Trump & Co. Put Out a Call for Plumbers (for leaks)- Moyers
Trump & Co. Put Out a Call for Plumbers
With so many leaks in the White House and no one to stop them, the Trump administration and the right-wing media are stepping up attacks on the "fake news" mainstream media and whistleblowers.
By Todd Gitlin | May 22, 2017
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As the firestorm over FBI Director James Comey’s firing reached blast-furnace temperatures, enter poor Sean Spicer to reinforce the theme that the “enemy of the people” has been missing the real story: “that our national security has been undermined by the leaking of private and highly classified conversations.” At the same time, according to The New York Times, Fox News hosts were airing “stories about the Clintons’ charitable foundation — the Fox News equivalent of a greatest hits reel.”
A topic of heated dinner-party discussions these days is whether Trump’s eruptions are (1) uncontrollable outbursts, (2) arousal calls to his base or (3) a strategic attempt to cow his enemies. This is a close question. In varying measures, all three might be true, though I lean to (1) and (2). Intention doesn’t matter much. (It’s not clear that Trump is capable of holding on to what in other people might be called “intentions” for more than 30 seconds.) The fury of the obsession is what counts. You don’t have to go full Freudian to understand that the fixation is a clue to the mentality of the fixer — his fears and his animus.
In the bunkers of paranoid regimes, it’s a rule of thumb that the enemy always lurks. Paired with that one is a second: that the enemy would be lost without a fifth column. This term has become a staple of the right. In a superficially architectural reference, Trump knowingly alluded to it in his remarks to the CIA in Langley on Jan. 23, saying: “We won’t have columns. You understand that? We get rid of the columns.”
Columns, columns everywhere. No wonder Trump and his drum-beaters are agitated. Indeed, Trump and his Vortex loyalists have tracked the fifth column to the interior of the swamp: “the low-life leakers.”
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Meanwhile, Trump’s hard-core supporters are said to be hanging tough, tuning out Comey’s firing. For them, cognitive dissonance meets feel-good, and they have more urgent concerns. What, them worry? This from the AP:
“I tuned it [the Comey matter] out,” said 44-year-old Michele Velardi, a mother of three sons, during a break from her job at a Staten Island hair salon. “I didn’t want to be depressed. I don’t want to feel that he’s not doing what he said, so I just choose to not listen.”
But Trump’s handlers need, from a critical mass of their followers, more than a tune-out. They need a rally. Toward that end, they need an alt-narrative, a story of their own to make sense of the unpleasantness that gathers around them. The explanation of first resort is that the “very, very dishonest press,” and its fifth column allies, are pumping them full of toxic untruth.
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http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-co-put-out-call-plumbers/
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