Trump Tragedy Album

Psychiatrists warn Trump's psychosis will grow "as he becomes more desperate.

Trump's behavior is worse now but that's only because we're seeing a peeling away of his façade.

Donald Trump, the traitor ex-president who attempted a coup on Jan. 6, a confirmed sex predator, an indicted felon who has been arrested for his alleged crimes, a white supremacist, an enemy of democracy and the humane society, a man who behaves as though he is a sociopath if not a full-on psychopath, a criminal mastermind.

While too many among the American news media have convinced themselves – incorrectly – that repeatedly listing Trump's many crimes and other horrible behavior is "counter-productive" and "unnecessary" because "everyone knows it already," it remains critically important to continue to do so. Why? One of the main ways that fascism and authoritarianism and other anti-democracy movements take hold in a society is through normalization.

In total, the mainstream news media, political class, and the American people have, for various reasons, become largely numb to the aberrant, anti-human and generally pathological behavior of Donald Trump and the larger Republican fascist and MAGA movement. Moreover, in the case of the mainstream news media (see CNN's recent Trump "town hall" special), as an institution it has largely decided that Donald Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign and legions of MAGAites are too good for business to be condemned and then subsequently treated as the existential threat to American democracy they actually are.

As such, the denial, normalization, hope-peddling and wish-casting and the other obsolete and dangerous habits and norms (bothsidesism, fairness, neutrality, balance, objectivity, access journalism, etc.) that helped to normalize Donald Trump in 2016 are being committed again.

To make these errors again, after seven years of experience, is a choice.

John Lopker | Popular USA Majority

John Lopker