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The Trump assassination-attempt photo wins a Pulitzer — 18 Comments

1. I remember vividly one Trump Derangement Syndrome – addled acquaintance going on at some length about how no, it was not a bullet or bullet fragment that hit Trump’s ear, it was a splinter of glass or some similar substance, possibly from the teleprompter or the teleprompter stand, that hit Trump’s ear.

   As if that was terribly important.

   For me at least, what mattered was that
   – it was another attempt on a presidential candidate’s life, and
   – the lack of competence and professional attention on the part of Secret Service and law enforcement was so appalling as to be scandalous — not scandalous in some rhetorical sense, but literally scandalous.

   For me, the heroism of the candidate was strictly secondary. What seems already to be overlooked was/is the *malign neglect* on the part of Secret Service and various law enforcement personnel. It seems to me to be down the memory hole — a d#mn shame.

2. Plus, a publication won a Pulitzer for falsely reporting that abortion restriction laws resulted in the deaths of some women. In truth, the deaths were attributable to medical negligence.

3. This Pulitzer ‘prize’ is simply one more example of a media org. lying its way to irrelevance. Like Obama’s meritless Nobel Peace Prize and the Oscars since Brando’s native american virtue signaling, only the “useful idiots” actually believe they are awarded based on excellence. Ideologically based ‘awards’ are simply another way to ‘preach to the choir’.

4. Heh.

   (Cracked old man voice): I remember back in 19-aught-32 the Pulitzer going to Walter Duranty for his reporting on the USSR.

   No famines here! No Holodomor! Stalin told him so.

   The Pulitzer Board has been asked a buncha times, but it ain’t never going to revoke that prize.

5. The President could secretly be Superman. And if the secret got out the Left would want him deported and simultaneously yell at him for not doing enough.

6. Huxley, I read and heard that in Walter Brennan voice.

7. Heh. Propaganda “media”, indeed.

8. Huxley, I read and heard that in Walter Brennan voice.

   Wow!:

   That’s what I was going for. Grateful you filled in the blanks.

   Speaking of Walter Brennan, he starred in a strange Hollywood propaganda film for the Soviet Union as a humble, happy pig farmer by the name of Karp. It was like smalltown America translated to the USSR.

   Collectivization works, comrade! You will own what we say and be happy. Every conservative ought to watch the first five minutes. Hilarious.

   –Lewis Milestone (director), “The North Star” (1943)
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dddwh2h0Xj4

   Of course that was back when Stalin was Uncle Joe, our valiant ally in the East against Nazi aggression.

   Lillian Hellman wrote the story and screenplay.

9. @ huxley > “The Pulitzer Board has been asked a buncha times, but it ain’t never [gonna] revoke that prize.”
   [Just a bit of editing to complete the iconic Brennan voice.]

   They have also refused to rescind the Prizes “For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest” on the Trump-Russia “story” (IOW, the political narrative written back when the Regime Media was still pretending that the Dossier and FBI investigation were on the level).

   https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/03/why-wont-the-pulitzer-board-answer-trump-on-whether-its-review-process-is-legit-enough-to-revoke-prizes-for-russia-hoax-propaganda/

   Both The New York Times and The Washington Post received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for amplifying claims that Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Despite years of evidence proving that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for and peddled the narrative in an attempt to sic the government on her political enemy Trump, the Pulitzer Prize Board has yet to rescind any of its prizes for reporting that was based on the debunked Steele dossier.

   *******
   “Lillian Hellman wrote the story and screenplay.”
   How can I resist referencing the familiar quote in this context?

   When Mr. Cavett asked what was “dishonest” about Miss Hellman, Miss McCarthy answered, “Everything.” Miss McCarthy continued, “I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

   https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/18/every-word/

10. What was striking about mr jones the bio about the reporter who broke the holomodor story was the herd effect to back duranty, without evidence. Only william randolph hearst who welles libeled for his own reasons really supported him years later other former political pilgrims like muggeridge and robert conquest revisited the story

    Peter skarsgaard was wonderfully cast as duranty james norton a possible bond was his foil. His boss david lloyd george who had a penchant for ignoring truth was also well cast

11. Yes Huxley, we old men remember things still.
    A little hitch in our giggyup

12. The selection of that photo for the prize is clearly malicious compliance to the popular sentiment.

    Yes, the Pulitzer Prize Bastards superficially acknowledge Trump’s near-martyrdom, but instead of his unfeigned love of country in the face of death, they underhandedly glorify their own hero – the bullet they hoped might have killed him.

