Donald Trump's "interview" last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" was a spectacle, one that embodied many of the failings that the mainstream news media has willfully made throughout the Trumpocene and America's continuing democracy crisis. Trump was allowed a platform to lie, circulate disinformation, amplify his disproved conspiracy theories about how the 2020 Election was "stolen" from him and the MAGA movement, and to act like he is leading a righteous struggle to retake the White House from a usurper. What is perhaps most concerning is how Trump was allowed a platform by NBC and "Meet the Press" where he in his role as a political cult leader could recruit new members for his neofascist MAGA movement. 

Intentionally (or not), Donald Trump is also a type of teacher. As seen during his "Meet the Press" interview Trump's lessons are cruel and sadistic: his apparent pathological if not sociopathic behavior is a way of traumatizing and abusing the American people.

As I and others have argued here and elsewhere, Trump's use of political sadism is one of the main reasons why so many among the news media, the country's political elites, and general public are still stuck in a state of denial about the dire and existential threat the ex-president and the Republican fascists and larger white right represent to the country and its democracy.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com