White House is new “Twilight Zone’
“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!” –
Rod Serling,creator of The Twilight Zone
When I was growing up, every kid I knew loved the Twilight Zone.
Why?
Well, er, we were kids.
And the kids of the 1950s and 1960s found it easy to escape the brewing Cold War, by seeking refuge in those surreal weekly dramas.
Our president of the United States must’ve been a real big fan of The Twilight Zone.
He recreates it daily.
The late Mr. Serling would be proud.
Mr. Trump’s complete disregard for hard facts that cannot be found anywhere in the natural world, is becoming increasingly problematic.
What had been the source of daily head-scratching during his presidential campaign, has now lit the entire 24-hour news cycle on fire.
There’s hardly a day that passes when one of The Donald’s whoppers passes muster.
Whenever fact-checkers (a growing army of them) find proof that one of his tall tales has been conjured up from his “wondrous land of imagination,” he launches into a vicious attack against the “dishonest media.”
President Trump doesn’t understand that serious discussions about the issues of the day require nuance, not bulldozers.
When he makes one of his frequent efforts to justify his travel ban, he claims that the media just isn’t paying enough attention to worldwide terrorism.
“And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that,” he told a group of assembled service-members in Florida last Monday.
The following day, Trump’s press secretary released a list of 78 “major” (my quotation marks) terrorist attacks that supposedly didn’t get adequate media attention.
Enter the fact-checkers.
Politifact.com’s fact-checkers sifted through that list. “We found that the media reported on every one of the incidents in some fashion, except an alleged October 2015 nondeadly attack in Egypt,” it concluded.
That’s one missed act of terrorism out of 78.
Trump’s attack had contained a tiny nugget of truth, buried under a Mt. Everest-sized fiction.
Those of us who’ve grown accustomed to the Trump White House spinning yarns took particular delight in Trump’s White House counselor Kellyanne Conway – with her breathless pronouncement of a “Bowling Green Massacre.” (once again, my quotation marks)
That became a two-day swan dive into the collective minds of a Trump administration that had somehow stitched together a “massacre” out of whole cloth.
When pressed for an explanation, Conway said that the word “massacre” had been a slip of the tongue. Her tongue, by the way, had slipped the exact same ways when she was interviewed by TMZ and Cosmopolitan Magazine.
But this isn’t about mere tongue-slippage. It’s about out-and-out lies.
It’s “a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mindlessness.”
Last Tuesday, surrounded by a group of the nation’s sheriffs, Trump repeated one of the completely debunked fictions that he pushed during his presidential campaign. He claimed that the nation’s murder rate is higher than it’s been in decades.
“I’d say that in a speech and everybody was surprised because the press doesn’t tell it like it is,” Trump said. Then he added (for effect, no doubt), “It wasn’t to their advantage to say that. The murder rate is the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years.”
No, it isn’t!
Not even close.
According to the FBI, the murder rate in the US has steadily declined since the early 1990s.
There was been a slight spike in the murder rate in 2015 (to 4.9 per 100,000 people), but that’s much lower than it was in 1980, when there were 10.2 murders per 100,000 people.
What does all of this mean?
That Trump seems to be allergic to the truth.
And that whenever he does encounter the truth, say, that he has lousy job approval numbers, he’s sure to call those polls nothing but “fake news.”
He’s surely “traveling through another dimension.”
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net