Did you hear the latest outrageous statement Donald Trump made about the faux Arizona election recount?
Yea, me neither.
If you believe the news media, though, we should be listening to every word he says. After all, he is still in control of the Republican Party. Worse, he’s leading an assault on our democracy.
Even Tom Friedman for whom I have great respect is urging all of us to pay attention to what is happening: “America’s democracy is still in real danger. In fact, we are closer to a political civil war — more than at any other time in our modern history.”
To hear Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddow talk, and I like both of them, too, you’d think Trump is still president given the threat his control of Republicans is posing to the country.
I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I think somebody needs to break the news to the American media that what they say may happen in the future already has.
Donald Trump took control of the Republican Party when he won the nomination for president, and he immediately began his assault on our democracy when he started naming people who were either corrupt or incompetent, or both, for his cabinet.
He intensified his assault on our democracy when he politicized the Justice Department, when he told his staff to ignore House Oversight Committee subpoenas, when he sought foreign help in the 2020 election, when he lied about everything every day of his presidency.
He went so far as to inspire an insurrection that resulted in an attack on our nation’s Capitol in an effort to overthrown the certification of the Electoral College vote.
So when I read about the danger Trump’s control over the Republican Party is posing I keep experiencing whiplash. The media is writing and telling us old news as if it is new.
In the process they are missing the real story that deserves more attention than they are giving it.
Our democracy survived the Trump assault.
He lost, we won, and by a huge margin, huge. Republicans also lost control of the Senate, and they failed to win back control of the House they lost in 2018. And just as important, the courts proved their independence from political pressure.
By all measures our democracy came through the existential threat Trump posed pretty well.
What is more, if Republicans at the state level keep doing what they are doing right now, I predict they will also suffer similar losses.
Indeed, if the sky is falling as the media wants us to believe, I would argue it is falling on the heads of Republicans.
That raises the question, “Why should I care?”
Because we need a strong two-party system? The answer is no, we need a multi-party system, but in lieu of that we already have a strong two-party system.
The fact that one has gone off the deep end doesn’t change the fact that the GOP still exists and in its current state will continue to be a threat to our democracy for one obvious reason, they don’t believe in it.
But there is only one thing we can actually do about that.
Exactly what President Joe Biden is doing – his job. And what a job he is doing.
We are close to defeating the pandemic, jobs are being created and unemployment is going down, businesses are opening, the U.S. is leading discussions on climate change again, allies have welcomed us back as reliable friends, and the mood in the country is improving dramatically.
All of this without a single Republican vote of support in the Congress. Not one.
President Biden has turned presidential news from negative to positive. And guess what.
The American people like it. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe the nation is headed in the right direction (ABC News/Ipsos poll).
That, I suggest, is the real news of the day given what we went through for four years and it should be what the media is talking about.
The reason it isn’t is because Joe Biden is doing something the media has yet to understand.
That after four years of Donald Trump, the old news adage, “Nobody wants to read about the dog that didn’t run away,” has itself become old news.
As President, Joe Biden is proving that we Americans have heard as much about the dog that ran away as we can take and are ready for some news about the dog that stayed home.
It’s time the news media catches up to the changing times.
linnposts.com 