Before going to Fort Bragg yesterday to tell the cheering apparently historically illiterate servicemen that he was going to restore certain forts names after the Confederate Generals they had before, said that we would be speaking Japanese if the United States did not win World War One, and his usual litany of lying talking points about immigration, the 2020 elections, and other topics, Felon in Chief and American Duce wannabe Donald Trump responded to a reporters question in the Oval Office about talking with California Gavin Newsom about the mostly peaceful protests in Los Angeles that he had talked to him a day ago and there was a lot of death and potential death in California because of Newsom’s, in Trump’s opinion, poor response.
Two problems with Trump’s statement.
First and foremost, no one has died as a result of the mostly peaceful California protests.
Second, he did not talk to Newsom on June 9. He spoke with him on June 7.
Why the reporter who asked Trump the question did not follow up with the obvious followup and calling him out on yet more lies from the Liar in Chief is depressingly astounding.
Trump also said, again without proof, that paid insurrectionists were hammering out pieces of granite from curb sites and going to freeway bridges and dropping the pieces on passing cars, police officers, and soldiers.
Again, the reporter, at least in the clip shown, did not follow up and ask what proof Trump had for his accusation.
At least Trump did not say, as others have pointed out, that the people of Los Angeles were eating the stray dogs or cats on the streets.
To be fair, Trump would have been safe if he had pointed out the one isolated major act of violence in the protests when a few criminals, captured on film, burned some Waymos. As everyone, including Governor Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have said, there is no place for any violent acts of vandalism or arson, ever.
What was particularly galling is that not one reporter in this Oval Office Briefing asked about why Trump called out the National Guard on mostly peaceful protesters in Los Angeles and did not call out the Guard when domestic terrorist/insurrectionists stormed Congress in his name on January 6, 2021.
How gutless is that? It would have been worth losing a White House press pass to ask that question.
Watch former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi call Trump out on that at a briefing to reporters yesterday.
Reporters, who have moaned and groaned about Joe Biden’s physical decline, see a current Chief Executive clearly not all there and are not pointing that out.
And it is not just Trump. Mainstream media journalists, the people charged with writing the first draft of history, let Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune off the hook by not aggressively pursuing their initial line of questioning on comparing Trump’s reaction to the violence on January 6, 2021 and the mostly peaceful protests in Los Angeles.
Please watch the two clips below.
The reporters let these two Trump enablers ignore the question of comparing the two incidents and allowed them to parrot lying MAGA talking points about what is happening in Los Angeles.
To his credit, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who sees his future home in 2029 at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not taking this, lying down.
In response to Speaker Johnson’s suggestion that Newsom be tarred and feathered, the California Governor responded:
He also delivered an almost ten minute nation wide rebuke to Trump’s illegal actions of calling out the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, saying that “The rule of law is being replaced by the rule of Don.”
It is not just television journalists that are screwing this up.
Nationally acclaimed columnists like David Ignatius of the Washington Post recently penned a piece blaming the Democrats and Joe Biden for not addressing border security sooner.
In two words, excuse me.
Commenting to Ignatius, I wrote a response to his historically inaccurate column:
“You forget that Republicans obstructed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 and 2014 all for political gain and one of the first legislative proposals from the Biden/Harris Administration was…wait for it…Bipartisan Immigration Reform. Republicans obstructed that too.”
Republicans, at Trumps behest, also blocked a bipartisan border security bill because they wanted the issue in the 2024 elections.
It should be pointed out, as CNN’s Abby Phillips did last night when one Republican operative had the gall to lie and say Biden did nothing on immigration when he had the House and Senate, that Trump did nothing on comprehensive immigration reform too in his first term.
Republicans have been AWOL on immigration reform for close to 20 years. Democrats have been trying to do something about this but Republican political operatives wanting the issue to appeal to their white nationalist and uninformed base, have obstructed again and again despite isolated efforts to move forward like that of the late Senator John McCain who was forced to abandon his own 2006 bipartisan plan he fashioned with Ted Kennedy when he ran for President in 2008.
It is journalistic and political negligence that reporters and, yes, Democrats do not point this MAGA Republican Hypocrisy out every day.
In an environment where Trump’s 2024 election win resulted from his dominant performance with uninformed voters, it is essential that mainstream media and yes, Democrats in real time call out Trump/MAGA Big Lies about immigration, crime, and the economy because the people who have no time to get into the nitty gritty of reading the fact checking accounts hours after the event, are actually believing them and voting for the people who are responsible for all that is wrong with the country.
It is time for reporters and journalists to get the first draft of history right.
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