The media mans the barricades
It’s not hard to discern the good guys and the bad guy in the opening hours of the Trump presidency. He’s the bad guy. If you’ve been reading a newspaper, a web page, a digital report or anything other than the few outlets dedicated to promoting everything Trumpian, it’s been pretty hard to miss.
“The Resistance Begins,” declared a Globe and Mail headline Sunday in a story about worldwide protest marches, sounding a bit like Danton or Marat or another revolutionary French firebrand addressing a mob from the barricades. The Toronto Star let it be known that Scarlett Johansson, Madonna and Alicia Keys all joined a march in Washington, signalling that — whatever changes Trump might hope to impose — “progressives” will still take their political lead from celebrities.
The New York Times has been beside itself since the inauguration, pouring out a deluge of alerts that Trump’s election may be the greatest threat to befall America since … well, who knows? Bolshevism? The end of the gold standard? The day someone decided it would be a good idea to get involved in Vietnam? “Hints of Sustained Campaign of Protest,” the Times proclaimed hopefully in a report on Saturday’s marches. “Scenes of Protest on Every Continent.” “Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March Had 3 Times as Many People as Inauguration.”
Crowd scientists? Now that’s a job posting you don’t see every day.
Even as Trump was delivering his Friday address, U.S. network pundits were disputing his words, rejecting his figures, denouncing his claims. Predictably, on his very first full day as president, Trump used a visit to the CIA not to heal scars he’s opened with the intelligence community but to eviscerate the media.
“The most dishonest human beings on Earth,” he called them. The Washington Post reported that when Trump spokesman Sean Spicer called a news conference to address reports on the crowd size at the inauguration, “he didn’t take ques- tions, or tell the truth.”
No one who watched Trump deliver his inaugural address can deny that this is shaping up as a very worrying presidency. If Trump follows anything like the agenda he laid out in such stark, angry, bitter terms, the world is in for four years of extreme challenge. The new president’s economic agenda — an end to free trade, a wave of punitive tariffs, a wall of protectionism sealing off the U. S. from global markets — is a recipe for disaster.
The very reason governments have spent most of the last century seeking freer trade and fewer barriers is that previous efforts to prosper through protectionism were colossal failures.
Britain, for which Trump seems to have an affection, became a world power that dominated the globe for three centuries from its tiny island base because it established a global network of trade, sending ships off to Asia, India and the New World to trade in tea, tobacco and spices.
Trump seems to want to go in the opposite direction: take a great, wealthy power and enfeeble it by building barriers with its biggest customers. And insult them as he does so.
It’s frightening. He clearly lacks the temperament to deal with the sort of challenges he’ll face. If he can’t survive 24 hours in office without going postal over the head count at his inauguration, how will he react when a real crisis erupts? His performance to date makes North Korea’s Kim Jong- un look sober and seasoned.
But it works both ways. It already appears evident that dispassionate, non-partisan, boringly factual coverage of Trump’s administration will be difficult to find. It was pretty clear in the closing weeks of the Obama presidency that the media had abandoned any pretence of objectivity, and no longer felt a need to even pretend to be impartial. The departing president was accorded loving treatment, glowing reviews, fawning retrospectives on his style, his family, his exceptional nature. Even his uneven record was often couched in apologetic terms, noting the obstructionist attitude of Congress, the mess of an economy he inherited. As in, “What could you expect, the man faced challenges.”
Trump will get none of that. Given his confrontational nature and astonishingly tender ego, he could hardly expect the people paid to report on his actions to simply cringe and obey orders.
He appears congenitally incapable of containing his manifold resentments, and the media world appears to have decided to give as good as it gets.
A luta continua. To the barricades, comrades. Someone needs to teach democracy a lesson, and apparently it’s going to be us.
HOW WILL HE REACT WHEN A REAL CRISIS ERUPTS? — KELLY McPARLAND THIS IS SHAPING UP AS A VERY WORRYING PRESIDENCY.