13. Re: Trump Pulitzer Photo

    Sorta like a photo of the Boys at Iwo Jima reaching that spot with the Flag, looking at each other, then saying “Let’s do this,” before, you know, Actually Doing It.

    Not quite the same.

14. when you dial down the ambient noise,

    https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/07/the-pulitzer-prize-remains-a-crown-for-left-wing-propagandists/

15. cervantes

    What was striking about mr jones the bio about the reporter who broke the holomodor story was the herd effect to back duranty, without evidence. Only william randolph hearst who welles libeled for his own reasons really supported him years later other former political pilgrims like muggeridge and robert conquest revisited the story

    Malcolm Muggeridge was in Moscow during the Holodomor as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian. He wrote about the famine in the 1930s. He published Moscow Nights in 1934- and IIRC had to eliminate any mention of a newspaper in it due to legal action from the Manchester Guardian.

    Eugene Lyons was a reporter in Moscow in the 1930s for about (IIRC) 6 years. He had the distinction of interviewing Stalin in Russian. He published Assignment in Utopia in 1937. (Lyons also published in 1941, The Red Decade The Stalinist Penetration of America.)

    From Assignment in Utopia: In 1933 he found reports in the Soviet press that entire towns in the Kuban, North Caucusus had been deported. From the 1930 census he deduced that 40,000–the combined population of those towns–had been deported. Soviet censors could not stop reports of the deportations, because they had been reported in the Soviet press, but wanted numbers eliminated. Lyons circumvented that by having his report smuggled out and sent from Berlin.

    My Kuban story, it thus transpired, started the first serious breach in the conspiracy of silence around the famine. The Soviet authorities, I had reason to learn, never forgave me.

    Lyons pointed out that Malcolm Muggeridge was another of the reporters who were reporting about the famine.

    Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian has, in his book Winter in Moscow, an unforgettable chapter on that journey; though done as broad caricature that chapter conveys the essential truth (which is the function of good caricature) : the insanity of a junket to hungerland, the correspondents chaperoned by official hallelujah-shouters, to dedicate a mechanical mammoth among wheat fields abandoned to weeds; of a holiday to glorify an electric station built in large part with coerced labor and producing electric power for factories not yet in existence.

    Muggeridge himself was among the most gullible on this journey, having only just arrived from London, with all the preconceptions about Russia fostered by the paper he represented and other well-meaning liberal publications. I remember how he and another young Londoner defended their dream against the doubts and cynicisms of the more seasoned correspondents. The other Englishman died in Moscow in a tramcar accident with his illusions intact. Muggeridge lived to record his disillusionment; much of the bitterness of his brilliant book is clearly a revenge against his own imported certainties

    Lyons’s book, published in 1937, also has a section on The Press Conceals a Famine.

    From Muggeridge’s first volume of his memoirs. Chronicles of a Wasted Time: The Green Stick:

    As I wrote in The Guardian, in the course of three articles of mine that
    appeared on 25, 27 and 28 March, 1933: ‘To say that there is famine in
    some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth;
    there is not only famine, but a state of war, a military occupation.’ The
    articles were held up to follow a series by Voigt on the Terror in the
    Polish Ukraine, and were run side by side with another series by him on
    the Nazi Terror, by way, I imagine, of neutralising some of their effect.
    In them I tried to describe it all – the abandoned villages, the absence of
    livestock, neglected fields; everywhere famished, frightened people and
    intimations of coercion, soldiers about the place, and hard-faced men in
    long overcoats. One particularly remarkable scene I stumbled on by
    chance at a railway station in the grey early morning; peasants with their
    hands tied behind them being loaded into cattle trucks at gun-point (this,
    incidentally, was the nearest I came to being in trouble myself; I
    was angrily told to make off, which I hurriedly did, fortunately
    without having to disclose myself as a foreign journalist); all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half-light, like some macabre
    ballet.

