Many in the media have said some disgusting things about Donald Trump.
They’ve called him racist and sexist; they’ve labeled him stupid and crazy and unfit for office, among other insults and affronts.
Surely, though, no one employed by and appearing on a “respectable” network would go so far as to directly compare the president-elect to an infamous, white supremacist, cold-blooded mass murderer…would they?
Apparently that outrageous connection is not too much for one CBS News commentator. In a piece published by the online magazine Slate, a CBS political analyst said that Trump and the man just convicted for the Charleston church massacre, Dylann Roof, essentially share the same ideology.
In a piece titled “Brothers in White Resentment,” writer Jamelle Bouie basically said Trump’s view of the world is no different than that of a young thug who killed nine people at a prayer meeting because of their race.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump took the stage at his eponymous tower in New York City and announced his bid for the White House. His message was clear. “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems,” Trump said.
A day later, in South Carolina, 21-year-old Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where members were holding Bible study. Using a .45-caliber Glock handgun and eight magazines of ammunition, Roof shot and killed nine people, including the pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator. Before he arrived at the church, Roof posted a manifesto on his website, a racist tirade that expressed his motives. His message was also clear. “Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals,” wrote Roof.
According to Bouie, Trump’s campaign rhetoric was actually him talking in “code” about the sort of white America that Roof was fantasizing about:
Trump wanted to “make America great again,” where “America” was a metonym for a traditional, industrial, and white America, set against a rising tide of racial threats, from Hispanic immigrants and black protesters, to Muslim refugees and the specter of “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Bouie himself admits that “[t]here’s no causal relationship between Trump and Roof, no tangible link between the two events.” But in the piece, he certainly manages to make a ridiculous case that Trump’s view of the world is not materially different than an openly-racist spree-killer. In a piece brimming with political resentment of its own, Bouie claims that “Roof’s violence and Trump’s demagoguery flow from a shared swamp of resentment.”
And this CBS News contributor whose face and feelings are familiar to viewers of the network made sure the pictures of Trump and Roof were prominently side-by-side in his Twitter promotion of the shocking article.
Racism is ideological and one cannot and shouldn’t lift Roof out of the larger ideological stream he swam in. https://t.co/JJ3kMyghTU
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) December 16, 2016
Now, picture for a second if this had been perpetrated by a conservative against Barack Obama — or really, any other liberal politician. Whoever authored the insane piece would be hard pressed to find a job in journalism again.
Let me repeat that this man is not just a writer for Slate, but is also a contributor to CBS, one-time home of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. He also cannot see the difference between a racist mass murderer targeting innocent church goers and the president-elect of the United States of America.
Is this how far we’ve come? Will anything pass muster in the media when it comes to attacking Donald Trump?
It’s not like this is happening in a vacuum, either. Reporter Julia Ioffe was fired by Politico, according to The Daily Caller, after she sarcastically tweeted that she believed Trump was having sexual relations with his own daughter. As of now, however, she’ll still be joining The Atlantic in January, meaning that she would suffer very little from her horrifying, disgusting remarks.
And these are just the latest incidents in a string of obloquy that the president-elect and his supporters have been forced to endure.
Is this how low we’ve sunk as a country where we don’t hold those in the media accountable for this sort of outrage? Both “journalists” should be jobless after these horrifying incidents — the same way they would be had they perpetrated such a grievous insult on Barack Obama.