See Link at bottom of posting

Pundit #1

Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times column, noted that the President is even turning on his own appointees who do not agree with him about the election results. She wrote, “The Republican establishment, and also the conservative establishment, has always made this bet that it could open Pandora’s box and close it on command,” Rick Perlstein, a historian of American conservatism, told me. They could activate tribalism to achieve power, while maintaining a modicum of respectability. They could create an alternative reality but keep people enclosed within it. But with Trump “having pried Pandora’s box open, that becomes impossible,” Perlstein said. Republicans helped Trump unleash countless civic evils. They shouldn’t be surprised when those evils don’t spare them.

Pundit #2

Back in the 1950s, Joseph Welch, the government’s counsel in the hearings investigating the late Senator Joe McCarthy’s accusations, challenged him by asking, “Sir, do you have no decency?” A recent USA Today editorial asked that same question of those in Congress who still support the President, who refuses to accept the election’s results and accelerates his acts, intentionally damaging the country he leaves to his successor.

(We suspect that Donald Trump has no decency … but what about most Republicans? More and more of the blame for our economic and health care crisis belongs with the Republicans in Congress, and specifically Mitch McConnell, rather than exclusively with Donald Trump. JL)

Pundit #3

In a recent column, the New York Times’ David Brooks writes about the necessity for a Covid19 relief measure now. “If McConnell won’t do a deal now, in the midst of a clear crisis and under a Republican president, there certainly won’t be one with more controversial issues under a Democratic president in 2021. If we don’t see a Covid19 relief measure pass in the next week or two, then our democracy is existentially broken.

If that happens, McConnell should spend Christmas with people thrown out of work and witness the suffering he has caused.

Pundit #4

From the December 7, 2020 issue of the New Yorker magazine, here is the comment, from “The Talk of the Town,” by that publication’s distinguished editor, David Remnick. That is about as close as the New Yorker gets to publishing an editorial. It is well worth reading.

The Cost of Trump’s Assault on the Press and the Truth

The President is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the election. But he will continue his eﬀorts to build an alternative reality around himself.

By David Remnick

November 29, 2020

Presidents have always complained about the press. At awards ceremonies and journalism-school conferences, Thomas Jefferson is often remembered for his principled support: in 1787, he wrote to the Virginia statesman Edward Carrington, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Yet, by 1814, having endured the Presidency, Jefferson was not quite as high-minded, whining by post to a former congressman about “the putrid state” of newspapers and “the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them.”

You could hardly blame him. How would you like to read that one of John Adams’s surrogates has branded you a “mean-spirited, low-lived fellow”? No President escapes scrutiny or invective. In 1864, Harper’s listed the many epithets that the Northern press had hurled at Abraham Lincoln: Filthy Story-Teller, Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, Monster, Ignoramus, Scoundrel, Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Fiend, Butcher, Ape, Demon, Beast, Baboon, Gorilla, Imbecile.

Donald Trump began his career convinced that reporters, once exposed to his myriad charms, would be willing stenographers of his story. He learned to elevate himself, his brand, and his interests largely by supplying the New York tabloids with a ready-made character, a strutting snake-oil salesman who provided an unending stream of gossip-page items about his personal and commercial exploits. It was of little concern to anyone that these items were, in the main, preposterous. Occasionally, investigative reporters, profile writers, and the courts would look more deeply into Trump’s swindles and business bankruptcies, but, as long as he skirted total ruin, he seemed to think that even his bad press added to his allure.

Trump’s relationship with reporters inevitably changed when he shifted his occupation to the command of the federal government. First as a candidate, and then in the early days of his Presidency, he discovered that the press was a variegated beast; Cindy Adams and Maggie Haberman were not of the same stuff. He could still depend on toadying support from some quarters, particularly the editorial holdings of Rupert Murdoch and emerging properties like Breitbart and Newsmax; however, he was now getting a more scrupulous going-over from what Sarah Palin had called “the lamestream media.” Trump craved the acceptance of such institutions as the Times and the Washington Post, but he knew that his base loathed them. And so he would loathe them, too, while at the same time declaring a new, Trumpian reality, constructed of what his adviser Kellyanne Conway memorably called “alternative facts.”

On his second day in office, Trump sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to the White House briefing room to con the nation the way he had conned the tabloids. The crowds on the Mall for Trump’s Inauguration, Spicer insisted, were unprecedented, despite the evidence to the contrary. A few weeks later, as news coverage further nettled Trump, he took to Twitter to declare that CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and the Times were “the enemy of the American People.” The resonance was clear. In the Soviet era, to be branded an “enemy of the people” was to await a boxcar to the Gulag. Even the U.S. Senate, whose Republican majority would prove so unfailingly loyal to Trump, seemed alarmed. In August, 2018, the Senate passed, by unanimous consent, a resolution attesting to “the vital and indispensable role the free press serves.”

But Trump knew precisely what he was doing, and he never let up. During a meeting at Trump Tower, Lesley Stahl, of CBS News, asked why he kept attacking the press. “You know why I do it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so that, when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

Trump may have devoted more mental energy to his degradation of the press—through lawsuits, threats, and hundreds of tweets—than to any other issue. He called reporters “corrupt,” “scum,” and “some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet.” And those words riled up his base, so much so that at his rallies reporters were often berated and menaced. Last year, the F.B.I. arrested a Coast Guard officer who had drawn up a hit list that included reporters at MSNBC and CNN, and an Army officer was arrested after allegedly conducting an online discussion in which he talked about blowing up the headquarters of a major TV network.

Trump’s assault on the press and his assault on the truth––he made more than sixteen thousand false or misleading claims in his first three years in office, according to the Washington Post’s fact-checking operation––have taken their toll. Where once American Presidents gave at least rhetorical support to civil liberties, he has given comfort to foreign autocrats, from El-Sisi to Erdoğan, who routinely parrot his slogan of “fake news” and lock up offending journalists. Perhaps Trump’s most disgraceful act in this regard was his refusal to speak a critical word against the Saudi leadership after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Post.

The costs at home are no less ominous. It is now estimated that one American dies every minute from covid-19. Every two or three days there is a 9/11-scale death count. How many of those people died because they chose to believe the President’s dismissive accounts of the disease rather than what public-health officials were telling the press? Half of Republican voters believe Trump’s charge that the 2020 election was “rigged.” What will be the lasting effects on American democracy of that disinformation campaign? Bit by bit, Trump is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the election. But he will continue his efforts to build an alternative reality around himself. Now that Fox News has proved insufficiently servile, he is likely to join forces with, buy, or launch an even more destructive media enterprise.

As President, Joe Biden cannot battle the debasement of a reality principle in American life by executive order. But support for press freedoms ought to be a central element of his domestic and foreign policies. What’s more, the press itself needs to learn from the prolonged emergency of the past four years. Just as it must go on applying investigative and analytical pressure to all forms of power, including the new Administration, it cannot relax in calling out the deeply anti-factual and anti-democratic foundation of a movement like Trump’s. The stakes are high. Donald Trump may be moving to Mar-a-Lago, but he, and the alternative reality he has created, could be with us for a long time.

Published in the print edition of the December 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “Real News.”

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.”

Magazine Cover Depicts Quarantining at Home

And speaking of the New Yorker, the cover of that December 7 issue has gone viral! Here’s what the Huffington Post had to say about that. JUST CLICK HERE. or paste this on your browser line.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-yorker-cover-sums-up-2020_n_5fc6245ec5b63d1b770f8d85

OR TAKE A LOOK AT THE TOP OF THIS POSTING TO SEE THE COVER!