#normalizing trump

Everything makes sense now.

Once again satirist Alexandra Petri nails it regarding the mainstream media's penchant for using headlines to make Trump's unhinged, rambling rants seem like they are standard political speeches. This is a gift🎁link, so anyone can read the entire post. Below are some excerpts. Enjoy! 😂

I found it! The machine! The wonderful machine that they have at all news production headquarters. Its input is Donald Trump’s remarks; its output is headlines. Everything makes sense now. It functions somewhat like a juicer. You insert Trump’s remarks at one end, turn a crank (you have to turn it pretty hard; the machine does a lot of heavy lifting and twisting) and then — Presto! — out comes the headline or chyron produced by those remarks. I had long been wondering where we were getting these headlines and chyrons. You glance up idly at a muted television and see “DONALD TRUMP DELIVERS REMARKS ON ECONOMY,” and you think, “Ah, presidential at last!” And as long as you do not make the mistake of unmuting your television, the machine’s work is complete. If you are silly enough to unmute your television, you find yourself thinking, “I don’t know what those are, but I would not describe them as remarks about the economy.” A similar process occurs in print. If it were not for the machine, we would have headlines every day like: * “Would-Be President Rambles Unintelligibly For Eighty Minutes After Promising He Would Speak About The Economy. * "At Intervals We Glimpsed Something In The Torrent Of Words That If Pulled Out And Dried Off Might Become A Policy Idea, So We Sent Several Guys In After It, But None Of Them Returned Alive, Except For One Guy Who Just Said ‘The Horror, The Horror’ After We Retrieved Him And He’s Now Staring Off Silently Into The Void. * "Is Donald Trump Entirely Well? * "Harris Also Delivered Remarks But Not As Many As We Wanted.” Maybe we should have those headlines, but, thanks to the machine, we don’t. Just for fun, I started putting other strange, incoherent things into the machine — bits of old horror movies, certain reader emails — to see what headlines it would spit out. “The Silence of the Lambs” gave me “In Impromptu Remarks, Buffalo Bill Stresses Importance of Moisturizing.” [color emphasis and bullet point punctuation added; formatting & punctuation changed in bullet-point section]

— Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Quoted at Salon in an interview by Chauncey DeVega.

Dr. Gartner also says...

[A]nybody with an IQ over 90, who isn't brainwashed by Fox News can see that Trump is unwell, dangerously unfit, malignant personality who has reaped massive destruction (have we just forgotten the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths?) but even "mainstream" news sources have been normalizing Trump's dangerous and aberrant behavior because the corporate owners of the media want the ad money and don’t want to alienate their potential public by telling too much of the truth about the situation. Instead, they waste precious time talking about if President Biden is too old.