Another thought leader whose work I’ve admired for a long time now. As we dissect the business of messaging, marketing, and communications, and the impact current events have had on it, we’d do well to consider what Sarah Kendzior’s writing.
It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming, and know that many are abetting it by promoting the man who propels it. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, yet complacency remains, and you do not know whether this reaction is rooted in apathy or cowardice. Cowardice toward Trump has been epic: in the media, among the GOP, and even in organizations like the American Bar Association, who last week studied Trump’s use of lawsuits to silence opponents, then refused to publish the study out of fear he would sue them. While in recent months journalists have run critical coverage of Trump, most dismissed him as a joke or indulged him before and during the primaries, facilitating his rise. His fellow Republicans, even when they criticize him, still endorse him.
Maybe it’s a trite observation, but even if the damage to civil discourse, to community, and to social fabric itself isn’t exactly new, it’s gone beyond being merely quantitative, and is now into the realm of transformative. Not only is it going to endure well past the current election cycle — it’s legitimate to wonder whether it can ever be fixed.