For once, I wish the mainstream media would focus on the real story instead of chasing after every shiny ball President Trump throws at them.
Here, for example, is a real story:
As protestors demonstrated in the vicinity of the White House over the weekend, President Donald Trump reportedly retreated into the underground bunker intended to protect in the event of terrorist attacks. [I]t wasn’t just America’s anti-Trumpers who had a laugh at the president’s caution. He was reportedly also ridiculed on China’s state media, after weeks of attacking China over the spread of COVID-19.
(Hill Reporter, June, 2020)
That and that alone is the reason Trump rushed to project his weakness onto US governors. This, in yet another vain, and frankly laughable attempt to play strongman. And, like Pavlovian dogs, the media began chasing this shiny ball as follows:
Donald Trump has slammed the state governors as ‘weak’ during a fiery call where he implored them to crackdown on protesters taking to the streets in cities across the United States.
‘What happened in the state of Minnesota …They were a laughingstock all over the world,’ Mr Trump added about heightened protests, according to CNN. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, and the whole world was laughing.’
(The Independent, June 1, 2020)
That’s classic Trump.
Incidentally, the lesson this malignant sociopath seems to have learned from the infamous Kent State tragedy is that the National Guard did not kill enough protesters. That might explain why he seems hell-bent on seeing US soldiers execute a version of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre in an American city before these protests die naturally.
But don’t you wish one of those governors had the presence of mind to push back with words to this effect:
- With all due respect Mr. President, the world is not laughing at us. After all, violent protests are as American as Starbucks and iPhones. What the world is laughing at, Sir, is an American president fleeing into a bunker, down in the bowels of the White House, to escape fellow Americans who were just exercising their First Amendment rights. No president has ever cowered in the face of political protests like that before. That’s why your doing so made you look like a weak laughingstock – not just to your enemies in China but even to your friends in Russia. Not that this would be the first time, mind you. Hell, but for Covid-19, our NATO allies would probably still be talking about the laughingstock you made of yourself at last year’s summit.
That’s the story! Not Trump bullying governors and ordering them to deploy the National Guard, which half of them had already done. Jeez!
But he knows all too well that the more outrage he manufactures (i.e., the shiny ball du jour), the less media scrutiny there will be of his weak and feckless leadership – of not only these protests but also the Covid-19 pandemic as well. And the media let him get away with it every friggin’ time!
Given the way the media are covering his law-and-order hi-jinks, you’d never know this is the same president they were pillorying just days ago for blustering and flailing while over 100,000 Americans were dying.
Meanwhile, Trump has become such an international laughingstock, it seems some G7 leaders no longer want to be seen with him on the world stage. Only that explains the runaround they’re giving him as he tries to host this year’s summit.
I mean, one can understand Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany citing transatlantic travel amidst this pandemic as her excuse for not attending. I know the last thing she wants is to fly all this way just to schoolmarm his childish behavior like she had to last year. But what credible excuse could Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada have?
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would postpone a Group of Seven summit he had hoped to hold next month until September or later. …
The decision to postpone the G7 summit is a retreat for Trump, who had sought to host the group of major industrialized countries in Washington as a demonstration that the United States was returning to normal after the coronavirus epidemic.
(Reuters, May 30, 2020)
Or later is right. In fact, the only way he will get any of them to give him the time of day again is if he wins another black-swan election in November. But if he does, God help them, and us.
I assure you, if Obama were still president in these same circumstances, every G7 leader would have accepted his invitation without hesitation.
Related commentaries:
Projection… America rioting…
covid-19 thread… NATO summit…
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