The media found a new justification for apoplexy on Sunday evening with the revelation that a pro-Trump group shared a creepy meme video at a Trump property.
The video was a clip modified from a 2014 dark comedy film. It superimposed the president’s head onto a gunman opening fire on what was turned into the “Church of Fake News.” This was played as a part of a “meme exhibit” for the pro-Trump event, and it reportedly went mostly unnoticed until a disturbed attendee sent a recording of it to the New York Times.
Trump himself had no role in making or platforming the video at the event, which he did not attend. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham claims the president, who had no prior knowledge of the video, condemns it.
Re: the video played over the weekend: The @POTUS @realDonaldTrump has not yet seen the video, he will see it shortly, but based upon everything he has heard, he strongly condemns this video.
— Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) October 14, 2019
That didn’t stop, warranted or not, a full-scale media meltdown.
How disconnected from humanity must you be to find humor in a depiction of a mass shooting of journalists inside a church—knowing, surely, that Americans have been slaughtered in churches & newsrooms, that it’s not a fantasy for the families that those shootings made incomplete?
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) October 14, 2019
I’m sure some people will read this and respond, “lol triggered.” And yeah, I am fucking triggered! Being triggered sometimes just means having access to your ability to feel and to care about others.
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) October 14, 2019
This is about so much more than a single video. It’s about what happens when you plant seeds of hatred and division. It’s about what happens when you give your supporters permission to hate and dehumanize critics. https://t.co/X77yPhn8JG
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 14, 2019
There’s no question that the video’s message on its face — the leader of the free world murdering members of the Fourth Estate — is abhorrent. But anyone can make a meme, and even the worst memes aren’t necessarily taken seriously by anyone who makes let alone views them. Just because an anonymous Trump supporter made the macabre video doesn’t mean that any member of the administration endorsed or enabled it, and furthermore, deplorable content can be responsible for raising the temperature of our civil discourse to dangerous heights without remotely constituting a threat in and of itself.
The media have already chosen to spin the video as a product of Trump himself. But even Trump’s inappropriate mockery and vilification of the media is a very far cry from actual calls to violence. Trump deserves condemnation for trying to control the free press from his Twitter account, but he’s not prosecuting up or spying on journalists, as his predecessor did.
Moreover, the instant leap to blaming Trump for demonstrations and literal acts of violence ignores a vital truth in politics: A politician’s words can be both despicable and not responsible for how followers react. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has spent half a century blaming the wealthy and Republicans for the woes of ordinary Americans. Just because his rhetoric is irresponsible overall didn’t make him responsible when his fanatical supporter, James Hodgkinson, took it upon himself to attempt to assassinate an entire baseball field’s worth of congressional Republicans two years ago.
CNN’s Brian Stelter is correct to be upset about the video’s message. But the idea that journalists are in immediate and actual danger of facing violence in the Trump era is unfounded (Ben Jacobs notwithstanding), and this attempt to blame it on Trump is even more baseless.
