Guest post: They keep treating it as politics as usual
Originally a comment by iknklast on Grave concerns.
why nobody in the media seems to grasp the gravity of what the GOP is trying to do
The media has struggled with the Trump dumpster fire from the beginning, because they keep trying to do things the same way. They keep treating it as politics as usual, so they try to figure out what the strategy is, what the end game is, what Plan B might be. None of these things exist. This is a demolition operation, and unless you understand demolition, you can’t get there.
Maddow gets it because she is able to see that this is not business as usual. But most of the pundits are in the mode of doing what they’ve learned to do, and thinking what they’ve learned to think, and acting how they’ve learned to act.
Many of the Republicans are in the same handbasket with Trump. This isn’t the Republican Party of Eisenhower, or even of Nixon, where working within the government system to promote business and lower taxes was the order of the day. This is a group of wildcats (no insult meant to any actual cats who might be reading this) who have no integrity, no conscience, no compassion, no human feeling for people outside their own set, and believe with an almost religious belief that they are a race of superior human beings. They have gorged themselves on Ayn Rand, and are vomiting Rush Limbaugh. They believe in the superman, and they are the superman. The rest of us are, to use a familiar parlance, “losers”.
They may sell themselves as promoting the “American Way”, but in reality, they are seeking to be the rulers of the rest of us. Some of them are motivated by money, some by Christianity, but a horrifying number are motivated by both. They are serving God and Mammon, and mistakenly believe that they are the natural ruling class. They believe fervently that they achieved their exalted place by their own efforts alone, because they are incapable of seeing all the people helping them as they climbed – including healthy doses of the government, which provides so much for so many and is despised by most.
This is what the media isn’t expecting. They have been part of the aristocratic class for a long time, and assume they understand it, but they are not listening anymore. They open their mouths to begin analysis almost the second the politician stops speaking, so they don’t have time to process what was said. And, if I may liken this to sports (my husband is an avid watcher), it is like those announcers who will discuss endlessly whether that ball was really in or out, whether that play was good or not, and will announce with enormous smug satisfaction what the answer is, even though they are perched in a soundproof booth above the field and may not be seeing what the refs are seeing. Just as these announcers are always totally sure that they know, even if the ref doesn’t, the pundits are convinced that they understand what is going on, even though this is nothing they’ve seen before. In short, they lack the flexibility to accommodate the new world where we find ourselves.
I actually disagree with that, I think we in the media do grasp the gravity of what the GOP is trying to do. It is how you get to hear about it.
The trouble is, take Donald Trump. Nobody can claim that they weren’t warned about him, 90% of the coverage of Trump was how bad a president he would be, how much of a liar he was, how was a complete idiot in fact.
And yes, he got a disproportionate degree of coverage – but voting for someone because the media keeps going on about how bad he is, is a bit like pouring petrol on your house during a wildfire because the media is telling you about how bad the fire is.
It isn’t that Trump got more coverage, it is what that coverage was saying.
Americans to a large extent have been raised on rebel narratives where you smash the system, tear down the barriers, cut through the red tape and all of that.
This is exactly what Trump is actually doing.
The problem isn’t that the media don’t get that this is a demolition project, it is that a large chunk of the population has been raised on the idea that such a project is a good idea.
Bruce, no disrespect to you, but I continue to read pundits who see this as merely another Republican administration with politics centered around a pro-business, anti-tax agenda, and treat it as though it can be analyzed using the same tools. Yes, we hear about these things, but in the case of much of the media I read, it is presented in the same way as it was presented when Nixon went to China or when Bill Clinton signed a bill into law – it is just a slightly different presidential style, but we can twist this and fit it into a normal mode.
Maybe the journalists do know what’s happening. Maybe they are simply just trying to do the “fair and balanced” thing. Maybe the analysts do know there is no greater strategy beyond breaking things, and no Plan B, and no thought behind the actions. If so, I am unable to see that represented, because magazines, newspapers, and talking heads are treating it as a standard sort of political process that is to be analyzed using the same tools as we have always used. Those tools are broken.
The thing is, there are some out there – bloggers, the ethics lawyers from Bush 43 and Obama, non-profits – who are screaming this from the rooftop while the mainstream pundits continue to present this as ordinary news right alongside the local 4H queen and king and the City Council voting to close 9th street. And most of the news I read presents this as simply a disagreement on what should be done between the extremely right-wing Republicans and the (to them) extremely left-wing Democrats (you know, like Hillary Clinton).
This is not meant as a personal attack on you. Since I have not read any of the things you have written (except on this site) I certainly cannot say what your take is, or how you present it. I can only go by the rather large segment of media that I do consume.
I know that this is little consolation to you, iknklast, but in the UK the mainstream media seems to have his number. I’ve noticed that even BBC newsreaders seem to have adopted heavily sarcastic tones when reporting on Trump. They all-but ‘airquote’ the word president.