The Trump Trap
If you make everything about Donald Trump, as the press has for ten years, the simplest headlines quickly become tortured
A brief note on headlines inspired by the Charlotte murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right” by the New York Times, and “How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing,” by CNN:
When you cover everything in the world through the lens of Donald Trump, and Trump must not only always be wrong but the avatar of ultimate evil, outlets like the Times and CNN are forced forever to find opposing angles to anything he criticizes. A horrific murder can’t just be that, but an “accelerant for conservative arguments about the perceived failings of Democratic policies.” CNN’s account was like the screenplay to Crash, about how “the paths of two people fatally converged,” culminating in an act “decried by the Trump administration and conservative politicians as an example of the violent crime they say plagues many Democrat-led cities.”
Forget about attacker Decarlos Brown’s mental health, these stories (and others, like the Axios report “Stabbing Fuels MAGA’s crime message” and Brian Stelter’s bizarre outburst about the reaction being “baldly racist”) show the press is in the grip of severe monomania and madness. Nothing exists outside of Trump, the subject of every line of every story. Incredible, and unsettling, to watch.
We were told in no uncertain terms that one could not mention anything other than guns in response to the Annunciation Catholic shooting. The shooter's delusions were off-limits.
Now we're told that the killer's mental health is the only relevant aspect of this story, and any law-enforcement angles (and the killer's overt racism) are off-limits. One wonders how coverage would shift if Iryna Zarutska was shot instead of being stabbed!
The difference between Jordan Neely and Decarlos Brown is one Daniel Penny, and the Left hates Penny and laments his exoneration. Even George Floyd was on the path to becoming Decarlos Brown, and we have to look at his big ugly mug on murals all over the country now.
But the real problem isn't that these repeat offenders roam free. It's the cocktail of identity politics, non-agency, resentment, and permissiveness that has increased the number of Decarlos Browns in our society by orders of magnitude over what it could be.
No wonder they want to blame the guns.
It's the height of hypocrisy (and hilarity) to claim the right is "making this political" when the left was responsible for the "Summer of Love" after George Floyd.
And I'm not the only one who noticed which story got wall-to-wall coverage.