'Banality of crazy': Trump’s increasingly violent rhetoric is being underreported by journalists
After Target announced that it was closing nine stores because of crime, plenty of journalists and politicians — both liberal and conservative — argued that shoplifting in major cities was out of control and that police needed to crack down aggressively on shoplifters in order for retailers to stay in business.
They didn't advocate violence, but they called for shoplifting laws to be aggressively enforced. Former President Donald Trump, however, called for shoplifters to be shot and killed during a speech in California — where he also joked about a violent attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi.
In an article published on October 5, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi stresses that Trump's rhetoric has grown increasingly violent — and argues that major media outlets are underreporting this problem.
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Farhi observes, "Trump's advocacy of extrajudicial killings was widely covered by newspapers and TV stations in California but generally ignored by the national press. No mainstream TV network carried his speech live or excerpted it later that night. CNN and MSNBC mentioned it during panel discussions over the next few days. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR and PBS didn't report it at all. The New York Times wrote about it four days later, playing the story on Page 14 of its print edition."
The Post media reporter notes that Trump also recently suggested that former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Mulley should be executed, adding that political journalist/author Brian Klaas has used the term "banality of crazy" to describe responses to the former president's violent rhetoric. In other words, Trump says so many outrageous things that, according to Klaas, people become desensitized to it.
The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes, a Never Trump conservative, told the Post, "If the former president of the United States endorses extrajudicial killings of shoplifters, and we have to ask 'Is that newsworthy?' we need to reevaluate what we regard as important.'"
Paul Farhi's full Washington Post article is available at this link (subscription required).
