Trump and the press
Cartoon of 14/11/2018 in CTXT
When I get bored of domestic politics, which is usually two or three times a week at least, I turn to politics in other countries for at least a change of scenery.
And although in essence it's all pretty much the same, i.e. polarisation of positions to the death, the difference is made by the characters. One of them is Donald Trump, whose press conferences continue to be a catalogue of sour gestures, rudeness and machismo.
Cartoon of 22/01/2017 in CTXT
The last one was the hook-up with Jim Acosta that ended with the announcement of the withdrawal of credentials to this CNN journalist, the company announced a lawsuit to Trump for this, but the lout does not get off the mule. Days later, a judge ordered the White House to reinstate Jim Acosta's press pass.
The calm, almost silence, of the journalists present at these events in which journalists are called "enemies of the people" is curious, something that Trump has exploited to the delight of his acolytes, who are not few in number and who repeat his message like a mantra.
It is enough to read the comments in the videos and news stories about his brawls with journalists.
Cartoon 25/02/2017 in CTXT
"Trump just shot Jim Acosta in the middle of Fifth Avenue and the press didn't blink," so headlined Matt Gertz an article in January 2017, when Trump latched on to Acosta's jugular and pointed his pointing finger at him with "You are fake news", an expression that the boor repeated insistently and which was already starting to become a favourite ditty of the Trumpists.
Trump does not miss an opportunity to exploit the best and only thing he knows how to do, to set fire from McCarthyism. And so he covers up one fire with a bigger one.
Just after the terrible fires that ravaged southern California, President Trump approved an emergency measure. It was supposed to provide more federal funds to help fight the fires.
But, for a change, he spouted his daily ration of rubbish on Twitter just a day later, threatening to withdraw aid and blaming the state's alleged "poor forest management" for the catastrophe.
The president of the California Firefighters' Union made it clear to him, without diplomacy or embellishment: "You're an idiot
And a docu
On this issue, I recalled the 8-episode documentary series "Flint Town"(Netflix), which I recently finished watching.
Flint Town chronicles the day-to-day life of a group of Flint police officers between late 2015 and early 2017. It also goes through, though not in depth, the 2016 presidential campaign.
The story is told more like a character-driven series than a pure documentary. Although the approach doesn't excite me too much, as it spends more time exposing the problems from the personal point of view of the police officers than from that of the community, I recommend it. It has interesting and curious passages. Events that allow us to understand a little more about how certain clichés disappear when cities deteriorate and poverty, uprooting and distrust of authority and government take over neighbourhoods.
In several of the chapters, police officers and firefighters from Flint must go door to door to visit the residents of this city, one of the poorest and most violent in the USA, to get a security tax passed to prevent the mass dismissal of police and firefighters and the loss of resources.
