Trump news the third

[robkelk]

Opinion piece on CBC: The only skill needed to spin for Trump? A total lack of shame

Written by Andrew MacDougall, a past "director of communications" for Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

I find this bit the most plausible, and the most worrisome:

This is where Team Trump's total lack of shame is horribly — and deliberately — corrosive. They aren't there to engage in the healthy back-and-forth between government and the press. They're there to provoke the kind of hysterics that usually end up discrediting the media. And if they themselves are discredited in the process too, well, that's just the cost of doing business.

If this sounds incredibly inside-baseball: it is. But its effects will be felt right across the country. Trump was elected, in part, because of a deep dissatisfaction with the way politics was practiced. By dipping convention in acid they're erasing, not fixing or replacing, a troubled system.

But that's the point. Trump has never enjoyed being held to account. He knows the media are struggling financially and with perceptions of bias. Anything he can do to further their journey down the current trajectory will absolve him of needed scrutiny as he pushes deeper into his first term.

Without the ability to hold politicians to account, can one honestly say one is represented in politics? (I seem to recall something about "no taxation without representation" from ... somewhere.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012