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Trump shits on America. Why doesn’t the media care?
For many news orgs, Trump’s fascist coalition is uniquely legitimate.
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Last Saturday, millions of people took to the streets to defy President Donald Trump in the largest single-day political demonstration in the country’s history.
How did Trump respond? By taking a big (virtual) shit on America.
Saturday evening, Trump released an AI video of himself in a crown piloting a fighter jet named King Trump. The jet flies over cities, dumping feces on protesters below.
At this point, it’s not exactly a surprise that Trump sees himself as a king. Nor is it a surprise that he thinks it’s funny to shit on America. Still, the leader of the free world fantasizing about seizing supreme power to cover his constituents in turds seems newsworthy.
Six million people exercised their democratic right to protest, and Trump’s response was to giggle and express a wish to bury them in feces. At best that’s juvenile; at worst it’s an ugly attack on the democratic spirit. Either way, it’s bizarre, jarring, and extremely divisive. You’d think journalists would want to talk about it.
And yet, for the most part, the mainstream media has shied away from the story.
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The Sunday shows hardly mentioned it. As Parker Malloy points out, when House Speaker Mike Johnson went on ABC’s This Week, no one asked him about the video. Print media mostly tried to avoid informing its readers of the scatological nature of the video. People and The Hill euphemistically said in their headlines that Trump was dumping a “brown liquid” on protestors. The New York Times and Axios wrote headlines which mentioned the “King Trump” jet, but avoided saying anything at all about the shit he dropped.
Perhaps the media is avoiding details in part because editors feel that talking about poop is distasteful. Even so, it’s clear that there’s a double standard at work.
When Democrats or liberals question the morals or perspicacity of Trump voters, the press treats it as a major scandal. When Trump expresses a desire to cover protestors with feces — essentially saying that anyone who disagrees with him is shit — the media is barely willing to talk about it. Why?