Even if he loses the presidency, we won’t have seen the back of Trump
ON July 21, 2016, just hours before he accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump and I sat down for an interview. What he said on that occasion would serve as a remarkably candid foreshadowing of how Mr Trump would handle his relationship with the media in what, on that day, seemed the unlikely event that he would actually become president.
“I don’t need you guys any more,” Mr Trump told me. He pointed to his millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook, explaining that the days of television anchors and commentators acting as gatekeepers between newsmakers and the public were essentially over.
Without discernible acrimony, he trotted out one of the early versions of what would eventually become a leitmotif of his presidency: the media was made up of largely terrible people trafficking in fake news. There was nothing personal in the observation. It was the unsheathing of a multi-purpose device, used adroitly in tandem with the endlessly adaptable political vehicle provided by social media during the election campaign and now during his presidency.
Is there any reason to believe what worked for Mr Trump before he was elected and while in the White House won’t be equally effective after he leaves office?
There is a disarming innocence to the assumption that whether by impeachment, indictment or a cleansing electoral redo in 2020, Mr Trump will be exorcised from the White House and he and his base will revert to irrelevance.
It imagines that, for some reason, Mr Trump in defeat or disgrace will become a quieter, humbler, more restrained presence on Twitter and Facebook than heretofore.
It assumes further that CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, perhaps chastened by the consequences of their addictive coverage of him as candidate and president, will resist the urge to pay similar attention to him in exile.
Let the record show Mr Trump has launched the careers of numerous media stars and that expressions of indignant outrage on the left and breathless admiration on the right have resulted in large, entirely non-partisan profits for the industry of journalism. Why anyone should assume Mr Trump and those who cherish or loathe him in the news business will easily surrender such a hugely symbiotic relationship is hard to understand.
It is all but inevitable that whoever succeeds him in the White House will be perceived by 30-40pc of voters as illegitimate – and that the former president will enthusiastically encourage them in this perception. Whatever his failings, Mr Trump is a brilliant self-promoter and provocateur. He showed no embarrassment, either as candidate or president, about using his high visibility to benefit his business interests. Untethered from any political responsibility, he can be expected to capitalise on his new status as political martyr and leader of a new “resistance”.
The dirty little secret about the US’s relationship with Mr Trump is that we have become addicted to him. His ups, his downs, his laughs, his frowns are (as the lovely song from ‘My Fair Lady’ once put it in another context) “second nature to (us) now, like breathing out and breathing in”.
When he fails to tweet for a few hours, Trumpologists search for meaning in the silence. Hours are devoted on television every day to examining his utterances. Has there been a day in the past two years without a Trump-related story on the front page of every major US newspaper? How does the president lie to us? Let us count the ways. And we do, endlessly, meticulously.