Trump Dictatorship and All Things Politics

Red said:

Bari Weiss Praised El Salvador’s Dictator Before Spiking '60 Minutes' Story on His Torture Prison

Weiss touted El Salvador’s brutal leader while her blog published jokes about Trump sending immigrants to the CECOT prison.

zeteo.com

“The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax.” This is what Bari Weiss’s The Free Press wrote in April about CECOT – the infamous mega prison in El Salvador where Donald Trump sent immigrants without due process and in defiance of a judge’s order.

Weiss separately gushed about the popularity of El Salvador’s president, who describes himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” and how safe he’s made the Central American nation – without noting he’s suspended basic civil liberties, has been accused of making deals with gang leaders, and has thrown thousands of innocent people in jail without giving them a fair trial.

Months later, on Sunday night, Weiss spiked a CBS News story on the treatment of immigrants Trump sent to prison in El Salvador – while offering sanctimonious lectures to the actual journalists who produce ‘60 Minutes’ about how the show’s CECOT segment wasn’t ready and didn’t include enough about the Trump administration’s bogus justifications for sending people there.

Many observers have fixated on the notion that Weiss’s decision was a favor to Trump, an outgrowth of her role being essentially installed as “Editor-in-Chief” of CBS News by a Trump-aligned billionaire. But the arc that led to Weiss’s unilateral move to spike the ‘60 Minutes’ segment shows exactly why it’s so ludicrous she’s overseeing the network’s news coverage at all – particularly as it relates to El Salvador.

And Weiss is apparently doing this all for – sources in and close to the Trump administration tell Zeteo – people who don’t even like her, or who think she’s merely a “useful idiot” embedded in the legacy media that the president loves to trash.

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fishonjazz said:

Saw this:
When the United States Presidency Becomes a Carnival ActThere’s a particular danger that emerges when the nation’s highest office is reduced to the role of a carnival barker. The barker’s job, after all, isn’t to govern, solve problems, or steward institutions. It’s to dazzle, distract, and keep the crowd emotionally hooked long enough to forget they paid for the ticket.When leadership becomes performance, the country becomes the stage. Complex issues are flattened into slogans. Policy is replaced by spectacle. Accountability dissolves into applause lines. And the public—exhausted, overstimulated, and increasingly polarized—finds itself reacting to the noise rather than evaluating the substance.
A carnival barker presidency thrives on perpetual crisis, because crisis keeps the crowd from noticing the machinery behind the curtain. It rewards outrage over outcomes, loyalty over competence, and entertainment over expertise. The institutions meant to safeguard democracy become props, and the public square becomes a midway where every grievance is amplified for effect. The real cost isn’t measured in headlines or approval ratings. It’s measured in the slow erosion of civic trust. When citizens can no longer distinguish governance from showmanship, they stop believing in either. And once that trust is gone, rebuilding it is far harder than resisting the spectacle in the first place. A democracy can survive disagreement. It can survive hardship. What it cannot survive is the belief that the presidency is just another act in the traveling show.

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