The boy who cried Trump

This archived article was written by: Hannah Coleman

Once there was a farm boy who was charged with watching the sheep and protecting them from wolves. He was supposed to cry ‘wolf’ if he encountered any and the villagers would come to his aid. He was either bored, or lonely, or scared, so he decided to cry out when there were no wolves. The villagers rushed to his side, but were annoyed to find he lied about the situation.
The boy cried out twice more that evening, and with every false alarm, the villagers were more reluctant to return. In the latest hours, a ravenous wolf really did appear to attack the sheep. When the boy cried out, nobody came to help him. He’d conditioned them to believe his calls were nothing more than a fable, and he lost his flock to the wolf.
The Boy who Cried Wolf is a fable that I think perfectly captures the liberal problem. Why do liberals keep losing elections? Why do they have such a hard time persuading people to join their causes? Why does nobody take allegations of Russian involvement seriously? Why is it that no matter how much comes out about Trump, people don’t seem to hate him more? The answer is that they’re conditioning people to ignore them.
In the last edition of the Eagle, there was nothing new to talk about relating to the Trump presidency. An article was pushed out anyway that was a messy culmination of everything people disliked about the president since the campaign started, with a sentence about a proposed defense budget to try to justify the spew of angry rhetoric everyone has seen throughout the last several editions of the paper. They don’t care anymore.
One student remarked on the plethora of Trump articles saying, “We get it. You hate Trump. I don’t need to hear about your insufferable feelings every time I try to read about what’s going on in my school. If I want to read about national news, I’ll read national news.” Other students said they just stopped reading the articles, or even the whole paper because it was too much Trump without any real substance.
That’s the problem. When a media source pushes out Trump Trump Trump Trump articles, people start to tune it out. Sean Spicer made a controversial comment but. there doesn’t need to be a whole article about it. People don’t care. Writing an article about Trumpcare when it hasn’t even been fully disclosed and isn’t a complete thought yet is unnecessary.
There is so much about Trump that doesn’t need to be priority in a college newspaper, that if something were to happen that is actually big and actually newsworthy, people aren’t going to be interested because they’re sick of people crying “Trump” with no purpose. There is an over-saturation of Trump information. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t hear about the travel ban, but likewise you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t know Kellyanne Conway sat on a couch in the Oval Office inappropriately. It’s no wonder readers are getting fed up with news.
The most ironic thing is that it’s people against Trump who are harming their own cause. If they don’t relax, people won’t take these issues seriously when elections roll around, the same way nobody took Obama hate seriously during campaign season after years of Rebuplicans over-sensationalizing their issues with him. If you want to oust Trump, you need to pick your battles, something we aren’t seeing in the media now.