Nearly everyone has an aunt on Facebook who indulges in daily political doomcasting. It’s difficult to witness — like a deadly addiction, sucking the life out hit-by-hit.
Still, we hold our tongues. We endure it — we remember Christmas, weddings, and happy times, and we think, “Aunt Phyliss, love that one.”
It isn’t her fault, after all. She has been conditioned for a cool decade to see signs of the Trump-ocalypse in every news item. Rachel Maddow’s voice narrates a dystopian novel in her mind throughout the day, unraveling conspiracy theories and performatively pitying the oppressed.
Like any toxic addiction, the thrill of being “proven right” by some news twist, and then gloating about it, outweighs the damage to her and those nearby. MSNBC and NPR sold President Donald Trump as evil incarnate, and like cigarettes, the idea that one person can be blamed for everything is too addictive to quit.
And as any smoker could tell you, sometimes a cigarette is more than just a smoke. At the right moment, a cigarette can be the difference between blowing your top and recollecting yourself, with deep breathing being as effective as nicotine at calming the nerves. Sometimes you just need a f***ing cigarette. After the putz in the next cubicle gets the promotion. After Trump takes office and democracy doesn’t end.
The Aunt Phyllises, drowning in public optimism over the nation’s state, have craved a doom fix lately. Before the election, they were told Trump was a buffoon, a felon, a literal Nazi! Yet he’s outshone his predecessor, and the national mood is perky — the number of people saying the country is “on the right track” has skyrocketed since he took office.
Like a tobacco rep offering a light, the legacy media delivered a sweet hit of doom with apocalyptic monologues and breathless headlines this week regarding the market downturn.
“For the first time in my 20-plus years covering politics, we are watching, in real time, an American president single-handedly tank the U.S. economy,” a keyed-up Chris Hayes began on his Tuesday night MSNBC broadcast. “It’s truly unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. … This is way worse than even I anticipated.”
“ECONOMY CRACKS,” Drudge Report plastered across its formerly anti-establishment front page along with nearly a dozen similar stories.
“We’re in a recession,” commentator Don Lemon said on his popular YouTube channel. “We’re in a dictatorship, but we’re in a recession.”
On Monday evening, the top four headlines on the New York Times’s homepage were about the stock market dip, which is ironic since the outlet spent the past four years playing down concerns about the economy. NPR, which has already published two features this month questioning whether government economic data can be trusted under Trump, led with several headlines that foretold doom.
‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’ DELIVERS SHOCKING INFLATION RELIEF
Of course, it’s fair to link Trump’s tariffs to the current turbulence in the stock market — the Washington Examiner did exactly that in the March 12 editorial. But the exaggerated and affected doomcasting, which is ironically Trumpian in nature, drowns out legitimate criticism of Trump and his policies.
Even if Hayes and Lemon are, in fact, correct that the president is “single-handedly tanking the U.S. economy” and that “we are in a dictatorship,” their barely concealed glee shows that they aren’t seriously attempting to inform their audiences about the pertinent news of the day, but only in giving them more hits of what’s already killing them.