Professor Scott Lucas, of UCD, was on RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor Show last Sunday, calling it. He said he was going to start with the facts and try to keep emotion out of it.
He went on to describe what is happening in America now as the biggest threat to the US since the end of their civil war. Because it is an attempt — not just by Trump, but also by his advisers, allied with the world's richest man — to "take apart” the US government. He talked about the "stealing” of records from US agencies, including Treasury payment systems.
In an otherwise-excellent contribution, it was darkly amusing that Scott wanted to "keep emotion out of it”, followed by an accurate description of the collapse of the United States of America as we know it.
I have noted here for some time the reluctance of serious people to call the Trump situation correctly, due to their dread of being regarded as somehow less than serious. As a result, not only have they been keeping emotion out of it — they've been keeping the totally bleeding obvious out of it, too.
In this column we've never worried about that stuff, which is why we were calling Trump's intentions correctly some eight years ago. It didn't take the investigative genius of a Lieutenant Columbo to deduce it, we just listened to what Trump was saying.
Yet a goodly proportion of the world's media heard him saying these things, too, and decided he probably didn't really mean it, or it couldn't happen anyway, due to our old friends "checks and balances” — and, incredibly, some of them are still doing it. Unlike Lucas, they're not calling it straight-up "stealing” yet.
Mostly, it is independent journalists in the US who are keeping the flag flying, while the corporate media resembles the chief in a TV police drama, always reverting to a kind of institutionalised inertia: "You're off the case, George. You're emotionally involved.”
You could say that theirs is a basic failure of corporate imagination. But it's worse than that, as there's no imagination required here — it's all been happening in front of our faces, for about eight years. Trump even went to the trouble of staging a violent coup on live television, to prove his authoritarian bona fides. Now that the coup has been completed, Lucas says it's not a "slippery slope” any more, it's an "avalanche”.
Scott is working at UCD, yet he is calling this more accurately than many of the esteemed figures in the US media — they're still expressing concern about bad things that MIGHT happen, IF things keep going the way they are. They're not at the straight-up "stealing” stage, or the "avalanche” stage. They've been in denial about this stuff for so long, that even now they're looking at it through a window of wishful thinking.
They have legitimised Trump in a thousand ways, laundering his lies, backing away from his criminality, not even raising the point during a presidential TV debate that he was held liable for sexual assault.
They and other enablers claim that they have a duty to be circumspect, because he has a mandate — but really, it's the other way round: he got that mandate, partly because they were circumspect.
Once the political and justice systems and the media have failed to hold accountable a man who is obviously intending to "take apart” the United States, and a few other places, too, it's fair enough for the multitudes to think: if he's still standing after all that, who are we to be judging him?
Once-great institutions such as The New York Times have "both-sidesed” their way to a place beyond self-parody. Still they're inclined to retreat into that dead zone, of warning that this MIGHT get really bad, IF something else happens. CNN's Jim Acosta was put on the graveyard shift and has left the network for standing up to Trump — once literally, at a White House press conference.
But last week, the top players of the US media had the opportunity to do something for their beloved democracy. Not a huge thing, but something.
The White House banned Associated Press — AP — from the Oval Office, because they had not complied with Trump's edict to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
CNN's Kaitlan Collins put a question about this to Trump press secretory Karen Leavitt.
But this was not an issue that required a question. It required instead a statement — that reporters who still regard themselves as part of a free press, will not attend White House briefings until AP is reinstated.
That might actually work, because Trump needs the "fake news media” to keep on showing up, so he can abuse them as characters in his reality TV show — a role to which they have consented.
But no, they didn't walk out, they "asked the hard question” — and got a ridiculous answer that could only emanate from a twisted thugocracy. And the game went on.
Still, they'd kept emotion out of it.
In Trumpworld, science must serve the psychosis
The "responsible” reporters will also see both sides of the confirmation of Robert Kennedy Jnr — there's the downside of having an anti-vaxxer in charge of, among other things, vaccinations. And there's the upside… whatever that is.
One of the oldest tropes of right-wing media is to claim that loads of rich people will be leaving the country if the right-wing party doesn't win the next election and they end up having to pay tax. With the confirmation of Kennedy (pictured inset), there will certainly be many Americans — or at least those who can afford to move permanently to another country — figuring that for them, it's game over.
Ireland might even get a few of these, maybe even top health professionals who know how dangerous this appointment will be for the health of the general population. Not to mention their own health.
There's a bird flu outbreak in the US at the moment, to which the Trump administration has responded by freezing the release of important studies on the virus — in Trumpworld, the science must always serve the psychosis.
We saw during Covid that Trump viewed the pandemic in the same way he views most things — it's all about messaging. So he'd say that it would blow over in a few weeks, because that was the message he wanted to impart, at that moment.
As for the effect such a completely made-up statement might have on the lives of those who believed him, that is really no concern of his.
People died needlessly due to Trump's belief that Covid could be cured by bullshit. Still, he couldn't quite stop the Dr Faucis of this world continuing to tell people what was going on — and he will not be making the same mistake this time. No health agency under Robert Kennedy Jnr will be making statements on bird flu or any other outbreaks that are not approved by the crack medical team at Mar-a-Lago.
Fox News won't be going off-message either — which raises the philosophical question: if a virus kills a million people, but the government says that that's just fake news, did it really happen at all?
Did Elon Musk's son just echo his father's words?
A four-year-old could see some of these things coming. Literally. Elon Musk's four-year-old son 'X' seems to show a heightened awareness of what's going on.
In the Oval Office with his father last week, he was heard to say to Trump: "You're not the president…”
Almost as if he'd heard Elon saying that same thing about the man who miraculously won seven swing states using Elon's… eh, expertise.
In other corrections and clarifications, we kept hearing criticism of how badly Trump was "negotiating” with Vladimir Putin — but he is not negotiating at all. It is more accurate to say he is collaborating, and he's doing it very well, upending the old world order.
Thank you for your service, America, and goodnight.
