Anyway it's both unhelpful and almost cruel to put Trump on TV at all like CBS is doing. His mind is thick chowder and he can't/won't tell the truth. We should all already know what he is by now, which is exactly what he appears to be.
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) June 17, 2019
In my opinion, David Roth is poised to follow in the footsteps of great commentors like Damon Runyon, Roy Blount, and Charles P. Pierce as he moves from sportwriting to politics. This is from the New Republic:
… Even after the hit NBC reality show The Apprentice rebuilt his personal fortune and retooled his image from Gilded Tabloid Oaf to Glowering Dealmaster, Trump never declined an opportunity to fish a quarter out of the toilet when the situation presented itself. That reflexive and amoral avarice is one of the ignoble truths of Trump, but it’s subsidiary to the most important and elemental fact about the man, which is that he never does or says anything new. Some things may be shaded slightly differently from one blurt or boast to the next—every number he says invariably cheats upward over time, and he periodically adds new scenes and jokes to the metastasizing stand-up act that he rolls out at his rallies…
At this stage in his sublimely unexamined life and increasingly evident cognitive decline, Trump isn’t really capable of very compelling misdirections or even passably convincing falsehoods. He digresses because he loses the plot, and he lies when the truth wouldn’t look good on him; he distracts himself and tells himself lies because it is the only way to square what is actually happening with what he would prefer to be happening. (In this, he is but building on the spiritual birthright bestowed on him by his dad: Fred Trump was an ardent worshipper at the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, the reactionary business prophet who distilled many failed superpower incantations of his own in his blockbuster self-help tract, The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale presided over Donald’s first wedding in 1977, and remains Trump’s most frequently cited spiritual mentor.)
Where the media has failed and continues to fail is in its insistence that Trump is doing all of this, or any of it, for the same reason that other politicians are understood to have aimed to distract or chosen to lie. When this tendency is criticized, the criticism often arrives in the form of some lamentation that the media is still covering Trump as if he were a Normal President.
That criticism is reasonable as far as it goes, which is not nearly far enough. A series of long-standing procedural and political and discursive norms really have failed the essential challenge that Trumpian politics and Trump’s own bulletproof shamelessness present. But the steepness and rapidity of their fall raises some serious questions about just how sturdy they were to begin with. The spectacle of expert analysts and thought leaders parsing the actions of a man with no expertise or capacity for analysis is the purest acid satire—but less because of how badly that expert analysis has failed than because of how sincerely misplaced it is. Trump represents an extraordinary challenge to political media precisely because there is nothing here to parse, no hidden meanings or tactical elisions or slow-rolled strategic campaign. Mainstream political media and Trump’s opponents in the Democratic Party conceive of politics as chess, a matter of feints and sacrifices and moves made so as to open the way for other moves. There’s an element of romance to this vision, which is a crucial tenet in a certain type of big-D Democratic thought and also something like the reason why anyone would need to employ a political analyst. But Trump is not playing chess. The man is playing Hungry Hungry Hippos…
The politics of Fox News are reactionary, but they are also hard to pin down—they are about a feeling, a combination of distaste and distrust for all the things that other people are getting away with and seem so entitled to out there. This hunched and feral posture of grievance is then combined with a fiercely put-upon impatience with the service that viewers themselves are receiving…
Trump’s towering incuriosity and impatience with other people have ensured that, despite having a massive intelligence-and-policy apparatus at his command, he continues to get most of his information from his television. Fox News’ editorial policies have ensured that he believes politics to consist of three separate and equally important parts: tax cuts, wars, and elections. You see the problem. ..Trump is prone to asking questions he doesn’t know the answer to on Twitter—wondering after the connections between the various obscure figures in the sprawling conspiracy against him and his success, which both succeeded to a criminal degree and failed miserably, and which is still ongoing or defeated and primed for prosecution. He’s going to make the things stop until he can figure out what’s going on; he’s going to stop doing the things that are confusing and don’t seem to be working and start doing the simpler things that will work; he’s going to get to the bottom of these horrible things that people keep hinting at.
He’s going to figure it all out and very strongly fix it […] but his television won’t tell him how. It keeps saying that it will, but then it just tells him about something else to worry about and some other person who is trying to bring him down and stop him from getting his due. He gets up in front of his crowds to tell them what he’s done and what he will do and draws a huge seething blank. And then he opens his mouth and yesterday’s television comes out, and they hoot and cheer because they know that what he’s saying is true, because they’d heard the same thing the other day. They’d found it upsetting and the man up there found it upsetting, too. He says they’re going to be looking into it.
Well that's a complicating factor for me as well tbh
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) June 17, 2019
De-platform the Liar-in-Chief!
If you watch the far-right absolutely lose their shit when someone gets deplatformed, you’ll find out that deplatforming is pretty effective. pic.twitter.com/lI0aSBzlLG
— AntiFash Gordon (@AntiFashGordon) June 15, 2019
mad citizen
That’s a long excerpt but certainly perceptive. I’ve had the same thought (as most here). Shorter Roth: There is no there there. So it’s ridiculous for pundits or anyone to parse or respect anything he blather out.
