Confessions of an enemy of the people

President Trump has taken to calling reporters “enemies of the people,” evoking memories of Soviet-era show trials in which officials who had fallen out of favor were forced to confess to imaginary crimes before their executions. Nothing like that has been proposed for American journalists, at least not yet, but if it happened, I imagine it happening something like this:

Comrades!

I stand before you accused of being a disgusting person, a member of the Failing Fake News Media who invent lies to make the president look bad. Thank you for catching me before I can cause more division & distrust, or even cause a War! I am very unpatriotic and totally unhinged because America is WINNING AGAIN, so it’s a good thing I’ve been caught. Thank you, President Trump for Making America Great Again by exposing people like me.

I am accused of spreading the Hoax that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win, which was totally Fake News that I made up to justify the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt. I even got Putin to agree, because I knew that would make Trump look bad. Russia is very unhappy that Trump won, by the way, as Trump says himself. But that’s something the Fake News Media, like NBC for example, wouldn’t ever report, right?

Right?

I made up the story that Donald Jr., Jared and Manafort met with a Russian operative who was offering intel on Hillary Clinton. This was a total lie at the time, because the White House put out a statement explaining that the meeting was about Russian adoption. The president now says the meeting was actually to get information on an opponent, which he says is totally legal and done all the time in politics. So I am guilty of reporting the truth prematurely, which is just as bad as lying.

President Trump was talking about me when he said that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” We showed Fake News pictures of Queen Elizabeth checking her watch while waiting for Donald Trump to arrive for their meeting, totally contradicting Trump on the fact that it was she who kept him waiting.

And I admit that I never report any good news coming out of the administration, like the 4.1 percent growth rate in the second quarter. You didn’t see that in the New York Times, did you? That’s because I’d rather spread lies about the size of the U.S. trade deficit, pretending that it isn’t actually, as President Trump said at the 33-minute mark in his speech in Ohio Saturday night, an “$817 billion trade deficit among all countries over the last number of years. Think of it per year, per year. $817 billion.” I didn’t understand how it could be both “over the last number of years” and also “per year,” but in any case I prefer to attack the administration with Fake News statistics like this one from the Deep State U.S. Census Bureau, which shows the deficit has been averaging around $500 million for the last eight years, and never reached $800 billion in history.

Why do we do it? Mostly for the ratings. We only have until the end of Trump’s second term to make money off him, because after he’s gone, nobody will watch us ever again. Of course if we were as smart as we think we are, we would have figured out by now Fox News has the highest ratings because they tell the truth about Trump.

I like to pretend that I’m a member of the elite, only Trump is much richer than I am, with a bigger apartment, and he has a very good brain, and it’s driving me crazy.

The sad truth is, we’re suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. We can’t stand that he beat Hillary even with her 3 million illegal votes, which we refuse to acknowledge on the ridiculous excuse that there’s no evidence for it. We hate the idea that America is winning again. We are thin-skinned and don’t take well to criticism, or to threats, or the president whipping thousands of his followers into a fist-shaking, catcalling mob. That’s what it means to be an enemy of the people.

And this has been going on for a long time, even long before Trump. Remember the “lamestream media”? That was us! Watergate, that whole phony deal, was something we concocted because we didn’t like Nixon, either. As far back as the 1950s, we were totally one-sided in our coverage of the civil-rights movement, because we refused to say anything good about Jim Crow. No wonder so many white supremacists still hate us.

So, comrades, yes, I am very “dangerous & sick.” I am ashamed of everything I have done to hurt President Trump and stop his agenda, and the mean things I said about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ eye shadow, or actually that someone else said, but it was at a dinner full of reporters so practically the same thing.

Yes. I admit it: I am an enemy of the people.

There’s only one thing to do with me.

Lock me up.

_____

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