Like some fellow citizens, I still watch TV news, usually the local Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) and some guys on CNN, like Don Lemon or Anderson Cooper. They seem like fairly reliable sources, though you can certainly quibble with their choice of news and the emphasis they give to various issues.
Which provokes the question: Why the constant TV coverage of Donald Trump? Why videos of every rant that he presents?Usually when somebody loses the presidential campaign, he goes off into solitude and gets ignored. Even when they win two elections, as both George Bush and Barack Obama did, the ex-president goes quiet for a respectable amount of time. After George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter lost their elections, they also went fairly silent and were fairly ignored, except maybe when Jimmy was sometimes hammering out Habitats for Humanity.
Not that we don’t hear from ex-presidents, as they still appear in speaking engagements and are interviewed by news people. (As my esteemed colleague J.P. Bone has noted, Bill Clinton spoke in San Francisco, for a modest fee of $100,000 not long after concluding his second term. But this appearance was not touted as important national news.)
So why is it, that every time Trump hauls his bloated carcass onto a stage and repeats the same nonsense he’s been blathering out for the past 6 years, anybody thinks it’s worthy of coverage? He has not announced that he is running for office. He has not presented anything that indicates a change in his thinking. He hugs candidates that he has endorsed—a fairly common gesture. Is any of this worth the attention of the media? Is anything remarkable or original or exciting being said? Clearly not. Therefore, is it actually “newsworthy”? No.
Now if he got up there and explained in detail, for example, his allegedly crazed behavior in the presidential limo when they hauled him back to the White House after he stirred up the masses on January 6—well, now, that would be newsworthy.
In view of these circumstances, I propose a moratorium on attention to Donald Trump. His rants to his disciples are not new—and simply not news. Let the media pay some attention to more interesting phenomena, be it hideous weather or interesting sports developments or an unusual Republican who has the guts to refute this reactionary windbag: A guy who attempted to overthrow the elected president and install himself—and who has whined about this experience for almost two years.
