tough” Trump wrote that “a president doesn’t ‘create’ jobs, only businesses can do that.” But as President he has credited himself with creating the best economy, the best stock market, and the lowest unemployment rate in American history. Well, then, Joe Biden. Why not talking now of a Trump Recession and Trump’s Record Unemployment? Besides the Trump Virus, of course.

And one more thing: Time to Get Tough!

Donald Trump and the Big-Lie Theory

By Brigitte L. Nacos

When parents tell their children to tell the truth, they may cite the proverb that lies have short legs. The lesson is that you do not get away with lies.

I thought of this, when I reread an article on Donald Trump by Marie Brenner that Vanity Fair published in 1990 and republished in 2015, right after he declared his presidential candidacy.

Brenner wrote that one of Trump’s lawyers told her, “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory.  “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”

Obviously, the Big-Lie theory has served Donald Trump well before and after he moved into the White House. According to the fact checkers of the Washington Post, President Trump made 16,241 “false or misleading” claims during the first three years in office. In other words, more than an average of 14 lies per day.

And, yet, with TV, radio, and online Trumpian propagandists at his service, Trump disproved the saying that lies have short legs.

During his ascent to and rule as liar-in-chief he has relentlessly attacked the mainstream media as “fake” and “enemy of the American people.”

Anyone who calls himself a “very stable genius” does not allow disagreement when he muddles fact and fiction. Thus, after the premier public health scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci corrected Trump statements during press conferences in the White House, he all but disappeared from that stage. One appearance in the last seven events.   

Dr. Deborah Birx, also a recognized public health expert, seems lately being sucked into the Trumpian circle of benevolent servants. In an appearance on “Watter’s World” last Saturday she told the FOX NEWS host that the President “looks at every bit of data” praising his “strong foundation on data” and that he is asking the right questions. When she explained Trump’s insane notion about the internal use of heat and disinfectants in the treatment of Covid-19 as his habit “to talk it through out loud” new information, she must have scored brownie points. Same, when she went after the news media.

Asked whether the media had been fair in reporting the pandemic, Dr. Birx answered forcefully,

I think the media is very slicey and dicey about how they put sentences together in order to create headlines. …I think often the reporting may be accurate in paragraph three, four, and five. But I’m not sure how many people get to paragraph three, four, and five…And I think the responsibility the press has is to really ensure that the headlines reflect science and data that is in the piece itself.”

No criticism of the Big-Lie theorist and his dismal relationship to truth and fact even during the current health emergency. Instead, an admonition of the mainstream media that records his falsities and misleading statements day-in and day-out.

This morning, President Trump threw another tweet bomb in the direction of the mainstream media.  “FAKE NEWS, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” he wrote. “There has never been, in the history of our Country, a more vicious or hostile Lamestream Media than there is right now, even in the midst of a National Emergency, the Invisible Enemy!”

The White House then informed reporters that the previously scheduled afternoon press briefing would not be held. Another signal that these press conferences are not about informing the public about the health crisis but rather about the president’s vanities.

P.S.  A few hours after announcing that the day's press briefing was canceled the White House let it be known that the President would “brief the nation” at a news conference in the afternoon. The stable genius needs the stage and always the starring role.