Hear President Trump’s distorted wall of sound
Trump says absurd things. Unblinking, Sarah Huckabee Sanders backs him up, Heather Mallick writes.
Detectives interrogating a murder suspect often go quiet, implicitly offering the killer the conversational impetus to speak. He is given time and space in which to climb onto the battered scaffold and hang himself with his own words.
Speaking of President Donald Trump, his phone monologue on an excruciating morning show called Fox and Friends on Thursday was too painful to watch live. Although I am a morbid person who quite enjoys the sensation of disgust, I felt able to watch only serial segments online, like a hospital drip.
Trump did hang himself legally, twice, on the matter of attorney-client privilege with his former lawyer Michael Cohen, and on his threat to meddle with the Justice Department, presumably about the Russia investigation.
But those were just two notes in a wall of sound, a non-stop blast of lies, rage, petty complaints, self-praise, self-pity and whining, interspersed with the words “fake” and “collusion” and bridged by the constant phrase “and by the way.” All three Fox hosts, the dimmest of bulbs, began with the huge smiles that are American television’s resting face and ended up looking grim with mouths like hyphens.
What I heard was madness. There are always damaged men with long white hair on the street with signs — “The BLOOD of Damnation is Within You!”—shouting like this. But at least they have a point and stick to it: you are all going to hell.
Trump had no point, he was all over the place. I heard different voices behind his, Vice-President Mike Pence, the Scaramucci, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all saying the same thing.
The wall of sound, cooked up in the ’60s by noted music producer and murderer Phil Spector, wasn’t the foghorn you’d expect. It was layered sound with different instruments playing the same tune, say, three kinds of piano. Springsteen’s version in “Born to Run” had overdubbed sax, guitar and drums.
As Trump spoke, a toad hopping from lily pad to lily pad, he was backed by a choir invisible. Take Trump & Huckabee (it sounds like a brand of jam or maybe linseed oil) as a pairing. Trump says absurd things. Unblinking, Sanders backs him up.
Trump was defensive about the Russian investigation. “Nobody’s been tougher to Russia than I am. You can ask President Putin about that!” This is not true, if only because Putin is not going to say that.
But there’s Sanders claiming that nobody’s been tougher, not JFK, not Carter or even Reagan. She then reads from a prepared list of a dozen minor ways Trump has punished Russia. She says this deadpan, which is what Trump likes in a woman’s voice. She lies.
Trump says the U.S. is the highest- taxed nation in the world. A reporter says this isn’t true. It is, says Sanders. But it isn’t.
“Sorry, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree,” she tells the reporter. She lies a lot. Does she believe Trump? Maybe. Does she believe his lies or her own lies about him? Politico writes at length in “The Puzzle of Sarah Huckabee Sanders” about what her head might contain but comes to no conclusions. It’s easier to analyze Trump than his blank-eyed daily briefer.
She is the second layer of the Trump sound. The third is Jeff Sessions lying about meeting Russians. The fourth is Trump’s collapsible foldable lawyer saying he’s never even been to Prague.
These aren’t the talking points carefully mapped by previous administrations staying on message before a watchful media. Trump is not leading a choir.
These are unco-ordinated liars saying vague boastful things they think will please one of the most powerful men in the world. They are different instruments. They don’t call ahead. They don’t check with each other.
They hear Trump’s lies and sing along. As a wall of sound, it’s pretty poor stuff. It doesn’t carry you on a last chance power drive out of Freehold, N.J. It’s a wall of bombast, industrial-scale dishonesty and fear.
One day, maybe sooner than we expect, each layer of Trump’s wall of sound will peel off and speak alone in a courtroom witness box. They will all be soloists then.
These are unco-ordinated liars saying vague boastful things they think will please one of the most powerful men in the world