The Conversation We Should Be Having

Originally posted on Facebook, September 20, 2024.

I believe there’s an under-appreciated aspect of Trump and Vance’s recent lies about Haitian immigrants eating peoples’ pets. Most of the discourse I’ve seen has centered around the fact that Trump lied and how this lie has endangered the people of Springfield, and of course it’s terrible that he did that and also terrible that both him and Vance have since doubled down on it repeatedly. But hey, they constantly lie about everything and I guess everyone’s decided that it’s expected at this point for some reason.

HOWEVER, there’s another issue here around why Trump even thought it was a good thing to bring up in the first place. The question that Trump received in the debate was about the bipartisan border bill that he killed because he wanted to run on the issue instead of solving it (another crazy thing that we’ve all normalized, but I guess let’s put that aside too for now). Instead of speaking about border security and illegal immigration, Trump chose to bring up this lie about LEGAL immigrants in a town in Ohio, which is about as far from the southern border as you can get. These two issues have nothing to do with each other, but Trump, and most other Republicans honestly, seem to have trouble distinguishing between legal immigration, illegal immigration, and refugees even though these are entirely different groups of people who require different solutions in any comprehensive immigration reform that we might do. It really makes me question whether this is an issue that they actually care to solve or if they’re just… racist? And somehow this is supposed to be one of the two issues that Trump is supposedly strong on…?

But honestly, I’m a little upset that this is where the discussion is as a country. And for this, I blame the media more so than I blame Donald Trump or Republicans. Most of these ‘policy disagreements’ (if you can even call them that… does Trump even know what a tariff is? whatever, I guess let’s put that aside too lol) are largely irrelevant. Donald Trump tried to overturn an election in an attempted coup by using false slates of electors, and then pressured legislators to go along with this plan by inciting a violent insurrection at the capitol, which he was cheerleading on twitter while also making calls to further pressure legislators to go along with this coup attempt. Luckily, there were enough people within Trump’s own administration to thwart the attempt this time, but none of those people are aligned with Trump anymore, and they’ve all been replaced with loyalists.

The crazy part about talking about this is that Trump himself doesn’t even deny it! His legal defense hasn’t been “I didn’t incite an insurrection” it’s “I did incite an insurrection, but as president, I should have the power to do so.” All these people I see running defense for Trump on social media over the insurrection are defending him more than he is even defending himself! Why does the conversation not stop there? Why does the media entertain debates over policy proposals from an American traitor and wannabe-fascist-dictator?

Putting aside the most obvious disqualifying factor that a person could possibly have for being president of the United States to have pretend discussions about policy with a person who has no real policies doesn’t make you ‘fair and unbiased’ as a media platform, and it doesn’t make you a thoughtful freethinking individual. It makes you complicit in allowing illiberal ideology to infect the American discourse.