Fascism Depends On The Presumption Of Good Faith

Linda from Arizona put the president’s personal military force in charge of airport security. You won’t hear much about Linda, however, making executive policy decisions via phone calls to right-wing radio shows. 

With congressional Republicans refusing to fund the Transportation Security Administration, a willful decision that has created four and five-hour security lines in airports across the US, the president over the weekend posted to his money laundering social media website that the paramilitary that works directly for him – you might know them as ICE – would take over security checkpoints at airports. 

The president was clear about why he thought ICE-agents-as-TSA-workers was a good idea: To infuriate and terrorize his political enemies and to more easily target and kidnap and deport Black immigrants. There was only one way to interpret his social media post announcing the ICE takeover of American airports: As an act of pure vengeance, of undiluted malice. 

That's not the way the Newspaper reported it though.

The president's call for ICE in airports had nothing to do with easing the workload of short-staffed airport workers and managers. It had nothing to do with making air travel a little less miserable for Americans. It was always about sending his personal goon squad into airports and threatening violence against those who did not comply with masked, armed men deemed above the law by the vice president and other higher ups in the regime. It was about making immigrants and people of color a little more fearful of going about their everyday lives.

Media outlets have largely treated the president's mobilization of his paramilitary into our airports as a good-faith effort to solve a seemingly intractable funding stalemate made worse by Republican lawmakers who actively loathe the people they represent. Many mainstream outlets ran the president's mob boss-style threat through the ever-churning sanewashing machine they keep by the office fax machine and came up with headlines and stories about Trump "assisting" the poor airport staffers struggling mightily with TSA workers refusing to show up for work because the president's party refuses to pay them.

The sanewashed version of the president's proposal was a sober policy created by a serious national leader thoughtfully seeking only to solve problems for the people. All the hate and vitriol and eye-watering racism emanating from his social media post announcing ICE storming an airport near you was filtered out of this coverage. It's the same as it's always been: Granting Trump the presumption of good faith (and good intentions) makes him seem like any other president just trying to Get Things Done from his all-powerful perch. Life goes on in the dying empire, the same as last week or last year or ten or twenty years ago.

There's only one way to cover politics in the United States, and it's with an overarching, unshakeable presumption that everyone – including those who admit to operating in bad faith – is acting in unsullied good faith. In 2024 we saw this in horrifying clarity with coverage of Republicans' publicly-available plan for ending representative democracy in the US. Sam Alito recently chastised a federal judge for not offering Republican legislators in Texas the presumption of good faith in their creation of Jim Crow-style electoral maps.

The Media Can’t Handle This Bad Faith

The modern media was not designed to responsibly cover an ascendant fascist movement determined to use democracy against itself

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

That the idea of ICE agents as replacement TSA workers originated on a vapid right-wing radio show does not – and will not – enter mainstream discourse. A lady named Linda on Friday called into The Clay And Buck Show – a good place for fascist sports chatter if that's your thing – and suggested the president's goon squad goose-step into American airports as temporary (?) TSA replacements.

One of the show's host, a far-right grifter named Clay Travis – who does not in any way Know Ball – then floated the idea on Fox News. And since our president is nothing more than a broken-brained boomer whose entire world is shaped by fascist media, it's reasonable to suspect he picked up on Linda's policy proposal and ran with it. It's not all that dissimilar from the regime's invasion and occupation of Minnesota originating with right-wing influencers on Elon Musk's X platform complaining that there were too many Black immigrants in their neighborhoods.

Like every other policy rolled out by a deeply unserious administration that has no interest in governing, dispatching immigrant kidnappers to packed airports is being treated like any other idea from any other administration. Linda from Arizona indirectly telling the president to send his troops to the airports is treated the same way the Biden administration's extremely detailed and well thought-out student loan forgiveness program was treated, the same way the Obama administration's sensible and practical Cash for Clunkers program was treated. For mainstream media outlets there is no difference between good and bad things. They are the same, you idiot, you moron.

It's all the same once the sanewashing machine – powered by the presumption of good faith – kicks into high gear. And so it has with the president's paramilitary wandering aimlessly around American airports today. They're not actually helping. They're not doing anything to ease the airport workers' burden. They're there because the president wants you to remember his unaccountable army is everywhere, all the time, and they answer only to him.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.