The politics of distraction.
To quote the president of the United States: “So sad.”
Overwhelmed with sadness, actually, with despondency, for the opening un-grace notes of Donald Trump’s thuggish presidency.
Aquestion for the media, however: Isn’t six days into Trump’s term too soon to be jumping the shark?
It’s as if somebody fired a starter’s pistol and the race is on — between Trump’s maladroit comportment and the overwrought push-back from a Fourth Estate girded for battle.
Already what should be the immediate gist of the matter — Trump’s assault on multilateral trade pacts (killing U.S. participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership) and dismantling Barack Obama policy (blocking NGOs that perform abortion-related services from receiving federal funding) — has been sidelined by the trivialities of mutual loathing.
Aside: I would remind that Trump’s aversion for global trade agreements is more in line with Bernie Sanders than the Republican Party, while the “Global Gag Rule’’ (as it’s known by critics) essentially forcing healthoriented NGOs to choose between funding or so much as providing abortion information, has been backand-forth rescinded/reinstated by Democratic and Republican administrations since the Reagan era.
But these were among Trump’s first executive orders.
And that was getting down to the business of Trump’s manifesto following a weekend of outright duplicity by the president and a mobilized media scrambling to keep pace with his non-stop dissembling.
From Trump ignominiously using the background of the CIA’s memorial wall, hallowed ground, to bang on about journalists as “the most dishonest people on the earth,” to the media’s feverish deconstruction of his inauguration address, neither side has acquitted itself particularly well.
In the 24-hour news cycle last Saturday, for instance, Trump’s fulmination over the neither-here-nor-there dispute about the size of the inauguration crowd managed to largely shove aside the significance of the massive Women’s March protest in Washington and indeed in cities around the world. At the very least, media — especially TV coverage — pulled off a weird newsworthy equivalency between the two: obvious falsehoods and “alternative facts” asserted by the president and his press spokes-thingies versus an obsessive need by the media to get in the last word about driblets.
Trump, sorest winner ever, has shown no willingness to let the little things go. That tendency, of course, was a core theme of his presidential campaign and stayed Twitter outfront in the weeks after his election. Yet the media tactically accommodated Trump by taking the bait, not merely documenting the tweet yips, which is quite proper — the drivel is coming from the American president, after all — but endlessly fixating on the how-could-he? angle. How could he? The same way he has for month after month over the past year and a half. Because, despite being a 70-yearold who apparently doesn’t even use email, Trump — in essence a showboat salesman (The Art of the Spiel) — instinctively grasped the power of his social media pulpit, shooting his blurts straight over the head of his perceived enemies, speaking directly to the base that catapulted him into the White House.
Trump may be a vainglorious bloviator and sleazy narcissist — Lounge Lizard Goes to Washington — but he’s also cunning. Bashing the media played well with a public that distrusts us. It rendered him a tilter at institutional windmills, the anti-hero who vowed to drain swamps, though he’s brought in a rogue’s gallery of crocodilian billionaires and oligarchs similarly ill-suited for cabinet positions. Has there been a murmur of displeasure from the Trump constituency? No. It’s just us, the anti-Trumps, chanting: Told-you-so, told-you so. As if derision and hectoring is going to change anybody’s mind.
You think we would have learned a lesson from the spectacularly misleading polls and the smug consensus that Trump didn’t have a chance in hell of becoming the Republican candidate or the 45th president. The Trumpists handed Big Media their hat.
But we’re no more chastened than, well, Trump, still disastrously out of touch with millions upon millions of Americans who preferred this cuckoo maverick to the establishment option of Hillary Clinton.
They doubtless nodded their heads in agreement when press secretary Sean Spicer pronounced, on the tenor of Trump’s coverage: “I’ve never seen it like this. The default narrative is always negative and it’s demoralizing.”
Not half as demoralizing as Trump Un-plugged at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Much as we may have wished that the Orange-a-tan would about-face pivot once he formally occupied the Oval Office, did anybody really expect him to transition into presidential and statesman-like and measured in his words? This is what worked for him in dispatching Clinton, so palpably more suitable for the job, with a public service resume from here to next week. And while she may have won the popular vote, her team was strategically inept, outmanoeuvred by the Trump campaign’s focus on electoral college votes, particularly in states which the Democrats wrongly believed to be in the bag and ruinously ignored by Clinton.
All right, that’s in the past. We are where we are.
Engaging with Trump on minutiae is getting a little silly. We know Trump is a liar. We know he doesn’t care about being caught out in mendacity. We know that claiming he never had a war going with the intelligence community — an invention of the media, he claimed with a straight face — was a jaw-dropping nose-stretcher.
And in these preamble days, it clearly doesn’t matter. Echo chamber, us.
It is the media’s role to speak truth to power, to hold those in power accountable. Yet that noble responsibility has been blunted, like a splintered sword, against the anvil of the Trump phenomenon.
Who are we trying to convince from the loftiness of our self-assured faultlessness? Allow me to cite Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Achronically aberrant Trump might get himself impeached, as many of us fervently hope, though the likelihood is slim to nil with Republicans controlling both houses.
Otherwise, four years of this monstrosity lie ahead.
If we don’t dial down the day-to-day outrage, we’ll expire from exhaustion before Trump passes the first month pole. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.