Trump Administration and right wing pals find a cure for the COVID-19 epidemic: Arrest the press!

May 11, 1933: Adolph Hitler's followers express their for disdain for reports

and thoughts that displeased them by burning them on a huge bonfire.

Everything old is new again.

Every time you think things can’t get any worse, things get worse.

Blistering under the heat of press criticism, caught in lie after lie on public health issues as Corona virus infections spread, Donald Trump has decided to get even with the press. He’s starting with CNN, but you can bet that if the other news media don’t buckle under — and buckle fast — he’s coming after them, too.

I learned about this from the conservative — pointedly not liberal, or progressive, or socialist — National Review:

Vice President Mike Pence has blocked Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, as well as other top U.S. health officials, from appearing on CNN following the network’s decision to not air the White House coronavirus press briefings in full.

Vandals smashing the presses?

As I said, the National Review is anything but the kind of whiny, left wing outlet that Trump and his band of servile sycophants (am I getting redundant here?) generally attack. I don't know why they've chosen to play this up. However, I believe that regardless of their political orientation, the National Review folks do have a genuine regard for the First Amendment. 

Maybe they can also foresee, with dread, the day when the Trump government will be walking into newspaper, magazine and television newsrooms around the country, smashing the presses and the cameras, and computers, burning the news they don't like, arresting editors and reporters and throwing them into dungeons. That day might not be far away. Trump supporter Jerry Falwell Junior has already sworn out an arrest warrant for two people who dared to write for the New York Times about the university he runs. More about that further on.

But back to Trump vs. CNN. It all began with the hour-long briefings on the Corona Virus pandemic, starring Donald Trump, who helpfully instructed us to get just a teensy-weensy bit racist by calling it the “Chinese Virus” and the “Wuhan Virus,” and otherwise filled a good part of the daily hour or more with dog whistles and adulations of his glorious self, rather than useful information, or a useful strategy to help the nation cope with the virus. Perhaps it’s this way because he has no useful strategy, at least none that is timely, other than forcing us to watch him stroke his own id.

Truth is the only reliable guide to keeping your story straight, and Donald Trump wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up to him, stuck its tongue down his throat, and grabbed him good and hard by his pussy. (Why do I want to think that he has one?) And so, for not dutifully broadcasting the daily combined press conference and thinly disguised Trump campaign rally precisely the way the White House choreographed it, CNN has been blocked from the briefings. It’s as if the Soup Nazi of the Seinfeld era has transmogrified into a real Nazi in the Trump administration: no Fauci and Birx Soup for you, CNN. 

What should the news media do about all this? I’d suggest doing what the New York Times did:

Give baby Trump a time out

The New York Times, another outlet that has been a target of the Trump administration’s ire, stopped airing the briefings on its website entirely.

“We stopped doing that because they were like campaign rallies,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, told the Washington Post. “The health experts often have interesting information, so we’re very interested in that, but the president himself often does not.”

Remember, for Trump’s ego, media attention is like oxygen. Cut it off and his persona smothers, dies, and shrivels away. If the entire press — or even most of the press — embargoed him for a month or two, perhaps the increasingly outrageous behavior of the six-year-old brat in the Oval Office would check itself for a while. 

Maybe,  the next time a reporter gets berated by Trump for asking a “nasty question,” (i.e. a question that is meant to elicit real information and doesn’t obsequiously praise the president) if the entire White House press corps stood up and walked out of the briefing room, that noisy, not-very-bright boor would begin to behave better.

Think it’s worth a try, AP? Newsweek? Washington Post? ABC? NBC? CBS? Chicago Tribune?  Anybody? 

Meanwhile, Jerry Fallwell Jr. 

has a meltdown, too

Poor Jerry Falwell, Jr! What he has to put up with! His daddy founded Liberty University, a Christian fundamentalist institution. Of all the people on the entire planet, you’ll never guess who was deemed most qualified to be its president and chancellor now that Falwell Senior is gone? 

Right.

And everything was going along just swimmingly until Falwell reopened the university after Spring break, while most other colleges were staying shut and teaching via distance learning to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

And you’ll never guess what happened next!

Right! The New York Times just happened to show up. And the Times reported, after talking to the doctor who serves the campus, that “nearly a dozen” students were experiencing symptoms of COVID-19.

O, those nefarious journalistic bastards! 

What’s a poor university that needs the tuition money and nothing but favorable publicity to do?

Right again! You’re so smart! Junior swore out arrest warrants against the two people who reported the story. And he also must have given that doctor a stern talking to, because I'm guessing it's awfully hard to maintain the university, to say nothing of Junior's salary, with a 10 percent occupancy rate. Politico reports:

A statement on the school’s website says the physician denies “he ever told the reporter that Liberty had about a dozen students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19” and that he “gave figures for testing and self-isolation that are consistent with Liberty’s numbers but the New York Times preferred to go forward with sensational click-bait that increases traffic.”

Falwell defended his decision to allow students back to campus, saying there was “maybe” less than 10 percent occupancy on campus and that some who remained on campus were international students or were afraid to go home and live with high-risk family members. 

Falwell, a fierce supporter of President Donald Trump, was among those who were portraying reaction to the virus as overblown as recently as a month ago, accusing opponents of the president of weaponizing the outbreak to hurt him politically and suggesting the virus might be the work of North Korea and China.

When Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia commanded higher-education institutions in the state to stop in-person teaching last week, it was viewed by some as a swipe at Liberty, which said it had canceled its remaining in-person offerings.