What if he really, really didn’t like, randomly, some other profession. Economists, say.
Oh, wait. Donald Trump has it in, big-time, for our nation’s biggest economist, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve. Who he appointed to the job.
But now, “Powell’s termination cannot come soon enough!” as the president wrote on his social media site in April. Smart national leaders who understand economics as well as politics don’t mess with the central bank. We are not blessed with such a leader.
But to lie to the chief economist on camera, while touring a construction project, lie so baldly that all the chairman had to do was pull his reading glasses from his vest pocket when presented with a lie about supposed extra billions of dollars in current cost overruns to a Fed construction project. Powell rolled his eyes. “That building was built five years ago,” he said, properly handing the paper with the lie back to the president. Talk about fake news.
OK, some other profession. Gardeners … Wait. Let’s not go there.
Let’s go to the simple fact that after a career of making his bones by cozying up to the press in New York City, of being so desperate for ink that he would call up reporters and pretend to be a PR man with a hot tip about that hot developer Donald Trump, well … we elected a man, twice, who is a congenital liar, and let’s just say that this is hardly unprecedented in American presidents, from LBJ to RMN, and that says something not so good about gullible us.
But his biggest ongoing congenital lie about a profession that got him where he is in life is that the news media is the enemy of the people. And we in the press need to continue to call him out on that lie, and we will, even when the people who own us, the corporations who find it in their best interest to kowtow to him, from Paramount, which owns CBS, and so paid Trump $16 million over a weird edit in a promo for “60 Minutes” that the president didn’t like in order to get his lackeys to approve an $8 billion merger with Skydance, to Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, spiking an endorsement of Joe Biden because he wants to make nice with a guy who had once threatened to raise postal rates for his much bigger business, Amazon.
To see how well that kind of gladhanding will work out for them in the long run, the Bezoses and Mark Zuckerbergs of this world need look no further than the president’s relationship with Rupert Murdoch, his longtime friend, now apparent frenemy. When the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is the conservative standard-bearer in the national press, ran a straight news article about a previously unknown “bawdy” letter it said Trump sent disgraced financier Jeffery Epstein, Trump didn’t just push back. He sued the Journal, and Murdoch personally — for $20 billion.
That’s not going to work out. So, instead, the anti-press White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump will stop the Journal from covering an overseas trip this weekend. “Thirteen diverse outlets will participate in the press pool to cover the president’s trip to Scotland,” Leavitt said. “Due to The Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the 13 outlets on board.”
The only thing to be done in the face of such flummery is to carry on, with brio. It’s all we can do.
A Paramount-owned network can cancel Colbert, as it did during its campaign for the merger, and, joyfully, Colbert can respond with wit and dignity. And the thing that really can give us hope in a nation whose First Amendment still guarantees the absolute freedom of the press is when creators really push back, hilariously.
When you make a network lots of money, as Paramount’s satirical animated show “South Park” does, you can get away with speaking truth to power.
In the opening episode of its 27th season this week, “South Park” showed Trump in bed with Satan, as they discuss the Epstein list. “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax,” the devil tells the president. Life is short. Art is long. The truth, one of these days, will triumph over the lies.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.