đź”— Link Post: “Donald Trump Is a Menace to Public Health”
The entire article is certainly worth reading. It was hard to pick out excerpts because it’s all so well written.
Adam Serwer writing for The Atlantic:
Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee.
Democracy can be thought of as a garden; if you don’t tend to it, it doesn’t take long to be overtaken by the weeds of alternative, less-preferred civic models.
“Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president.”
Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
I’m old fashioned in that I like my news to give me the news, not an opinion. Right-wing media is out of control - pretending to be news but actually delivering propaganda.
The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
This pretty much nails it. Everything is for personal gain; not for the collective good. In Trump’s world, everything is a zero-sum game.