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The Storm is Here: Blame It on the Rain and the American Lügenpresse

Photo by reza shayestehpour

Blame it on the rain that was fallin’, fallin’ Blame it on the stars that didn’t shine that night Whatever you do, don’t put the blame on you Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah – Milli Vanilli “I just did an interview…with NBC fake news. And because it was raining, I got a little bit angry at them. I was not happy with them.” – Donald J. Trump` “Storms bring luck to whatever the occasion.” – Donald Trump

Blame it on the rain that was fallin’, fallin’ Blame it on the stars that didn’t shine that night Whatever you do, don’t put the blame on you Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah

“I just did an interview…with NBC fake news. And because it was raining, I got a little bit angry at them. I was not happy with them.”

“Storms bring luck to whatever the occasion.”

For some reason, it keeps threatening to rain – and sometimes actually rains – on Trump’s parades, though in the end it hardly seems to matter. Still, it is a shame that rain was forecast for Trump’s June 26 Freedom 250 Concert and that neither Milli Vanilli nor, by Trump’s own estimation, other “third-rate” stars shone that night, all of them, save Vanilla Ice, having bailed on an event many of them were apparently enticed to join in to satisfy Trump’s lust for attention and adulation. However, rain did fall on his Meet the Press interview, inclement weather threatened the success of his UFC circus, and severe storms virtually ruined his Independence Day celebration, although none of it came early enough to cancel Charlottesville 2.0: the July 4th march of 400 masked, khaki-clad white nationalists. Or were they simply ICE agents celebrating the nation’s birthday and, belatedly, their Führer’s?

During his Meet the Press interview, a fuming, red-faced Trump threw his mic to the ground, crushed it underfoot, and stomped away from host Kristen Welker after she pressed him on his illegal slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and election-fraud lies. Toddler that he is, Trump responded with “I-know-what-you-are but-what-am-I” retorts right out of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, though voiced with less self-assurance than that film’s eponymous man-child.

If only Trump, the unwoke, social justice warrior, were as impassioned about the “Central Park Five,” five black[1] and brown youths, falsely convicted in 1990 of the rape of a white jogger in 1989 and imprisoned for between 6 and 13 years before being exonerated in 2002, an exoneration based on evidence rather than on the self-serving political machinations of a miscreant president. The same man who today defends insurrectionists who attacked police, threatened to kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, and defecated in the halls of Congress, who counted a convicted pedophile as a bestie, and who himself was found liable for sexual assault, notoriously took out full-page newspaper ads demanding that the Five “be forced to suffer” for their “crimes” and that the death penalty be reinstated to execute them. A quarter of a century later, Trump continues to deny their innocence, even as 97 of the rioters he pardoned have gone on to commit additional crimes, including at least 14 who have been charged with sex crimes.

Yet during the interview, when Welker countered that many of the Jan. 6 defendants pleaded guilty, Trump the Compassionate declared it was “because they were frightened they would spend 15 years in jail,” and blamed their convictions on “dirty cops,” “Comey,” and “people like you, the dirty press.”

The tactics of fascism may be universal, but its vocabulary is localized. As usual, Trump used the interview to attack “fake news.” Nazi propagandists had another word for it:........

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