We must put country before incompetent president
“Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker and sicker and poorer.” Those are the words from prominent Republicans, former leaders, Republicans who care about America and Americans.
We have been watching our country explode with rage and we have a president who has sent our military troops to fight his own people in our city streets. We have a president who has said nothing to the families of the 107,000 Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19. We have a president who is a narcissist, a bully, a liar and a racist. We have a president who is so incompetent at his job that the void is being taken up by other leaders, governors, public health professionals, former presidents and generals.
We can no longer stand by as the world watches in horror as America implodes upon itself. We cannot continue to grow weaker, poorer and sicker under the Trump administration and GOP Congressmen Daines and Gianforte, who have supported him and sheltered him. We must make a change. We have a coward in the White house. “This is the time for choosing; America or Trump.”
Martha Collins
Bozeman
Chronicle’s AP articles allow Trump to control media
The Associated Press News articles selected and printed by Chronicle staff allow Donald Trump to largely control and dominate the media’s narrative of his presidency.
On June 4, Chronicle readers consumed this piece: “White House: Trump visit akin to Churchill WWII role.” While the headline itself amounts to political propaganda, much of the article directly quotes both Trump’s and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s loaded language as they mooch Churchill’s mojo, allowing a political strongman to essentially dictate a puff piece from lead paragraph to the last self-congratulatory word: Trump’s, of course.
Secondly, the article spends so much time parroting Trump’s spin that its coverage is light on facts. We learn that on Monday evening, June 1, peaceful protesters were “forcibly cleared” from the area around St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House so that Trump could pose with a Bible, without learning details like the specific violent crowd control tactics used, or that Trump chose to have his photo op before curfew began, or that two Australian journalists were attacked by police on camera, or that the Bible was held aloft upside down like a prop, because it was one.
Similarly constructed articles and their headlines on June 6 read: “Trump claims victory over virus, econ collapse” and “President evokes Floyd after hailing strong jobs report.” In “Surviving Autocracy,” author Masha Gessen writes that journalists must “accept their responsibility for shaping and facilitating the political conversation citizens must have in a democracy [and]… to create a communications sphere in which people do not feel like spectators to a disaster that defies understanding but like participants in creating a common future with their fellow citizens.”
For our democracy to work, the media must stop playing Echo to Trump’s Narcissus.
Christine Montano
Bozeman
Bozeman Daily Chronicle Letters to the Editor 6/16/20