Eugene Robinson: Expect a summer of discontent from Trump

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

George W. Bush once said that to get a message across you had to repeat it over and over, “to kind of catapult the propaganda.” Donald Trump must have been paying attention.

I predict this will be a summer of nonstop, shameless propaganda from Trump and his minions. It will be clumsy, ridiculous and pathetic; but don’t ignore it. Call it out. Laugh at it. Recognize it for what it is: a sign not of strength but of fear.

Last week, in the White House, we saw a spectacle that would have embarrassed even Trump’s cult-of-personality role model, Kim Jong Un. Trump was announcing $16 billion in effective welfare payments to farmers whose livelihood is threatened by his ill-advised trade war with China. As usual, the president went off-script. The assembled farmers must’ve been puzzled as he went into a diatribe about press reports saying he had been irate the day before, when he had stalked out of a meeting with congressional leaders that was supposed to be about infrastructure.

He had been perfectly calm, Trump claimed. Then, one by one, he called on aides to attest that he had indeed been serene and unruffled — counselor Kellyanne Conway, communications aide Mercedes Schlapp, economic adviser Larry Kudlow, press secretary Sarah Sanders. Oh yes, Mr. President, you were sooooo calm and collected, they told him. I was afraid one of them might call him “Dear Leader.” Even deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, who hadn’t even attended the meeting in question, was forced to chime in; he dutifully offered his measure of fawning praise.

Perhaps, in its long history, the White House has witnessed a similar display of toadying, but I can’t think of when. The men and women in that room once had reputations and self-respect. Now they have only Trump.

Later that evening, the president retweeted a highly edited video clip from a news conference by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, intended to suggest that she was having trouble putting words together. Another clip making the rounds on social media had been slowed and distorted, intended to make it appear that Pelosi — who is not a drinker — was drunk.

This appears to be the propaganda line about Pelosi, that she’s no longer sharp, that she’s lost it. In fact, Pelosi has been both lucid and devastating, saying last week that she prays for Trump and suggesting that his family or staff perform an intervention.

-more-

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/robinson-expect-a-summer-of-discontent-from-trump/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=1332320bba-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-1332320bba-228635337

[trev]

1. "George W. Bush once said that to get a message across you had to repeat it over and over"

Hm. Goebbels said the exact same thing, in the same words.