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  1. #1
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    The trouble with writing about Donald Trump

    The trouble with writing about Donald Trump

    The first rule of punditry is to find something interesting to say. But we're at the point when that's impossible when writing about Donald Trump.

    By Daniel W. Drezner March 28 at 8:33 AM
    Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

    This weekend, the mainstream media was all in a tizzy because of Nick Kristof’s column arguing “that we in the media screwed up” on Donald Trump.

    As someone who has #headdesked himself repeatedly over Trump’s myriad failings as a possible president, I confess that I’m not terribly interested in Kristof telling me to eviscerate Trump’s idiotic foreign policy views yet again. Rather, I’d suggest a few things in reaction to Kristof’s column:

    Kristof is really writing about television rather than all news media;
    Kristof’s complaint about reporters not taking Trump seriously seems about six months out of date;
    It’s not that the media hasn’t fact-checked Trump to death, it’s that his supporters remain convinced that Trump is right;
    Trump hasn’t really expanded his electoral support all that much, so maybe the media might be doing something right?
    For opinion writers, there’s another problem with criticizing Trump: He’s too basic.

    Let me elaborate on that last point.

    It might shock you, my dear readers of Spoiler Alerts, but opinion writing is not rocket science. Events happen. Opinion writers react and interpret them using our own prisms of experience, education and analytic training. Or, sometimes, we wait, and react and explain why the first round of punditry is wrong. When we do this, the goal is to be right, of course, but also to be read. The latter can involve adopting a counterintuitive position, or linking a story to a larger, ongoing theme, or pointing out the ways in which this news shatters some stale conventional wisdom (or reaffirms said wisdom, take your pick).

    The more singular one’s punditry, the better — provided that the writer can draw upon facts in evidence to support that view. The great thing about the world is that most events or people or trends are complicated enough to inspire a welter of different viewpoints.

    The trouble with writing about Trump is that he has no complexity. There is no subtext to what Trump says or does — it’s all on the surface. He’s so basic that it’s impossible to find any deeper meaning or counterintuitive take.

    This is true regardless of one’s ideological starting point. For months, Jonathan Chait and Matthew Yglesias kept trying to find ways to argue that Trump was a better choice for president than the other GOP candidates. A few violent rallies later, however, even they had to admit that they were wrong. At the same time, Mollie Hemingway and Mary Katherine Ham are conservatives who like to take issue with modern feminism in interesting and thoughtful ways. When it comes to Trump, however, they both wind up sounding like someone who works for the Center for American Progress. That’s because neither of them is stupid and it’s blindingly obvious that Trump really is that much of a misogynist.

    Some realists and paleoconservatives have desperately tried to excuse Trump’s transgressions to focus on his foreign policy musings. This might be because they think Trump vexes neoconservatives, and neoconservatives are awful. Or it could be because they yearn for a Trojan horse to smack down conventional wisdom about American foreign policy. The problem is that the more Trump opens his mouth on foreign policy, the stupider and shallower he sounds. Unsurprisingly, realists don’t want to be associated with yet another objectionable politician.

    Others have tried to use Trump’s surge to argue that he’s exposing economic anxieties or fury about political correctness or whatnot. Trump’s voters certainly merit analysis, but claiming that his support is really about trade or immigration misses the big racist elephant in the room. The public opinion data suggests that the appeal of Trump’s economic musings is pretty limited. And the meager efforts to defend Trump’s rudeness as “politically incorrect” are so laughable that they undercut those trying to defend free speech. Trump is simply too toxic a brand even for those who might want to champion some of his populist worldview.

    Trump reduces all punditry to the obvious take.

    No matter how much one tries to develop an alternative perspective, the inescapable conclusion is that Trump is a narcissistic, ignorant, misogynistic gasbag. Which means that, at this point, the entire commentariat winds up sounding pretty much the same when it comes to him.

    I suspect that this near-uniform chattering class repugnance with Trump, his ugly campaign and his retrograde policies absolutely delights his supporters. There is so little trust in authority that for those voters, the bipartisan calumny that will rain down upon The Donald is seen as proof that he must be right.

    Fortunately, those supporters represent a decided minority of voters. Which means he probably won’t win the general election. Unfortunately, it means we’re going to have seven more months of Very Boring Punditry about how the likely GOP nominee is an arrogant know-nothing. I’ll probably contribute my fair share of analysis to this pile. But at this point in the 2016 election cycle, no opinion writer wants to write about Trump even though we have to write about Trump.

    He’s basic and bad. There’s really nothing else of substance to say.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...-donald-trump/
    Last edited by Judy; 03-28-2016 at 01:43 PM.
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Misogynist -noun: misogynist; plural noun: misogynists

    1.
    a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women.
    You write an article, or attempt to write something about Trump that is interesting, claim you can't, and blame it on your belief that Donald Trump is a "misogynist".

    Donald Trump is not a misogynist by its definition. Donald Trump is an egalitarian. He treats women the same as he treats men. If a woman insults him or attacks him or is unfair to him, he punches back the same way he would punch bsck to a man who did the same thing.

    Take you, Daniel Drezner, how many names and rude insults have you thrashed at Donald Trump just in your one article today? Let me name and count them for you:

    You have hurled the following insults of misogynist, stupider, shallower, racist, rudeness, narcissistic, ignorant, gasbag, arrogant, know-nothing and bad at a man you've never interviewed and never met who has done nothing to you. You have no evidence to support any of these terms and more than ample evidence to refute them, yet you wrote them.

    These are your opinions, not facts. They are immature and childish opinions, without any basis or purpose, other than to demean someone running for President who wants to fix our country and make it great again. You claim you have a hard time finding something "interesting" to write about Donald Trump. You are blinded by the reality of this man. I started to perk up when you said he is basic. I thought wow, someone at the Washington Post has discovered the secret of Donald Trump. But then you didn't.

    The reason Donald Trump is driving all you inert pond scums crazy, and he is you know, when he wins, your new addresses will be the nearest Psychiatric Wing of your local hospitals, is because he is so basic. He is basic in everything. There are no ploys, no undercurrents, no plots, schemes, tricks or ulterior motives with Donald Trump. He's worked hard, done well, lived his life, made a bunch of money, built some beautiful properties, redeveloped some awful areas into beautiful sections of cities, in our country and all over the world. He's hired tens of thousands of workers, has 20,000 employees currently, hires women, pays them well, has no glass ceiling and never has. He's gracious, charming and a very good person.

    He's a man who wants to be President for one reason: to fix our country and make it great again.

    And this is someone you feel justified in persecuting because he's not in your glee club?

    You are a disgrace to your legal profession and a disgusting example to your students.
    Last edited by Judy; 03-28-2016 at 02:54 PM.
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