The Era of Perpetual Outrage

Does anyone remember Elon Musk’s supposed Nazi salute? Or when planes were supposedly falling out of they sky in other countries because of President Trump? How about claims the entire government was about to collapse and people were going to die?

If President Joe Biden presided over the Era of Perpetual Bailouts, we can confidently declare President Trump’s time in office as The Era of Perpetual Outrage one hundred days into his second term, one where the howls of condemnation from his detractors come so swift and shrill, they are forgotten by the time the next cycle begins and every week seems like at least a month, if not a full year.  Even barely three months in, armed with a mind like a steel trap as they say, it’s hard to come close to counting them all.  For example, does anyone remember when Elon Musk was accused of making a Nazi salute not once, but twice on Inauguration Day itself, no less?  At the time, this was considered a serious, serious thing, covered and analyzed by the likes of The New York Times, who pondered “What Elon Musk’s Nazi Salute Was All About,” NPR who followed up last month wondering “Why people are arguing Nazi salutes are just a joke” and “Prominent right wing figures mimic Musk’s Nazi salute,” The Washington Post, who insisted it had stoked a debate in Congress, was missing context, and stirred controversy while reporting on some Jewish leaders calling for a boycott of X, Politico, who claimed it had gone viral and sparked fury in Europe, and CNN who said much the same.  Given the outrage, one would have sworn Mr. Musk donned a Hitlerian mustache and a fancy, leather-strapped, metal-studded uniform, after being appointed Obersturmbannführer of President Trump’s reformation of the SS, but barely a week later, this story was promptly forgotten, replaced by a new narrative that President Trump’s efforts to trim the Federal budget were literally causing planes to fall out of the sky, at times in other countries after a collision between a passenger jet and a Blackhawk helicopter at a Washington, DC airport.  The media was all in once again.  The Associated Press complained a couple of weeks later, “Trump begins firings of FAA staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash,” writing  “The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.” PBS followed suit, offering almost exactly the same headline, though perhaps even more misleadingly, claiming that the firings were actually among air traffic control, as in “Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control employees weeks after fatal DC plane crash.”  When a plane crashed on a runway in Canada, Tom Costello, NBC News’ Senior Correspondent claimed, falsely “This is going to, once again, raise the concern about FAA staffing, air traffic control staffing.”  CNN’s Dana Bash said something remarkably similar, insisting “This is happening against the backdrop of massive cuts across the federal government including at the FAA.”

From there, outrage over cuts to the government rapidly spread from the absurd – a claim that no one at Yosemite National Park had the “institutional knowledge” to unlock a bathroom – to the dangerous, that President Trump was either literally killing people or at the least ensuring their Social Security checks wouldn’t come when the system collapsed.  He was also breaking the law and could probably be arrested. Things reached something of a fever pitch when Elon Musk sent an email to government employees requesting a few simple bullet points on what they did for the week.  As he put it on X, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week…Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”  Yet again, the mainstream media went into overdrive, prompting me to call it the email heard around the world.  The Associated Press claimed that Mr. Musk had “roile[ed] the federal workforce with demands and threats.”  The BBC insisted there was “confusion over Musk’s demand that federal workers justify their jobs.”  NPR noted that it had stoked “confusion and anger among federal workers.”  CNN devoted several articles to the topic, quoting federal workers who claimed “‘It’s bedlam’: Federal workers left in limbo as clock ticks down to Musk’s email deadline.”  “Federal workers spent Monday trying to figure out how – or even whether – to respond to Elon Musk’s weekend email blast telling them to explain their work last week or risk losing their job.  A day of confusing and often contradictory guidance left many federal workers still unclear ultimately how to handle Musk’s request. Some were told to comply, others were advised not to, and still others were awaiting instructions from their agency’s leaders until late in the day.” “Our chief said it was mandatory. Then OPM said it became voluntary. Then I guess Trump just told us it was mandatory again,” explained one career employee with the Department of Veterans Affairs. “No one knows who is in charge and who to listen to.”  Simultaneously, the mainstream media began reporting on laid off workers in a fashion never before seen, eulogizing each and every one as though they were guaranteed a job for life and the average person in the private sector has never faced the potential of losing their job.  They were also convinced that disaster was just around the corner.  “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who served as President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, told NPR in an interview earlier this month.  “We rely on our CDC for things like tracking down disease outbreaks. We rely on NIH for research into new treatments and tests and vaccines. At this moment, whether those will continue to be effective has really been put into question. We don’t know what the implications of all of this will be. I’m worried that what we’re going to see is more people getting sick, more disease outbreaks and infrastructure that is going to be less and less capable of responding to those threats.”  “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished,” echoed Dr. Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner twice before stepping down in January.  On LinkedIn, he insisted he was “overwhelmed’ with messages about the cuts.  “I believe that history will see this [as] a huge mistake,” he wrote. “I will be glad if I’m proven wrong, but even then there is no good reason to treat people this way. It will be interesting to hear from the new leadership how they plan to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ back together again.”

