Thom Hartmann is one of the most read and listened to progressive writers and broadcasters in the country. (SeeWikipedia profile)
He has a five day a week call-in radio show broadcast on numerous stations and on Free Speech TV.
He begins his Substack today, When a President Spits on Unity: The ‘Scum’ Speech That Should Warn Us All
Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise? You don’t.
as follows:
Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning:
“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…”
When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag.
It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable.
Hartmann concludes:
We can’t afford to normalize this. We can’t laugh it off as Trump being Trump. We can’t wait and hope that someone, somewhere, will step in and draw a line. We have to be that line. We have to call this what it is: a deliberate, dangerous assault on the core of American democracy.
Words matter. In every fascist movement of the 20th century, it started with the words. Before the arrests, before the beatings, before the camps, there were the words. And in every case, those words went unchallenged until it was too late.
It’s not too late now. But we are closer than we’ve ever been. We must push back hard against this dehumanizing rhetoric, demand better from our leaders, and defend the democratic principle that every citizen, no matter their party, is entitled to dignity, voice, and full participation in the political process.
Because once a president gets away with calling fellow Americans “scum,” it’s only a matter of time before he treats them that way.
I urge you to read his entire essay. He is saying it loud and clear, but despite the fact that he’s one of the top progressive voices in the country he’s not the mainstream media. How, then does the mainstream media paly this?
Not unexpectedly Fox News glorifies Trump here:
Just looking at the other titles of the articles about the speech ( click here) you see how none got it right and how most or all of them got it wrong. Those that said he honored fallen solderiers got it TOTALLY wrong even though they may have said he peppered the speech with political attacks. USA Today for example: "Trump honors veterans at Arlington National Cemetery after lashing out at political opponents in Memorial Day post." At least The Guardian led with
"Trump peppers Memorial Day speech with personal boasting and partisan attacks" but their subtitle was "President paid tribute to fallen soldiers at Arlington cemetery, and also veered off into rally-style remarks."
Trump dishonored the people he was supposedly honoring. In doing so he dishonored democracy and when you do this you debase the sacrifice of those who gave their lives fighting for it.
As Hartmann notes, the speech (and the commencement address at West Point where he wore a MAGA hat) was testing the limits of how much he could get away with in his Hitlerian rehetoric.
Trump was reading words someone wrote for him off the teleprompter which he barely glanced away from to look at the camera and audience showing he probably didn’t rehearse at all and possibly hadn’t even read the speech at all before hand. He read it in what only could be charitably called a wishwashy monotone. Trump, ever the performer, couldn’t even manage to pull off a half-way decent performance showing he cared about those words. The only time he showed any passion was when he called his enemies “scum” and went off on his usual vicious tangents. I doubt these words were on the teleprompter.
Of all the titles I look at in a Google News search only NorthJersey.com got it in the ballpark:
What was Donald Trump's Memorial Day message? What he said about 'monsters' and 'scum'
So did The Independent:
Trump can’t resist attack on Biden during Memorial Day speech honoring fallen heroes
The newspaper headlines should have shouted out "Trump declares democracy dead on Memorial Day."
This is a follow-up to my Substack from yesterday.
Most recent:
