Headline Fail of the Week Brittany Bernstein
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/
In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”
“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.
Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.
“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.
After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”
“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”
Media Misses
• MSNBC anchor Katie Phang recently claimed that Trump “never” brought home several Americans who were imprisoned when he was in office — despite two of the three Americans having been detained during the Biden administration. When a social-media user brought this to Phang’s attention, she doubled down: “Trump never conditioned his ability to return any American hostage on being President,” she wrote in a post on X. “You got a problem with it? Take it up with Trump, who, again, didn’t bring them home. President Biden did.”
• Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins claims there was no reason to be offended over the drag-queen-parody performance of Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of the Last Supper at the Olympic opening ceremonies last month.
“All the religious police see are phantom insults,” Jenkins said, arguing that the ceremony’s theatrical director, Thomas Jolly, is more Christian than the ceremony’s detractors are. “Perhaps, just perhaps, Jolly is a better, truer worshiper than his critics. At the least, he did something they have failed to do: He saw faces and framed them with interest, rather than hostility.”
• Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs has reportedly been fired by the outlet after she was one of two reporters who jumped the gun and published a story about Evan Gershkovich’s release from Russia before he had safely deplaned. Bloomberg published its piece at 7:41 a.m. on August 1 before updating it a little over an hour later to correct the record: “An earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect that the Americans have not been released yet.”
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported the news shortly after 11 a.m. when Gershkovich and the other Americans released as part of a prisoner swap were actually on the ground in Turkey. A reporter for the Journal told New York magazine that the outlet actually had a reporter on the ground with binoculars waiting to see Gershkovich step off the plane, and only then did the Journal publish its story. Outlets had agreed to an embargo as prisoner swaps could change at any time. Bloomberg has received widespread criticism for publishing its story before that embargo lifted.
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