The Trump Trap If you make everything about Donald Trump, as the press has for ten years, the simplest headlines quickly become tortured Matt Taibbi
https://www.racket.news/p/the-trump-trap
A brief note on headlines inspired by the Charlotte murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right” by the New York Times, and “How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing,” by CNN:
When you cover everything in the world through the lens of Donald Trump, and Trump must not only always be wrong but the avatar of ultimate evil, outlets like the Times and CNN are forced forever to find opposing angles to anything he criticizes. A horrific murder can’t just be that, but an “accelerant for conservative arguments about the perceived failings of Democratic policies.” CNN’s account was like the screenplay to Crash, about how “the paths of two people fatally converged,” culminating in an act “decried by the Trump administration and conservative politicians as an example of the violent crime they say plagues many Democrat-led cities.”
Forget about attacker Decarlos Brown’s mental health, these stories (and others, like the Axios report “Stabbing Fuels MAGA’s crime message” and Brian Stelter’s bizarre outburst about the reaction being “baldly racist”) show the press is in the grip of severe monomania and madness. Nothing exists outside of Trump, the subject of every line of every story. Incredible, and unsettling, to watch.
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