Aesthetics are very important to Donald Trump.
That’s not to be mistaken with taste or a sense of proportion, of which he possesses neither.
He’s an enemy of art.
Much of Trump’s self-esteem derives from his sense of power over others.
He is deeply misogynistic; any woman who doesn’t immediately respond to his overtures or outright aggression becomes a subject of ridicule and belittlement.
He also has two very defined types: big-haired blondes and ‘smart and sexy looking’ brunettes.
He would micromanage how women appeared on ‘The Apprentice’ and at the Trump Organization.
At the White House, Trump insisted that female staffers ‘dress like women’ (that they wear skirts or dresses), at least the ones young enough to elicit Trump’s attention.
He has a ‘uniform’ that he approves of, as women have always been a commodity to Donald Trump.
The optics of CNN’s debacle are key to understanding why it was such a win for MAGA - and a disservice to the American public.
Not to mention an affront to journalistic ethics and morality.
A cynical money-grab to get viewers, by an embattled network head with abysmal ratings and uncertain job security, fed back to us by their star anchors in a sanctimonious rebuttal after the viewing public became irate.
CNN handed Trump a giant victory then patted themselves on the back and mocked our pain and frustration.
As a nation, we overdosed on trauma this past week.
It began with the sharing of videos and images of murdered shoppers at a Texas mall.
As gory and as gruesome as it gets; the fact that it included images of children made it the sort of thing you may never wash from your memory.
The week ended with the uproar and fallout from Trump’s ‘Town Hall’ which in essence was a seventy minute MAGA rally, replete with an audience of ‘deplorables’ laughing and cheering at his mockery of one of his dozens, if not hundreds, of sexual assault victims.
I know women he has attacked. Trump is a despicable and violent man: the fact that a large portion of our population still chooses to cheer for him says more about the United States than many of us would probably care to examine.
CNN’s Kaitlin Collins began the prime time show, that, again, amounted to a Trump campaign commercial, by saying there were no ‘pre-conditions’.
Then immediately started calling Donald ‘Mr. President,’ an honorific reserved only for those currently in office. And then immediately continued the broadcast by indulging his delusional fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Is it any wonder Trump spent the next hour or so trying to cement that claim in the hearts and minds of the misguided and malicious who are so inexorably drawn to him?
Collins was obviously outmatched, in over her head and seemed to wilt under Trump’s constant barrage of lies and conspiracy theories. She did her best to point out his glaring rewrite of history and the facts surrounding the January 6th insurrection - that he himself had ordered.
It soon became a lost cause though. Collins fell woefully short in failing to pushback on second amendment gun-rights’ falsehoods.
Trump said there were 700 million firearms in the US which is incorrect. The number now stands at about 400 millions guns, for roughly 330 million Americans, which in and of itself in completely insane.
When it gets to 700 million (God forbid) you won’t want to leave your home.
It would have been nice to have a moderator who pointed out these facts.
Collins also let his claims that, ‘Democrats execute babies’ go unchecked but at that point the ‘Town Hall’ was already completely off the rails.
Had it been a prize fight the referee would have called it for Trump by TKO.
Precisely the opposite of what America needs right now.
Especially with the debt ceiling limit looming - and the GOP’s willingness to not raise the ceiling unless President Biden agrees to cut veterans’ benefits and social services. These demands by the Republicans are, of course, to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that Trump enacted.
I was screaming at my TV, ’They raised the debt ceiling three times under Trump! Say THAT to him Kaitlin!’.
But alas, journalistic malpractice seems to be a side effect of CNN chairman Chris Licht’s desire to move the network farther to the right.
A dubious endeavor indeed and likely one that CNN achieved on Wednesday night.
Stir in what Elon Musk has done to Twitter overall and the fact that Tucker Carlson will soon be broadcasting his show live, exclusively, on the now caustic social media platform - and you get a news landscape that is gonna look much different, and much more pro-fascist, than we’ve ever seen for the 2024 presidential election.
The billionaires and corporate interests that are promoting this new era of right wing extremism are going all in on autocracy.
I hope more and more Americans begin to realize this sad and shocking fact soon and prepare accordingly.
We need to vote in numbers that are undeniable if we want to elect another Democratic president in our lifetime.
If we allow Trump to assume office again we won’t be getting it back again.
Ever.
Another effect of CNN’s traumatic ‘Town Hall’ was to effectively push the Allen, Texas mass shooting out of the headlines - and most importantly for the GOP - the inconvenient facts we learned two days after it, that the killer was festooned with Nazi tattoos and a Proud Boys’ ‘RWDS’ patch.
Effectively overturning the narrative that folks like MTG and Rep. Keith Self (R-TX-3) had attempted to push in the immediate aftermath of the shooting - that the killer was ‘Hispanic and had gang tattoos,’ and this massacre could somehow be laid at the feet of their perpetual and xenophobic ‘border crisis’ narrative.
The same Proud Boys whose leadership was (just last week) convicted of helping Trump in his failed coup d’etat on January 6th, 2021.
The kind of person who would buy an AR-15 is not gonna become less enamored of his weapon by seeing the images of gun violence casualties.
He would be titillated by it because he sees himself as a soldier in an army being summoned by the dark rhetoric and lies of the far right and white supremacist movement - that Trump and the GOP have not just embraced but in many cases created.
I think that is what otherwise well-meaning folks on the left failed to see when they shared images of the carnage on Twitter last weekend.
It only increased the trauma over an already overwhelming horror.
CNN effectively poured fuel on that dynamic Wednesday night and they should not be soon forgiven, if ever. (Full disclosure: I worked on the ‘CNN Heroes’ broadcast from its inception until 2018).
We need to state clearly that if you continue to vote for GOP politicians you are aligning yourself against freedom and democracy and working against the principles previous generations of Americans fought to protect.
There’s nothing patriotic about supporting the Republican Party; most who now do may not realize that because they have been bombarded with messaging from some very crafty and well-funded special interests.
They’ve been hoodwinked with scare tactics about Democrats ‘coming for your guns’ or for the even more ignorant among them, ‘drag queens are grooming your children’.
Rhetoric so silly it wouldn’t play for a minute in most of our peer nations.
But given the amount of ass-backward, openly racist ‘Christians’ in America, and most prominently in the GOP, the hate and vitriol has spread like a wildfire.
It’s sad and pathetic and calls for some deep soul-searching as to who we are and who we want to become as a nation.
I no longer watch CNN as of the “town hall”. They arr owned by Warner bros. Btw.
I'm shell shocked from all these shooting and horrific images. Afraid to put the news on because of what I"ll hear or see. I turned CNN off when Kaitlin called him Mr. president. I literally felt sick to my stomache. CNN use to be a respectabtable channel and source of real news. How is trump walking around free and running for President?? It blows my mind. Thank you Noel for what you do.