The Sad But Unsurprising US Political Narrative: Ignoring and Whitewashing the End of the Rule of Law
Here is the headline of a story in The New York Times from July 4: "From Court to Congress to the Mideast, Trump Tallies His Wins." If one were searching for a perfect example of the absolutely blind insistence in the US on treating Donald Trump and his totalitarian regime just like we would treat any other US presidential administration, this headline would be in the running. The editor might as well have written: "Nothing new to see here, folks! Just wins and losses in the big game of American politics. And now a word from our sponsor." What exactly is so bad about that framing? It is not that Trump has suffered big policy or other losses, of course. He in fact has gotten his way in recent weeks and months on a depressingly large number of matters, across a range of policy and governmental controversies. No, the problem is that the notion of "tallying wins" evokes the idea of someone having engaged in spirited but genuinely ...