Trump is a media fungus

The numbing effect of the ongoing Trumpocalypse is extraordinary. At this point, I find it difficult even to look at his disgusting face or react to anything that comes out of his repulsive mouth. I am sure most everyone feels the same. We get caught in a double bind, where responding is just degrading, but not responding seems irresponsible. 

Doug Rushkoff coined the idea of the “media virus,” the meme that self-replicates through the culture. I think of Trump (and everyone involved with him) as something different: A media fungus. He represents a kind of rot that has infected the public consciousness of this society to an extreme degree and which will keep growing until it has killed everything in its path, unless we find the antidote. 

Given all of this, I still find it impressive that Trump launched a series of Tweets recently that are not just nominally but clearly illegal, as they constitute witness tampering. There isn’t any other way to spin this. Yet The New York Times and other media outlets are not even bothering to report on it. The segment from Lawrence O’Donnell is clear. The only thing that Trump can be counting on is that the entire Republican Party – and a great swathe of the US population – are insane. 

I also appreciated Paul Krugman’s recent editorial, where he makes the direct link between climate change denialism and Trump’s Presidency. We are now seeing the beginnings of a new phase in the ecological movement as waves of people grasp that we truly face an immediate existential threat as climate change accelerates. I hope eventually we will see the leaders of Exxon and other energy companies that have understood for decades that their continued extraction of fossil fuel reserves imperils the lives of hundreds of millions of people brought to justice. 

I am starting to feel a revolutionary impetus forming. Do you feel the same?