How unhinged must Trump get to even matter? | Will Bunch Newsletter

The irony is now painful. For many years now, the artsy mountain resort city of Asheville, N.C. has been marketed to a growing retiree population as a “climate refuge,” a temperate inland fortress far from the potential killer hurricanes or extreme heat of rival destinations like Florida or Arizona. That equation didn’t figure on Hurricane Helene, which went from zero to Category 4 in a short jaunt over the overheated hot tub that is the Gulf of Mexico, then brought its destruction far inland. Will the tragic devastation in Asheville and surrounding towns make climate change an issue in the 2024 campaign? I’m not holding my breath.

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This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.

That’s how “The Purge,” an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.

And yet here was Donald Trump, ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge — treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake, everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a whupping from an all-powerful police state.

“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said, even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day” by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will be out. And it will end immediately...”

Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...

And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant — it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.

“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory as the pressures of the campaign mount?”

Tomasky and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and, most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s actually happening?

Trump also charged that Harris — the candidate who just trounced Trump in a nationally televised debate, according to 63% of the regular Americans who watched it — is “mentally impaired.” I know I sound ridiculous when I keep saying that I’m old enough to remember when the Howard Dean Scream or Gary Hart’s possible one-night stand were considered enough to end promising campaigns. But it’s much more ridiculous that Trump’s daily, career-ending comments get met with the America Shrug.

The simmering anger with the mainstream media’s Trump sanewashing is real, but it’s also about something much, much bigger. Trump’s increasing rage and extremism is, to many of us, the antithesis of how we see America. Yet poll after poll after poll continue to show that the Nov. 5 election is going to be a coin toss, with Trump backed by an immovable mountain of support, no matter what he says. There are still more books to be written on how we got here, but the current reality is that nearly 10 years of political Trump has created a toxic state of nihilism, the precursor to dictatorship.

The most dangerous myth is that Trump’s bizarre rants are nothing to worry about because they won’t lead to actual policies. Nothing could be more wrong. A potential Trump 47 might never impose a National Day of Violence, but he has pledged to expand legal protections for cops accused of brutality on the job, and threatened other Orwellian actions such as sending troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime. On immigration, Trump’s Hitlerian language is the precursor to his stated policy of mass deportation, which would turn America upside down with military call-ups, dead-of-night raids in immigrant communities, and mass detention camps.

That’s why America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally. The only “purge” that the nation needs is the one that rational and empathetic Americans can carry out through the ballot box and not at the end of a nightstick. This is not a test.

Question: Should states or districts receive infrastructure funding if their senators or reps vote against it? — Richard McGovern (@richardmcgovern) via X/Twitter

Answer: Ha, that is tempting, given the ridiculous number of Republicans who voted against President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and then released a press release hailing some road improvement or new sewage plant in their district that was funded by the measure they’d opposed. This week, we saw the similar phenomenon of Southern GOPers who’d just tried to shut down the federal government then pleading with Washington for federal hurricane disaster aid. The thing is, Biden and now Kamala Harris have run on the only idea that makes sense, that a president must serve all the people — even in the regions that voted overwhelmingly against them. Donald Trump promises nothing but revenge for those who oppose him. The choice could not be any more clear.

Newsletter readers were pretty close to unanimous in taking the position — which I happen to share — that despite Hezbollah’s long history of Middle East terrorism, the exploding pagers-and-walkie-talkie attack on the group’s members and some civilian bystanders by Israel was both a war crime and a dangerous escalation of tension in the region. “The booby-trapping of pagers as bombs to be set off remotely and regardless of who is carrying the device, and where, is textbook war crime,” wrote Ed Theurkauf. “The silence of our government (and media) in the face of indiscriminate IDF attacks on civilians, from Beirut to Gaza, incriminates all of us as well.”

📮This week’s question: I’m hoping local folks can come through here: City Council will be debating a new $1.55 billion arena from the 76ers’ billionaire owners that critics say would wreck the character of adjacent Chinatown. It is a good idea, or should the NBA team stay in a revamped South Philly sports complex? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Sixers arena” in the subject line.

A lot of the 67 million folks who watched the Sept. 10 presidential debate thought the best performers weren’t so much Donald Trump or even Kamala Harris but the ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis. That was because of their aggressive fact-checking of Trump’s lies, including the outrageous claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets. The ABC journalists held firm even after a post-debate wave of condemnation and attacks from the MAGA right who thought it was unfair that the moderators only singled out one candidate. This working of the refs did have an impact, however. CBS News, which is hosting Tuesday night’s debate between veep nominees Tim Walz and JD Vance, has already made it clear that its moderators — Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan — won’t be doing such fact checks, and it will be up to the candidates themselves to call out any lies.

CBS News officials who revealed that decision to the Associated Press insisted that a 20-person off-camera team of journalists will be fact-checking the candidates for an online blog in real time, with on-air reporting once the debate is over. OK, but it’s clear that real-time fact checks during the debate, while controversial, are also much more powerful for a nation of voters with short attention spans. There are real-world reasons why fact checking might be more important in this debate than usual. Republican Vance has stunned observers by not apologizing but doubling down on the campaign of lies about Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio with new false claims about communicable diseases and crime. CBS News just gave him a license to lie before his biggest audience of the campaign. Both commonsense and fairness demand that both Vance and Walz be scrutinized closely for the truth.

After years of decline at CBS, it’s almost become a cliche to write that its pioneers like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — truth-tellers in the face of controversies like McCarthyism and the Vietnam War — must be spinning in their graves at the cowardice of their successors. But the fact that leaders of such an iconic news outlet chose to dodge some right-wing pushback instead of standing up for truth is one of the more discouraging developments I’ve seen, especially for any hope that a strong media would be some kind of bulwark against the extremes of a Trump 47 presidency. CBS News has broken the first rule of fighting autocracy: Do not obey in advance.

Given that Donald Trump’s first and hopefully only presidency launched 1,000 books, it’s remarkable how much we still don’t know about what really went on during those four insane years. On this date five years ago, I wrote about the revelation that Team Trump had gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the substance of a phone call between Trump and Saudi Arabian strongman Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS. The call took place not long after MBS’ thugs murdered an American-based journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in October 2018. Today, we still don’t know what was discussed. Then, I wrote: “We need to get to the bottom of this sordid story, because if America is a nation where our leaders can look the other way on a journalist’s murder to get low gas prices on Election Day or for a few overpriced nights in Dear Leader’s hotel, then what in God’s name have we become?” Read the rest: “What is Trump trying to cover up about his Saudi phone calls and Jamal Khashoggi’s murder?”

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