The Incredible, Missing ‘C’ Word

There’s a scene from a classic-era “Simpsons” episode where an accountant confronts his client, Krusty the Clown, TV entertainer and gambling addict. “Let me get this straight,” he says. “You took all the money you made franchising your name and bet it against the Harlem Globetrotters?” Krusty protests, invoking the name of the team he doesn’t know is scripted to lose every game, “I thought the Generals were due!” 

The scene cuts to a flashback of Krusty watching the game. “He’s spinning the ball on his finger!” he screams at a General on TV. “Just take it! Take it!”

Which, grimly enough, presents a neat picture of how the media is engaging with the criminality of the second Trump administration. Donald Trump is holding out an absolute gimme, on every issue. Take one. Take any. Take literally anything, except another four years off from responsibility.

This analogy is more than a little unfair to the Globetrotters. Each member of the team is a genuinely gifted athlete, doing things 99% of mortals can’t, whereas Trump is maybe history’s biggest idiot. What joins them is an equivalent lack of interest in pretending that anything they’re doing in full view of everybody isn’t against the rules.

We cannot know until the end of each day how many court orders the Trump administration is violating, but they are doing it, and it is illegal. Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency continue to impound funds that have been allocated by Congress to various executive agencies, which is illegal. They continue to fire members of the executive branch in violation of federal labor law, which is illegal. They view records to which they have no rightful access, which is illegal. They flout records laws to transfer, store or destroy information they have no right to access, let alone transfer, store or destroy, all of which is illegal.

Trump daily uses the power of the executive branch to coerce compliance, which is extortion, which is a crime. That he does this to lawyers — any of whom you could call and from whom you could receive the answer “yes” to the question, “Is this explicitly a crime?” — does not give the media sufficient courage to describe this as plainly criminal activity. 

The Trump administration is abducting lawful residents, which is kidnapping, which is a crime. They then traffic those abductees to foreign states, which is also a crime. They do so not in spite of, but because they know that the abductees are being sent to a concentration camp renowned for torture and other human rights violations, which is yet another crime. They then perjure themselves before the court, pretend not to know where those people are or to have an ability to return them to the United States, where they lawfully reside, which the Supreme Court has decided is not a crime. That’s nice for the Supreme Court — a conservative super-legislature neither bound to history nor to the precedents of their own diseased and corrupt reading of it — but if any of its activist Republican members told you they had ruled that a donkey was a duck, you would tell them to kiss your ass. Nobody has to play their game.

The legacy media has spent over a decade invoking the First Amendment every time college students express displeasure over spending their tuition dollars on speaking fees for acknowledged Nazis, and freely labeled those students as censorious, perhaps criminal and perhaps themselves the real Nazis. (That the media is also incapable of conceptualizing Nazism as a settled issue represents a higher-order form of the same auto-lobotomy.) Yet that freedom to label fails them when the Trump administration withholds funds as punishment for colleges’ toleration of suddenly anathematized views. That this sort of viewpoint discrimination violates the First Amendment somehow does not result in clearly labeling the violations for what they are. 

This list could go on and on, and it would doubtless leave something out. We don’t have the space to list every Trump appointee who is manifestly corrupt, which is a crime. If you printed out on a ticker tape all the crimes the Trump administration is currently committing, the rate at which the paper rolled out of the device would break the sound barrier. It would be a time saver to single out the things that it’s doing that are not criminal. Every first mention of Trump’s name in any article or report could begin with the wholly accurate and incredibly informatively descriptive appositive phrase, “A 34-time convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist and fraud,” yet you will begin seeing that sometime after the Fifth of Never.

Here we could have a very undergraduate-sounding discussion about manufacturing consent and Overton Windows. We could use academic framing to discuss this issue, to elevate it to something that sounds more like the scientific part of social science rather than the unequivocal reality of two and two adding up to four. But at some point, this obscures the appalling simplicity of the process. What you are seeing every time the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN or the Atlantic refuses to describe crime as crime is a denial. It is not only a denial of plain truth and a denial of the responsibility to inform their readers and viewers, it is a denial of permission to understand — an institutional disavowal of the ability to know things. 

The truth is there. It’s spinning on Trump’s tiny finger, right in front of your face. Just take it! Take it and run with it! Given that an informed citizenry is necessary to the function of a representative democracy, this isn’t a niggling issue. The parties’ respective branding colors do not mean that, when a Democrat says the sky is blue, it must be red to all Republicans, even if the latter intend to pump the air with enough coal smoke to make it so. When journalists needlessly obscure a self-evident crime by countering it with a quote from L. Brent Bozo VII at the Institute for Factual Freedom saying, “When the president crimes, it becomes law, and the Federalist Society says it’s a 10th century Anglo-Saxon precedent called Crimelaw,” the only result is the degradation of meaning on the road to the devastation of community, shared reality and life itself.

Each time the media declines to describe the most criminal administration in American history as criminals engaging in criminal conduct, what you are seeing is an editorial policy enforced from on high, and what that policy represents is a disgusting abdication of responsibility and a contempt for the truth. That policy is this: Our commitment to you is to produce fearless, first-rate and factual reporting that we, as an institution, will not endorse. Everyone can rely on our reporting but ourselves, because to draw an inference from what we attest is an objective accounting would be irresponsible. Just because it’s true doesn’t mean we can act like it is. There can be no acts with consequences, no actors who bear blame.

Because — aside from the wholesale destruction of the United States — that’s the most brutal insult there is. How can you tell that the media is abandoning not only the First Amendment but their pledge to be the first draft of history? You can read it in the paper.