Gripe No.1: Tonight the Democratic candidates for president, 12 of them, meet in their fourth debate. Debate is, of course, a euphemism for hullabaloo that is modeled on The Game of the Week.

Active participation in sports in youth and vicarious participation as fans through adult life is omni-pervasive in our society and competitive sports have become America’s paradigm for life. There is very little in human experience that we do assimilate to an athletic game, using the structures and language of sport to view all life as an agon, a combative competition.

This brings me to my point: I see a discouraging similarity of coverage of the debates to coverage of professional sport. We have pre-debate shows to discuss candidates’ earlier performance and to predict who will do best in the debate. Commentary is provided during pauses in the debate. And at the end come the post-debate roundups, evaluation of the debaters culminating in a determination of who was the winner.

This is by way of saying that I think the media trivialize and debase political discourse by turning it into a show, one like the show we know best, professional sports.

Gripe No. 2: I feel the media have bought into Trump’s characterization of those who have disclosed his malfeasance. Just today I read a piece in which figures from the White House who have revealed or are likely to reveal to Congress what they know about the President’s self-serving plots are referred to as snitches, just what Trump wants us to think of them.

Here I will complain not about sports in American life, but about the paradigmatic role of organized crime. So many gangster movies, so many that portray the gangster as an attractive anti-hero! Trump is the Godfather, surrounded by trustworthy capos and soldiers. Whistle-blowers or witnesses before Congress are the informers, snitches, rats who tell the feds the Godfather’s secrets. Trump also describes anyone who criticizes him as a traitor, but he never says traitor to what. To the U.S.A. or to Donald Trump?

But even though Trump thinks like a gangster, behaves like a gangster, and sounds like a gangster, we must not be tricked into treating him as another head of a crime family. Yes, he’s probably guilty of some lowdown crimes for which he should ultimately be prosecuted. But what he has been doing as President is beyond crime. He is breaking his inaugural oath by obstructing justice, condemning the Constitution, and is like Pravda streaming destructive falsehoods.