Fortunately or unfortunately, these hyperbolic concerns didn’t last long, almost instantly derailed by a meeting in the Oval Office between President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Though both parties had agreed to a deal covering mineral rights in Ukraine in advance of the meeting, it devolved into an infamous bickering match.  “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?” President Zelenskyy asked, referring to the Vice President casually by first name rather than the proper title that diplomatic situations like this demand. “What do you mean?”  He asked, again.  “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country,” Vice President Vance replied as if the context of the answer wasn’t overwhelmingly obvious.  “Mr. President, with respect,” he continued though he’d received none.  “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.  Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for bringing it, to bring it into this country.”  In response, the media recycled the Russian Collusion Hoax and promptly put it into overdrive.  CNN claimed  “never before has an American president verbally attacked his visitor like Trump did to Zelenskyy.”  An op-ed by The Washington Post described Trump as “more like Don Corleone than an American president.”  Alexander Vindman, who was hailed as an expert on European relations and a retired U.S. Army colonel, wrote President Trump has “taken Russia’s side against one of Washington’s European partners.”  NPR opined that foreign policy under Trump “downplays alliances and is open for business with any country — depending on what’s in it for the United States in the short run.”  The New York Times focused on President Trump’s so-called aggressive behavior, saying that he’d shattered a three year partnership. NBC News suggested the argument encapsulated “Trump’s deep impatience with Ukraine and its democratically elected president, and his persistent defense of Russia’s autocratic ruler.”  Whatever the case, the media found itself a new controversy almost immediately afterward.  This time, in the form of a secure messaging app, Signal, installed on government phones.  Though the decision to install the app was made by the Biden Administration, the disclosure that a journalist for The Atlantic had been inadvertently added to a thread discussing our actions against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea sparked yet another full week of outrage and demands that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth be fired immediately.  NPR quoted Mietek Boduszyński, a former U.S. State Department diplomat and associate politics professor at Pomona College, described it as  “crazy and unheard of.”  “This is one of the most extraordinary reports on U.S. foreign policy/national security I have ever read.”  They continued to quote House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who called it “completely outrageous” and said it “shocks the conscience.”  “If House Republicans are truly serious about keeping America safe, and not simply being sycophants and enablers, they must join Democrats in a swift, serious and substantive investigation into this unacceptable and irresponsible national security breach,” he declared in a statement.  A few weeks later, NPR actually claimed that President Trump was actively seeking his replacement. 

By early April, however, the media had moved onto tariffs, the only tax that the establishment doesn’t like and the one that was sure to wreck the entire world economy.  When President Trump announced “Liberation Day” on April 2, setting of a three day decline in the stock market, the media immediately pivoted to the notion that has either intentionally, as in for nefarious purposes, likely to funnel money to billionaires, or unintentionally, as is in, he’s completely incompetent and has no idea what he’s doing, wrecking the economy.  CNN cited the “economic damage,” claiming it is “piling up.”  The New York Times cited “supply-chain” damage while Bloomberg called it a “jolt,” certain to result in empty shelves and higher prices.  NPR said the tariffs were “fueling fears of a recession,” the Associated Press that they will weaken [the] global economy and trigger inflation.”  Suddenly the stock market was the economy, until it returned to the levels before the announcement, which were admittedly lower than the start of the year, but ultimately gave the lie that the economy was collapsing. Thankfully for Trump’s legion of detractors, there was a new outrage, this time over immigration in the form of an illegal alien deported to El Salvador rather than another country.  Though the Trump Administration correctly noted that he was under a deportation order anyway, his own wife had accused him of beating her twice, he was arrested driving in a car belonging to a human trafficker, and is reputed to be a member of a notorious gang, Democrats demanded he be brought back to the country immediately because the courts supposedly ordered it.  The Administration, in their view, was shredding “due process” and that it was only a matter of time before US citizens were being kidnapped by the gestapo.  Politico declared that the President was engaging in a “push to erode immigrant due process rights,” NPR claimed, “Trump wants to bypass immigration courts. Experts warn it’s a ‘slippery slope.’”  The New York Times broadened it to all “Government Notices to Migrants Fall Short of Due Process, Legal Experts Say.”  A Democrat Senator actually went to El Salvador to demand his release.  A Democrat Congressman went even further and filed Articles of Impeachment, as though the third freaking time really will be the charm.  I could go on as I am sure I’m missing one, two, or even three other outrages, but the only question at this point:  What outrage is next or are we in for a re-run?