The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur discusses the one upside, and the huge downside to Donald Trump's unconstitutional and anti-American proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
December 11, 2015

This segment from The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur really hit home for me, because it's been harder and harder to watch what's become of our corporate media in the United States ever since Donald Trump has entered the 2016 Republican presidential primary race and how they've covered his steady rise in the polls they're conducting every week.

Rather than just straight up call Trump out as a buffoon, a carnival barker, a professional Internet troll, a racist, and a huge raging narcissist who just feeds off of any publicity he's given, good or bad, and as someone who does not have the temperament to be the President of the United States, the media continually pretends that there's nothing abnormal about what Trump is doing, because the base of the Republican party loves him.

They give legitimacy to every crackpot idea that comes rolling out of his mouth when they don't call him out for being just that... a know-nothing crackpot who will say whatever he thinks will give him a rise in the polls from one week to the next.

So what we end up with instead are segments like the ones Cenk discussed in the clip above, where for example, we've got Fox's Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Stuart Varney "debating" the merits of Trump's ban on Muslims entering the country. And on MSNBC, despite the fact that Chris Hayes did a very good job during the segment, he's being forced to "debate" the likes of wingnut Republican Rep. Steve King, who ought to come with a warning on the screen before he's allowed to pollute our airways, ever, on American television.

Here's how Cenk wrapped things up on what Trump has done to what was already just a godawful media landscape in America:

UYGUR: So, should we be having a debate as Chris Hayes asked later about whether we should let the Jews into the country? No. That's not a debate to have, right? And should we have a debate about whether we should let the Muslims into the country? No, that's not a debate to have. Some things are not debatable.

But Trump, by going so insanely right wing has opened up these debates and has opened up this Pandora's box. So a lot of terrorists have already flown out of it. God knows what's at the bottom of that thing, but it looks like we're nowhere near the bottom, and he's hunkered our country into this dark place where we're having discussions about topics like this which we would have never dreamed about before decent Americans.

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