Save the China

Again

America voted to return Donald Trump to the White House.  His nominations for key policy and leadership positions within his next administration follow the Project 2025 playbook.  Progressives are clutching their pearls.  MAGA is telling women “Your body. My choice.” 

BuzzFeed reports Trump is defying the Presidential Transition Act.  He has “concerns” about the mandatory requirement to sign an ethics agreement binding him to avoid conflicts of interest. It is the guy’s superpower that he can find a loophole in any law. 

In this instance, he is having undocumented conversations with foreign leaders known to be enemies of democracy—and with the power to grant him favorable terms for the expansion of his real estate empire on their soil.  It does not take much imagination to guess that his crack legal team will point to Trump v. United States for guidance on the question of its application to the self-serving actions of a President-Elect.  (Don’t you just love the irony of the fact that he has sued himself and won?)

As Trump bulls his way through the Constitution and tramples past every legal or customary guardrail that would curb his actions, let us consider alternatives.  Killing him is illegal. Muzzling him is impossible. Constraining him is problematic.

Our best option is to ignore him.

It would drive him (more) nuts. 

That option is not viable in a revenue driven click bait news environment. 

Two remaining courses of action and resistance recommend themselves.

1.       Follow the money; and,

2.       Send in an experienced matado

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For now, let us take heart and hope from examples and actions of responsible journalists.  Here is the one from11/13/24:

The Guardian notified its readers that it would no longer post from its official editorial accounts on X.  “We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.  This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and … its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse. (Emphasis added).  X users will still be able to share our articles, and the nature of live news reporting means we will still occasionally embed content from X within our article pages.  Our reporters will also be able to carry on using the site for news-gathering purposes, just as they use other social networks in which we do not officially engage.

“Social media can be an important tool for news organisations and help us to reach new audiences but, at this point, X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work. (Emphasis added). Our journalism is available and open to all on our website and we would prefer people to come to theguardian.com and support our work there.”

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