The Portland moms have given us a precious chance to talk about how the American media fails us every day and enables demagoguery, lies, and posturing.

They also are helping us see how cruel and morally corrupt society we have become over the past four years.

These mothers have challenged our violent and vicious – and very male-driven –  politics, spawned a new and very human national organization.

They have exposed the lack of humanity and history that have made America one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world, at least until now.

As is so often the case, the media seems to be the last to know when something big happens.

For three days, the mutant soldiers of Donald Trump have tried to gas and prod and frighten these women and drive them away.

For three days they have failed.

And for three days the media numbs us with an endless parade of Trump, Trump, Trump, whose true genius may be his ability to say nothing with great flair.

What those mothers did over the last few days was braver than anything Donald Trump has done in his entire life. They put a bright light squarely on what is wrong with him, his selfishness, cruelty, coldness, and narcissism.

Trump thought he might gain some points by beating back the evil forces of anarchy in notoriously activist Portland and maybe criminalizing dissent along the way.

Instead, he finds himself in a stand-off that would horrify John Wayne or Gary Cooper – he’s got an army on his ass, and they are worse than hornets. They just don’t scare.

In fact, Trump is the biological, political, and psychological opposite of these women.

An accused and admitted sexual predator, he typifies the worst of the dominant white male; he degrades women is in conflict is a lifelong bully, and suffers from too much testosterone and too little heart.

He thrives on conflict and belittling others. The moms are on the opposite side of the human scale. They are everything he is not, and he is everything they are not.

By marching in Portland the moms, like Black Lives Matters before them, have torn up the old script and presented us with a new one.

Since the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter has become the largest social movement in American history.

The Wall Moms are next up.

Mark my words, they will run Trump’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles out of Portland while male politicians sputter and mumble and tweet.

The moms should be one of the biggest news stories in the country. They are not. For the moment, you’ll just have to put up with me, unless you live in Portland.

Until later afternoon Tuesday, I wasn’t planning on writing about politics. Then I saw this video of the Portland moms singing “Hands Up; Please Don’t Shoot Me” in front of the Trump assigned agents/troops/palace .uard marching on them, gassing them, and firing rubber bullets at them in front of the federal courthouse.

I also came across a video and story about one mom labeled “Naked Athena” as she opposed cops throwing pepper bombs wearing only a mask and a beanie.

She won, they retreated, they didn’t seem to have trained for this.

Patience was unimpressed. “Real men don’t hide behind their mommas. They protect their mothers,” she messaged me this morning after she accused me of being biased. “To me,” she added, “it is just another pathetic sign of how parents didn’t raise their children to be functioning adults in society.”

Patience (I love the name), I’m grateful you were not my mom, and I’m happy to not be a real man, I would be happy to let the mothers protect me, they are more robust than nails and tougher than me.

If anybody menaced me, Maria would knock them on their ass, and I would thank her for it.

I loved the mothers on sight.

Can you tell me that Trump’s hostage video talk at the White House was one-tenth of the story of these mothers?” Did he really deserve an hour of national air time to say something he should have said four months ago, and refused to say all that time?

There is a great divide in this country; we each have to make up our minds where we stand. I want to march right behind the moms.

“Wow,” I said to Maria, yesterday “this is an amazing thing. I have to write about it.”

The President just dug another deep hole for himself. The media, once again, completely missed the significance of a landmark happening in this election.

The moms, in their 3rd day of marching, have touched the hearts of millions of people and changed the narrative of President Trump’s desire to present him as the candidate of law and order.

Social media has done wild sharing the Mother’s Rebellion against President Trump and his camo secret agents.

Ever since the American Revolution, Americans have been twitchy about troops showing up invited and unwanted in our cities and towns. The Quartering Acts, passed by British Parliament in 1765, required local governments of the American colonies to provide British soldiers with housing and food.

The colonists didn’t like it any more than the Moms do. It helped spark a revolution, just like Trump has. The British didn’t have to face the moms.

At least the colonists could see the Redcoat’s faces. They didn’t have masks, camo, and unmarked vans.

My understanding of politics is that you don’t want to see photos of federal agents in camo with big guns and lots of pepper spray and noise grenades shooting stuff and menacing moms,  some of them pregnant.

It’s stupid, for one thing, but it also seems viscerally un-American. Trump’s legions of angry apologists will defend it, but to me, it is indefensible. And reprehensible.

I was knocked out reading about this story of the mothers, and I just assumed it would be the biggest story of the day. But it wasn’t.

Just as the military forces in Portland were a blatantly political prop in the President’s now desperate re-election effort, so was Donald Trump’s sudden discovery that the coronavirus was real, and that it might be getting worse.

Our media missed the rise of Trumpism, they missed the emergence of the resistance to Trumpism, they missed the rise of Black Lives Matter,  and they missed the instant growth of the Moms as a political movement.

If you watched the videos and stories from Portland, you could see that the sudden emergence of a national mother’s movement against Trumpism is much bigger than Portland.

The mothers have a powerful agenda. They call for a better America, they protest against militarization of

police and government agencies. This is really a march for a gentler and more humane America, and when Trump’s militia retreated from Naked Athena last night, the game was on.

This is the beginning of the battle for a Kinder America. The moms are protecting all of us, not just their kids. And isn’t that what moms do?

Other than sending good wishes and saying nothing at all of any substance, Trump did make some news at his anemic and bloodless press conference.

