And In the Fake News… Pt 2

“The press, honestly, is out of control… I see stories of chaos – chaos – and yet it is the exact opposite… It’s all fake news, It’s all fake news… Russia is fake news… I do get good ratings… that’s how I won, I won with news conferences and probably speeches, I certainly didn’t win with people listening to you people, that’s for sure. Tomorrow they’ll say ‘Donald Trump rants and raves at the press,’ I’m not ranting and raving, I’m just telling you, you’re dishonest people… this is a fine tuned machine.”

I could go on, with quotes from Donald Trump at his latest press conference, but I don’t think I need to. A lot of what he said was similar to the above, interspersed with (when he decided to actually answer a question instead of talking over the journalist asking it) reassurances over Russia and the preserving of the relationship with Putin in order to prevent ‘nuclear holocaust’.

To be absolutely frank, I haven’t the vaguest clue what to say. We have spent so much time going over and over Trump and his ludicrous behaviour, words no longer describe quite how astonished I am. Instead, it may be more useful to describe some feelings that reflect the discomfort in the pit of my stomach as I watched the press conference:

-The feeling you get when you go to get your phone out of your bag/pocket and it’s not where you expect it to be.
-The feeling you get when you’ve looked forward to some food you’ve been saving, and you open the fridge and it’s gone.
-The feeling you get when you can’t find the right song to listen to, and you’re not sure what you’re in the mood for, and it’s really uncomfortable and frustrating.
-The feeling you get when you’re intensely bored watching a film but you want to see what happens and can’t bring yourself to turn it off even though you’re hating every second.

In short, I wasn’t very happy. As I have mentioned before, I feel it totally contrary to the cause when we give publicity to those who say or do shocking things in order to evoke public response. However when that person also happens to be the President of the United States, it becomes incredibly difficult to ignore. The news is beginning to feel like a parody of itself, and Trump is managing, through some spectacular feat of stupidity, to satirise himself. It’s as though he is trying to act more and more like an exaggerated version of himself each time he appears in front of the press. It’s maddening to see him babbling on in the style of a man who has been asked to speak publicly about something which he knows little about except that he hates it (perhaps less of a style and more like simply the case), and be unable to do anything about it. Another four years of the news looking like the highlights from a Ricky Gervais sitcom and I will go absolutely insane.

The answer is probably to meet Trump’s idiocy with firm and persistent argument for common sense, but how long anyone can maintain that, I don’t know. My own opinions and dreams of progressive politics are spiralling into wails and fits of hysteria, but luckily I don’t have to deal with Trump directly. There are people stronger than I am who are working behind the scenes to limit the damage Trump can do, and judging by his ongoing behaviour, their job won’t be getting any easier.