“I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.”
Michelle Wolf, mc’ing the White House Correspondents’ dinner, April 28, 2018
Ms. Wolf got excoriated for that appearance, doubtless because she cut right to the bone, and the assembled Amtrak-corridor journalists, not surprisingly, couldn’t handle it and took great umbrage.
But what she said was right then and remains true.
The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging the problem, taking responsibility for how it came about, and for solving it. I don’t see American media ever getting over its obsession with the individual I call The Angry Inch, and so will never admit the problem that creates for informing the public, much less that it has any responsibility for fixing it.
Money’s part of it. Nearly eight years ago, in the early days of the 2016 campaign, then-CBS head honcho Les Moonves stepped right out and said it:
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun . . . I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry, it’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
So is the media’s need to be entertained. Even after two years of this rolling train wreck, NPR reporter Jim Zarroli in 2019 tweeted:
“I know a lot of people may have trouble understanding this, but no reporter was crying when Trump won. Whatever journalists think of him as citizens, he is a great story. It’s actually been, well, fun covering him.
After the 2020 election, Ben White, then of Politico, came clean, as well:
“Deep down in places you don’t talk about at cocktail parties you want him tweeting those tweets. You miss him tweeting those tweet . . . . And the sweet rush of outrage that followed. If you say you don’t you are lying.”
So, for the Fourth Estate, documenting the freak show boils down to making their jobs easy, “fun,” and cost-effective.
Even the spectre of something far worse than the first Angry Inch administration on the horizon has largely failed to move our media to change its ways.
Back in mid-December, the revelation that a folder with “highly sensitive intelligence” about Russian interference in the 2016 election “went missing” after the individual I refer to as The Angry Inch left the White House. After about a day, the story disappeared. Fifty years ago, Watergate-era reporters would have been all over that. Today, meh . . . .
Likewise, reporting on remarks by The Inch about illegal immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” which could have been culled directly from Hitler’s playbook, disappeared in short order.
Then everyone’s cage got briefly rattled during closing arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on The Inch’s claims of immunity for any and all acts related to the January 6 attempted coup. The Inch’s attorney, John Sauer (formerly notable being part of the team that sued to overturn the 2020 election results), responded to a question from Judge Florence Pan, who asked whether a president would be immune from prosecution if he did something like, say, ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate political rivals.
With his client sitting nearby, Sauer replied, “He would have to be impeached and convicted, first.”
In other words, an ex-president is beyond the reach of the law for anything he did while he was still in office.
The initial shock of that remark once again passed in due course.
The central question of this year’s presidential election is whether The Inch will somehow manage to return to the White House. Those of us tuned in already are flooded with news stories and social media posts from writers who’ve been examining entrails and polling (at this point, both have about the same predictive power), looking for signs on which they can base their arguments about the likely outcome. The general assumption is that the race will be “close,” though probably not in the overall vote count—The Inch has never won the popular vote—but in a handful of states that will make the difference in the Electoral College, most likely Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with Arizona and Georgia (who surprisingly went to Biden last time) as possible additions.
The Inch and Republicans in general have made it clear they will do anything to win, even as they acknowledge that they have next-to-nothing to run on in terms of accomplishments. They will spin all manner of lies and conspiracy theories; they’ll go in for threats of violence; they will work overtime to stop people from voting; they will attempt to clog the courts with challenges; and more than a few of them who are members of the House have said they will not vote to certify the election unless The Inch wins.
Moreover, they have made it clear what they intend to do if they win.
Republicans hold several advantages, including being able to count on billions of dollars in campaign funding from America’s wealthiest people, who are savoring the notion of establishing an oligarchy; a propaganda network with a broad reach; a potent appeal to racism in the immigration “issue,” and the support of tens of millions of voters who nurture a searing hate going back decades.
Democrats, meanwhile, continue on their traditional path of passing legislation and believing the public will wake up to all the good things they have done and reward them for it. On paper, they hold some reasonable cards: a good economy with strong job and wage growth combined with moderating inflation. These conditions could certainly change by Election Day, of course.
What won’t change, and what is one of their strongest suits, is abortion. Pundits and reporters keep expecting that to fade away, but it hasn’t, and it won’t.
Meanwhile, Dems have enjoyed a pretty good recent track record at the polls. After the shock of 2016, they rallied and took back the House in 2018. Two years later, Joe Biden, campaigning largely from his basement, beat The Inch by more than 7 million votes and won 306 electoral votes, including those from Georgia and Arizona, normally welcome territory for the Rs. Then, in 2022, a year in which the Rs were widely expected to re-take Congress, Dems held the Senate and barely lost the House. More recently, they’ve notched a series of victories down ballot, including flipping state legislative seats and, very importantly, the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
But add, in the Rs’ column, a mainstream media routinely giving Der Leader a pass by insisting on treating him as an ordinary candidate. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, for one, dissected this situation well, pointing out there is no shortage of expert analysis available to journalists who might wish to report on the threat The Inch represents.
Our media has shown little interest. Just the opposite, in fact. Beyond a handful of journalists who’re performing Sisyphusian labor trying to make clear that the dismantling of our democracy could be right around the corner, political reporting instead ignores who he is—a corrupt, completely unscrupulous megalomaniac—but tends to cast him as a challenger of norms, a tester of limits, making him sound audacious, almost heroic.
As one example, a New York Times story about the New Hampshire primary, which The Inch won by a modest margin, credited him, in some purplish prose, with driving traffic to the polls:
“The exceptionally high turnout on Tuesday underscores the electrifying effect Mr. Trump has on the electorate, driving loyal supporters and determined opposition to the polls as his divisive style of politics both inspires and revolts.”
When they do this, the scribes serve his purpose.
Ms. Rubin’s paper ran a piece about The Inch’s more recent public rants, which have grown more unhinged and threatening than usual, but it was cast in terms of how they might affect public perception and the election:
“But the display also suggests that one of Trump’s most distinct advantages in the general election might not hold up so well over time: perceived mental sharpness.”
This is an individual who has long had difficulty stringing coherent sentences together, but while Biden’s every slip on the podium over the last three years was read as a possible indicator of him lacking “mental sharpness”—typified by the Post headline last fall: “Anxiety ripples through Democratic Party over Biden”—The Inch is only now coming under what is, so far, light scrutiny.
Perhaps what irritates me as much as anything is the condescension of the media coupled with the refusal to acknowledge that their work affects people’s perceptions and attitudes. “No, no, you don’t understand our work; we report and let people decide.” Bollocks. The framing and tone of the reporting shapes public opinion, and denying that is pathetically dishonest and cowardly.
As I’m writing, it’s been three years since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn into office, two weeks after the failure of an attempted coup. In fewer than 300 days, we will hold another presidential election, and a year from now, there will be another inauguration. That could result in a renewed effort to recover from the interregnum of 2017 to 2021, or it could be the end of our representative democracy.
One of the philosopher Elie Wiesel’s most familiar observations includes this line: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” Newspeople stress they must be neutral and objective in their work. But avoiding writing accurately about what’s in front of your face is not neutrality; it’s complicity, and doing so to preserve the perception of your objectivity is shameful.
Later,
Scaypgrayce 