Turn Down the Temperature By Tuning Out the Media

On July 13th the 45th president and Republican nominee for the highest office in the land was shot in the ear, narrowly surviving the first serious presidential assassination attempt in four and a half decades. The nation has seemingly been on edge for years; one contentious election after another to see which major party controls the imperial presidency and the most powerful government and military in the history of the world has led to levels of political polarization not seen since Americans lived in far more dangerous and impoverished times.

Of course, as always, the power itself is the problem. The Founding Fathers could never have imagined the president or Congress wielding the kind of power over the American people that they currently do. Washington and Jefferson could not have predicted the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the New Deal, the ability for presidents to wage war without an act of Congress, gun control laws, the welfare state, the Patriot Act, COVID-19 lockdowns, or government crackdowns on free speech. They never would have guessed that Congress would willingly, even enthusiastically cede power to the executive, while the judiciary devolves into a macabre death-watch as the nation awaits the demise of one of our robed overlords, and they would weep at the notion that the press would become de facto agents of the state, focusing more on protecting the powerful than exposing their wicked deeds. Still, as polarized as our nation is, and as bloated, dysfunctional, and authoritarian the American regime happens to be at this juncture, now is simply not the time to give in to anger, hatred, and violence.

We still do not know the motive of the man who shot President Trump and others, including fireman Corey Comperatore, who tragically died of his wounds. 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Pennsylvania may have just been a madman, like President Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. who was convinced that killing the president would impress actress Jodie Foster, but it is not unreasonable to speculate that Crooks was driven to political violence by the constant stream of vitriol directed at political opponents by corporate journalists.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats have nothing to fear in a second Trump presidency, and Republicans have far less to be excited about than they think. Very few concerns (or reasons to be optimistic) are valid.

Rhetoric aside, President Trump governed like a centrist in his first term, far more like a 90s Democrat or an early 2000s Republican than his supporters or detractors would like to admit. The 45th president cut taxes around the margins, spent taxpayer money like Kenny Rogers in Vegas, and continued U.S. involvement in every Middle Eastern war, sound familiar? Trump went soft on the Second Amendment. His illegal bump-stock ban was recently overturned by the Supreme Court, all three of his SCOTUS appointments ruled against the executive order. Trump followed the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, causing perhaps irreparable damage to the economy, and even attacked conservative Governors Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Brian Kemp (R-GA) when they re-opened their states.

Despite claims by journalists and Democrats that Trump’s SCOTUS appointments would turn the nation into The Handmaid’s Tale, Supreme Court business has been par for the course. Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled that January 6th protesters were justly prosecuted while President Biden’s pick Justice Katanji Brown Jackson joined the conservative majority. 9-0 decisions are just as common now as they were before Trump’s presidency. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself criticized the now-defunct Roe v Wade decision as bad law.

President Trump was the first president of either party who was in favor of gay marriage when he ran for office, did nothing to shift the culture in a rightward direction in his first term, and the GOP recently removed all abortion language, Second Amendment protections, and plans to reform failing entitlement programs from the 2024 party platform. Whether these changes are viewed as necessary for Republicans to win in November or whether President Trump no longer feels the need to appease religious conservatives, this is an increasingly moderate candidate and party.

The likeliest scenario in a second Trump term is more of the same. More of the same can sound scary if, like me, you care deeply about economics, the ballooning national debt, and the impending crisis surrounding entitlement programs that are careening towards insolvency, but despite Trump’s selection of a bomb-throwing running mate, Ohio junior Senator J.D. Vance, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a list of fantasies that almost certainly will never come to fruition, it is unreasonable to assume that a second Trump term would be much different than the first.

When Donald Trump was shot last week, journalists predicted a retaliatory response from the former president’s supporters, a response that never came: no protests, no riots, no violence whatsoever. If an increasingly likely second Trump presidency is keeping you up at night; ask yourself what you are so afraid of. The media divided the country with their lies in order to protect their preferred politicians and policies, and they did it intentionally. It is high time to turn down the volume both metaphorically and physically, and tuning out corporate media is a great place to start.