The challenge the press faces when covering Donald Trump is that his lies are so brazen and so frequent and so obviously disprovable, both the public and the press eventually get numb and conclude, "Well, that's just the way he is," and stop talking about them. Ditto his racism, misogyny, antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Case in point: Trump claims he is the more "pro-Israel" candidate and it's his opponents that are actually the antisemites. He has argued that Jewish Americans who vote Democratic hate both Israel and Judaism, saying that he and his Republican party are better placed to help end the Gaza war. Yet Barbara Res, a lead engineer on the construction of Trump Tower, relates an appalling story in her memoir, Tower of Lies.
“We had just hired a residential manager, a German guy,” she writes, “And Donald [Trump] was bragging among – to us executives, there were four of us – about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman, and he was so neat and clean. And he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘Watch out for this guy – he sort of remembers the ovens,’ you know, and then smiled."
“Everybody was shocked,” she went on. “I couldn’t believe he said that. But he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people, and that’s the way he was.”
A man without shame, a man without morals, a man who thinks it's "funny" to invoke the Holocaust to Jewish executives meeting a new German counterpart.
Outrage over this story will last a couple of days and then it will be forgotten as attention moves on to Trump's next lie, his next outrageously racist or antisemitic or authoritarian remark. And then we'll all move on from there.
I remember a time in the not-so-distant past when a single remark like that would be enough to cause a politician to resign or drop out of a race. But a man without shame or any sense of conscience shrugs it off, doubles down on his offensiveness, and moves on, and the press just follows along.
No comments:
Post a Comment