    Jones was not the only reporter to have reported on the famine in the 1930s, though few suffered the consequences he did.

16. Also from Mugeridge,about the reaction to his reporting:

    As it happened, no other foreign journalist had been into the famine areas in the USSR except under official auspices and supervision, so my account was by way of being exclusive. This brought me no kudos, and
    many accusations of being a liar, in The Guardian correspondence columns and elsewhere. I had to wait for Khruschev – who surely knew the truth if anyone did, having been himself one of the chief terrorists in the Ukraine – for official confirmation. Indeed, according to him, my account was considerably under-stated. If the matter is a subject of
    controversy hereafter, a powerful voice on the other side will be
    Duranty’s, highlighted in the New York Times, insisting on those granaries overflowing with grain, those apple-cheeked dairymaids and plump contented cows, not to mention Shaw and all the other dis­tinguished visitors who testified that there was not, and could not be, a food shortage in the USSR. I doubt if even Khruschev’s testimony, let alone mine, will weigh against such honourable and distinguished witnesses.

    In Kiev, where I found myself on a Sunday morning, on an impulse I
    turned into a church where a service was in progress. It was packed
    tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar whence I could
    survey the congregation and look up at the altar. Young and old, peasants
    and townsmen, parents and children, even a few in uniform – it was a
    variegated assembly. The bearded priests, swinging their incense, in­toning their prayers, seemed very remote and far away. Never before
    or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of
    turning to God in great affliction was overpowering. Though I could
    not, of course, follow the service, I knew from Klavdia Lvovna little
    bits of it; for instance, where the congregation say there is no help for
    them save from God. What intense feeling they put into these words! In
    their minds, I knew, as in mine, was a picture of those desolate aban­doned villages, of the hunger and the hopelessness, of the cattle trucks
    being loaded with humans in the dawn light. Where were they to turn
    for help? Not to the Kremlin, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
    certainly; nor to the forces of progress and democracy and enlightenment
    in the West. Honourable and Right Honourable Members had nothing
    to offer; Gauche Radicale unforthcoming, free press Duranty’s pulpit.
    Every possible human agency found wanting. So, only God remained,
    and to God they turned with a passion, a dedication, a humility, im­possible to convey. They took me with them; I felt closer to God then
    than I ever had before, or am likely to again.

    pages 258-259

17. thanks for the clarification,

18. Posts like this one remind me that the evangelistic impulse in Americans is still strong, even among non-Christians, or even among the non-religious.

    Think about it: sports fans argue for players to be recognized with Most Valuable Player awards, Rookie of the Year, Most Improved Player, all-conference, all-league, etc. People get very exercised about the additional recognition received by millionaires they’ll never know personally. Some even rue the fact that certain stars’ primes are being “wasted” by their teams who don’t put them in a position to win a championship SO THAT the player can be recognized as one of the best ever. Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets of the NBA is a prime example.

    Same with TV shows and the actors in them, same with movies and the actors in them. Same with all genres of music. We tout a show, movie, actor, or singer as the best or more deserving than another of the specific award bestowed and fight furiously for a millionaire actor who is world-famous to get EVEN MORE recognition. Probably to validate ourselves as having picked the right horse, figuratively speaking.

    But greatness is still great, even if it’s not recognized by the official recognizers of greatness. If Nikola Jokic doesn’t receive the NBA MVP award, he still had a historic season. Goodfellas is still one of the best movies ever made, even if it lost to Dances With Wolves, and who remembers the movie that won Best Picture over Citizen Kane in 1941?

    The picture of Trump with his fist in the air and blood running down his face became iconic the moment it was taken. It seems providential that the photographer caught and framed a scene that condenses that moment perfectly. Who can see it without murmuring to themselves, “Fight. Fight. Fight!”

    Awards don’t matter. Greatness is what matters. And all of us have the capability to recognize greatness. That photograph is great. I don’t need someone to tell me it is. I know.

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