He startled everyone in the country by wishing Ghislaine Maxwell, the incarcerated former girlfriend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein well as she faces felony charges of procuring girls and young women for him.

That was a jaw-dropper.

Maxwell was arrested in early July on charges that she aided Epstein in his years-long sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls.

What wellness did he wish for Ms. Maxwell? Acquittal? Exoneration? A continuation of her career enabling the molestation of young girls?

Even before that, Trump’s briefing looked to me like one of those hostage videos from North Korea. He looked as if someone was pointing a gun to his head as he robotically and without any feeling said masks might be a good idea.

As his niece, Mary Trump pointed out in her new book Too Much And Never Enough, the President loves his own words, no one else’s.

He just can’t show any genuine emotion, not unless it’s about him.

To me, this is how the media fails us.

Trump’s brief talk was blatantly political and almost entirely devoid of any real news.

The now three-day-old march of the mothers was extraordinary, touching, powerful, and unprecedented in America.

More and more, we look like a Banana Republic in South America, with our own masked soldiers driving around snatching people off the streets. This is what they mean by “tone deaf.”

I thought of the “Mothers Of The Disappeared” in Argentina, still looking for their sons and daughters after 40 years.

President Trump said he sent those soldiers into Portland to end the disruption and disorder the city has been experiencing for 50 days and nights. While most of the protests have been peaceful, and with most of the city functioning normally, there has been some violence and vandalism.

Everyone in Portland says Trump has made it a lot worse. For all their guns and gas, whoever those people are in their uniforms, they are in over their heads, just like the man who sent them and put them at so much unnecessary risk.

City officials said the violence was beginning to ebb before Trump’s militia was sent in.

Since they arrived, the city has been in an uproar, triggering the most significant protests yet.

Then came the emergence of the Wall Moms as a force in Portland and elsewhere. Thanks to social media, the moms became a national group overnight, with brand new chapters all over the country.

If they link up with Black Lives Matter, which I suspect they will, the President may have dug his most bottomless hole yet.

You have not heard the last of the moms. Theirs is a very human story; it touches the heart. The Washington Post interviewed three of them yesterday, listen for yourselves.

The media showed us once more how they have enabled the worst excesses of Donald Trump, shielded him from accountability, permitted him to distract us with one manufactured crisis after another, and drawn us away from the very human suffering and consequences of his Presidency.

Mass media is no longer about conscience and oversight. It is just about money.  It is now entirely controlled by giant corporations who make billions of dollars off of the conflict and tension poisoning our civic life.

Their ethos is profit and loss, not public service. Thank God for the Internet. Information does want to be free, for better or worse.

The media love covering institutional events like Washington Press conferences because they don’t have to pay to send reporters anywhere, and there are precious few reporters left to send anyway.

Video is cheap and plentiful.

Cable news is a cash cow in part because it’s mostly about people sitting at desks and commenting on their inexpensive images. It is the land of the talking heads.

It serves the needs of Washington bureaucrats and politicians, and it serves the needs of corporate media who make a lot of money from what used to be called journalism.

It has almost single-handedly powered the rise and free rise of Donald Trump. Americans worship the faces they see on  TV, and he is on TV every minute of every day, no matter what he has to do to get there. The media can pretend to hate and confront him; that is an illusion.

They each make the other possible and profitable. The media has never figured out how to deal with someone like Trump, who undermines trust in journalism every day and who lies every time he opens his mouth.

Trump has used media to overwhelm our political system, hypnotize millions of people with his ability to make often false news and controversy, and flood images of him across the spectrum of the information system.

There is no one else who comes close.

Trump’s daily propaganda talk in the White House driveway is a prime example of how the media fails us and enables a demagogue.

President Trump chose this form because he can always walk away if he doesn’t like a question, often by pretending he can’t hear questions over the road of the helicopters.

There are no follow-ups and no chance for reporters to challenge his many lies and delusional exaggerations.

Instead of walking away or refusing to enable this quite naked effort at information control,  reporters rush out like puppies at dinner to shout questions that are either ignored or answered dishonestly.

Trump gets to lead every newscast every day.

Look what happened to him when he foolishly agreed to sit with Chris Wallace on Fox News for one hour.

Without a helicopter for him to rush off to and an hour to work with, Wallace called out the President for one lie after another.

Trump looked awful, sweaty, evasive, dishonest, and poorly informed. Wallace, a good interviewer, and journalist showed us the real Trump, not the carefully produced and enabled one.

You won’t see the President do that again, back to the White House driveway.

The moms were vastly more important than Trump’s weak and transparently self-service fake press conference on the coronavirus. The moms were a different story.

People love their moms; they don’t care to see them prodded with batons or gassed.

These women marched out in front of their sons and daughters and quite bravely challenged the President’s use of combat-clad soldiers to advance his re-election campaign.

No one had asked them to come to Portland, and no public official wanted them there.

Trump set himself up for one more monumental disaster.

If any of his militia is harmed, or one of the mothers is injured or dies — both perhaps even inevitable in the dangerous and thoughtless confrontation in Portland, the mothers will have struck a mighty blow for democracy.

I think of all those men in the U.S. Senate, and how pale and feckless and useless they look in comparison to the moms.

Posting messages on Twitter is not the same thing as marching out at night to get tear-gassed and hit with rubber bullets to plea for a more human world.