I was triggered by The Atlantic yesterday morning, and simply have to fire back for the record.
This screenshot might read as a minor offense, but when piled like kindling onto the red-hot embers of countless other examples of our corporate media soft-pedaling the most dangerous, corrupt regime to ever visit our White House, it’s no wonder we have a fire burning completely out of control in the United States.
Here’s the assaulting item:
“Mixed” messages. THAT’S what The Atlantic headline writers have assigned toDonald Trump’s incoherent lies, pontifications, insults, threats, backtracks, rage, double downs, doubles backs, and abhorrent treatment of the entire world because of the chaos that bangs around inside his fat head.
When will this gaslighting stop from media organizations that have catastrophically failed us the past decade?
Just what in the hell is going on here?
Trump is a human dumpster, a collection of the foulest character traits ever piled into one man.
His mouth is a sewage pipe.
He is a racist, a misogynist, an unrepentant liar, an autocrat, and a convicted felon. Nothing I typed there should be in any dispute by now, and would easily survive the most strident fact-check.
So why isn’t this included in all the reporting about him for necessary context?
The Atlantic is hardly the only member of the corporate media who has normalized the abhorrent, and incapable Trump.
The corporate media has failed us to the point that our Democracy is now hanging by a thread. I have typed extensively about this for years, and will say again as a man who spent 30 years around newsrooms that it galls me to no end.
I have concluded that either the editors in these newsrooms are incompetent, or they need Trump around to keep their enterprises profitable.
I will readily concede, it is probably both.
But back to this piece in The Atlantic, which framed their video this way:
“Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; David Ignatius; and Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Watch the full episode here.”
This was a polite, meaty discussion that for the most part was critical in a pinkies out sort of way about this asinine war. Being from the polite, upper-crust media elite, all five of the panelists successfully avoided calling the war exactly what it is: an utter and complete cluster----.
Essentially, they spent the better part of the show trying to do what Trump has so far proven completely incapable of: explaining just what the hell it is we are doing in Iran.
It was the kind of discussion you might get when the grownups discuss what to do with Uncle Billy, who simply can’t stop wandering into traffic with his pudding.
Trump is easily the most dangerous man in the world, and this is what needs to be reported with urgency.
The time for polite avoidance simply has to be over by now.
I have argued that if they had covered him this way the first time around, there would have never been a second or third time.
Here’s what needs to happen right now:
Our media needs to stop reacting to what Trump is doing, and start anticipating the worst before it happens. It does little good to tell us the house is burning out of control when you could have told us an arsonist with a blowtorch was roaming the neighborhood beforehand.
Starting now, every single piece on him should include the following for proper context and accuracy:
-He is a serial liar, who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything.
-He is a convicted felon, who was protected by the Supreme Court from being held accountable for crimes like his attack on America.
-He is a racist.
-He is a misogynist, who has attacked women verbally and physically. Start calling him that.
This is how any story about Trump should read: “President Trump, who is a serial liar, misogynist, racist, and convicted felon alleged this morning that … [fill in the lie].”
They could also stand to start working into their stories about the fact that Trump appears in the Epstein Files an astonishing 38,000 times. These are just the files his lawless, crooked Justice Department has allowed us to see.
Read that again.
All of these things are relevant, and provide the much-needed context to remind and inform us all of the sociopath who is in a position to finish us off.
STOP NORMALIZING HIM.
That we aren’t already at this place, speaks to the media’s shoddy job covering this deviant since he started blocking out the sun in 2015.
Either you believe we are in a national emergency or you don’t.
If you don’t, then kindly surrender your press passes, because you are incompetent as hell and unable to identify the most important story in America since the Civil War.
If you can’t see what is happening you are stupid, unserious people that shouldn’t read a news story, much less type one.
If you do see it that way, but refuse to report it that way, then you are aiding and abetting the end of our Democracy, and no better than Trump himself.
What never came out of that damn Atlantic roundtable was a much-needed, urgent discussion about removing this tyrant from office, which is most certainly going to need to happen.
We cannot survive three more years of this nuclear-powered assault on our country.
Removing Trump from office, and holding the monsters to account who are appeasing him, should not be seen as a stretch, or some faint hope, but completely necessary.
Does anybody think Trump is capable of taking a deep breath and reassessing the hell he is inflicting on the entire world right now, starting with his own citizens? Or is it more likely he will escalate and put us on the brink of extinction, and the point of no return?
Again: The arsonist is roaming the neighborhood with a blowtorch. Are you going to report it this way, or wait until we are all engulfed in flames?
Our mainstream media needs to sit with this, and consider how they go forward with their coverage.
There’s only one correct course of action, and they better get it right, because there will be no second chances.
This is a national emergency.
Report it that way.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.