No, Don't Be Quiet
How to tame a mutant dictator.
Kind readers, I have two bits of wonderful news for you.
First, you have a special opportunity to support the work of Bully Pulpit by becoming a paid subscriber. There’s a button to click down there somewhere. This column is not much of a revenue-generating enterprise, but I’d be grateful if it were slightly less not much of a revenue-generating enterprise. And opportunity knocks! For a limited time only, paid subscribers will get exactly what free subscribers get and not even one thing more. This will spare you, my generous benefactors, from the burden of additional tedious reading.
You’re welcome. And also thank you in advance.
The second pleasant surprise is that this week’s post is not about what a vulgar, perverted, fascistic, criminal piece of garbage the president of the United States is. It is about how selfish and foolish and cowardly and irresponsible the White House press corps is. They are the living embodiment of the term “sins of omission.” It is mind-boggling how not only impotent, but ultimately enabling they are in the face of Trump’s lying, bullying and playground insults. Someone asks a question, the asshole derides it as “nasty” or stupid or fake news and then personally attacks the reporter and the news organization. Meanwhile, the question is never actually addressed.
Instead, this happens:
1) The video is posted on social media, and everybody who knows what a monster Trump is watches in frustration but validation to have yet one more piece of evidence about his sociopathy. Oh, that helps soooo much.
2) MAGA viewers cheer at his courage in facing down the partisan-hack tools of the lunatic left so deftly put in their place by the one man anointed by God to fight the Deep State, bring order to our wayward society and restore America’s former greatness (see “slavery”).
For example, after the Texas floods killed 136 people, including dozens of young campers on July 4th weekend, the focus was on failures — amid the administration’s steep cutbacks to the National Weather Service — to warn citizens in time to avoid catastrophe. At a press conference, a reporter asked Trump, “Several families we’ve heard from are obviously upset because they say that those warnings, those alerts ... didn’t go out in time, and they also say that people could have been saved. What do you say to those families?”
Trump replied: “Only a bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you. I don’t know who you are but only a very evil person would ask a question like that.”
What he meant was, “Only a very evil person would answer a question like that.” In any event, there was no follow up from other reporters. A week earlier, after leaked Pentagon intelligence estimates from the US bombing of Iran’s heavily bunkered uranium-enrichment sites suggested that Trump’s triumphal crowing about “obliteration” was false, Natasha Bertrand reported the problematic US intelligence on CNN. Trump immediately went to Truth Social to ejaculate:
Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog’.
From a man who has successfully extorted millions of dollars from ABC and CBS and generally more deferential coverage from the rest of the mainstream press, these bloviations should be taken seriously. They were duly reported for 24 hours and, like the underlying issue itself, vanished from coverage.
On May 30, when Trump was being widely ridiculed for his chaotic, here-today-gone-tomorrow tariffs — earning him the sobriquet TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) — a reporter in an Oval Office press gaggle asked if the nickname was valid. Trump:
I chicken out? I’ve never heard that. Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.
Here’s what the reporter did not say in response: “Excuse me, you are not my mom, and you are not my boss. On the contrary, you work for me. So don’t you tell me what to say or what to do. Be accountable to the electorate and answer the question.”
Nor did any of the other reporters in the gaggle make that point, because they all had questions of their own to shout out. Not a Spartacus in the crowd. That, to use the word that Republics have embraced to reply to any inconvenient truth, is disgusting. And it is an ongoing shame. It’s not a question of ganging up on a president; it is about defending the 1st Amendment and the dignity of fellow journalists. But, nope, in the craven warrens of the White House press center, it’s every man and woman for him/herself.
Only a week earlier, in the hubbub over Trump accepting a $400 million airplane from the Kingdom of Qatar, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked about the optics of taking such a gratuity from a foreign government. Trump thoughtfully replied, “You are a terrible reporter. No. 1, you don’t have what it takes to be a reporter. You are not smart enough. But for you to go on to a subject about a jet that was given to the United States Air Force, which is a very nice thing. You ought to go back to your studio at NBC, because … they ought to be investigated. They are so terrible the way you run that network. And you are a disgrace. No more questions from you.” Amid the most transactional presidency in US history, thus ended the subject of $400 million influence peddling. The rest of the press? Crickets.
In the movies, there’s this trope of a bully, surrounded by his cackling entourage of imbeciles, picking on a nerdy outcast and humiliating him or worse as the mouth-breathers cheer the bully on. It’s infuriating and painful to watch. Except, in the movies, the clever nerd later figures out how to fight back, and the tables are deliciously turned. If only. Instead, for fear of “hostility” being taken as a smoking gun of political bias, the press again and again takes the noogies, and the swirlies and the slams against the wall of lockers. It’s simply amazing. Does anyone imagine that they are thus elevated in the eyes of the MAGA cultists, or that they are fulfilling their responsibilities as proxies for the public?
Just this week, on Air Force One, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins inquired about the bombshell revelation that Trump and sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein were estranged over Epstein’s poaching of attracting, young, female employees from Mar-a-Lago, including Virginia Giuffre, an early complainant in the Epstein case, now dead of suicide.
COLLINS: Mr. President, did — did one of those stolen, you know, persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?
TRUMP: Be quiet!
Her colleagues certainly were. Of course, there is a way to pose a question that wins the approval of the dictator. On June 27, the brunette bombshell White House correspondent for My Pillow TV, the MAGA channel of Trump cultist Mike Lindell, really put Trump on the spot.
“Would you consider appointing somebody at the DOJ, maybe to investigate the judges that allowed for the political persecution of you, your family, and your supporters during the Biden Administration?”
Oddly, Trump was not insulted.
“I love you,” he replied.
Used to be, reporters DID have each other's backs in such situations -- although I guess few if any recent past "situations" (like, in the 20th and 21st centuries) were "such" as these.
The kind of brazen, cruel and bald-faced insults and put-downs spewed by the Narcissist-in-chief haven't been heard or seen since . . . ever. But his uber aberration is no excuse to look the other way. The White House press corps silence isn't just embarrassing, it's infuriating.