By David K. Shipler
When will
we stop listening to Donald Trump? Yes, he’s president with a lot of power to
make people’s lives miserable, but his tweets? Please. His latest, at this
writing, is an attack on an ad (“a bad one”) for the “failing @nytimes”
scheduled to air during the Oscars ceremony. The Times ad declares: “The truth is hard.
The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more
important now than ever.” How fitting that Trump should make his debut in the
art of reviewing TV commercials by panning one that extols the virtue of truth.
It might be imperative in a democracy to remain
shocked, to sound the alarm again and again. But at what point does the public
become numb to presidential absurdity? How literally do we take his historical
allusion, for example, calling the “fake news” media the “enemy of the people.”
Did Trump know that he was borrowing a line from Lenin and Stalin that was used
as a condemnation deserving of death or imprisonment? The phrase is so heavily
weighted that it was avoided in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953.
The Times ad selling truth follows the
exclusion of the paper’s reporters, plus those from CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and several other
news organizations, from an informal briefing by White House Press Secretary Sean
Spicer, whose contempt for the press seems to have begun in college when the student
newspaper called him Sean Sphincter. Editors then insisted it was just a
mistake, a typo. Yeah, sure. Spicer doesn’t seem to have healed.