B.B.A.
The silver lining is that every time Il Douche spends an evening ranting in an empty stadium about how unfuckable Hillary is, he’s not doing any more damage to the country.
The cloud is that it means Bolton is in charge.
Patricia Kayden
Yes, de-platforming hate speech is a tool that media forums are finally doing and to king off Conservatives in the process. Ironically, these are the same Conservatives who cheer whenever a business owner declines to serve someone who is LGBT.
Brachiator
This gets close to what Trump is all about. He doesn’t play to his base. He and his base are as one. His resentment is their resentment. Their ignorance is his ignorance. And the strong force binding them together is Fox News.
JGabriel
David Roth via Anne Laurie @ Top:
We should … but clearly there’re about 40% (+/- 5) of the country who still don’t.
My take is that the networks should interview Trump as often as they want and can, because the more often his craven supporters have to defend him, the quicker they’ll get sick of it – and they are not patient people.
Hell, even if they don’t get sick of defending Trump, maybe we can keep enough of them angry enough, frequently enough, to spike their collective blood pressure and increase their mortality rate. (I’m getting mean in my late middle age.)
J R in WV
If the networks do the same thing they did last election, put his empty podium on all day waiting for him to show up and start lying, while real news is being generated by other candidates, some one will have to do something. CBS appears to be starting already, which is despicable, although not surprising.
Walter would be so disappointed at the way CBS is covering this rolling tragedy today.
Glad I don’t watch CBS at all anymore. Repulsive!
NotMax
Taking the bloom off Orlando.
jl
” Where the media has failed and continues to fail ”
is not calling out Trump’s bald faced lies. I hear totally false shit Trump says on the news every day, as if there were a possibility that it was true.
it only takes a word or phrase to fix it. Just say ‘falsely claims…’, or Trump said, with no evidence that…’
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NotMax: Orlando Furioso
ETA: Listening to MSNBC, trump played footage of Fox calling the election in 2016, and took credit for Lindsey Graham’s career.
japa21
@NotMax: To the corner young man.
japa21
@jl: Actually hearing the “no evidence to support” what he said more frequently.
Jerzy Russian
I remember seeing the Hungry, Hungry Hippos game commercials on TV as a kid. It looked like a fun game, but we never got one.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Meanwhile…
I’m starting to wonder if he’s…. not well
NotMax
FYI.
No Palestinians, No Israelis, Maybe Even No Journalists: What’s Left of Kushner’s Bahrain Summit
Wag
I thought that this was the money quote from the article. A truly amazing description. Thanks for sharing.
ThresherK
OT: US men leading Guyana 3-0 in 60th minute at the CONCACAF Gold Cup.
Yes, it’s Guyana. But considering the issues the USMNT has in dispatching teams like Trinidad & Tobago, etc, I’ll take my easy victories where I can get them.
Jerzy Russian
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe he is being like Arthur Carlson in that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where he was nominally running for mayor but for some reason was campaigning to lose. As I recall, he did end up losing in the end.
Run, Lillian
David Roth is one of my favorite writers of this, our shittiest timeline. He gets Trump better than anyone, and manages to cynically but hilariously indict our media for failing so spectacularly at doing the same. This is my favorite of his, everyone should give it a read, it is brilliant:
Kay
They just weren’t up to it. Honestly a lot of them weren’t really tested prior to this. Watergate was a long time ago and it isn’t a good comparison anyway. That’s the thing about a crisis, right? They’re all different. If it were the same crisis over and over it would be easier.
Run, Lillian!
Anyway the link didn’t seem to load, so google David Roth: President of a Blank Sucking Nullity and read it as it as it is so, so good.
jl
@japa21: That is good to hear. I wrote CBS complaining about repeating garbage Trump said as if there were a chance it might be true.
I’m also upset that the news lets hack ‘security analysts’ on to talk about the latest Trumpster maneuvers on Iran as if it weren’t complete BS. Pompeo is peddling that absurd, and completely unfounded, nonsense that Iran and Al Qaeda are collaborating, so they can pull some unilateral stupid shit based on the AUMF. Trumpsters are making absurd self-contradictory demands of Iran. No discussion. I just hear pretentious jackasses with pretentious titles droning on about troops, and signals of strength, and credibility and BS.
The corporate radio and TV news media in the US is garbage, an utter and complete failure at providing information to the public on anything more than pile-ups on the freeway, and how many houses a tornado wrecked in some small town in the Midwest (and sometimes they sound taxed even doing that).
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Wag: it’s wonderful, and a couple of years old. I think it was Claude Taylor on Twitter in late summer/early fall 2017. He wrote
I was struck by it then, even as I didn’t know the actual game itself. Much to the amusement of younger colleagues to whom I read it.
ETA: not intended to diminish Roth’s obvious talent.
tokyokie
@Jerzy Russian:
I thought it looked like a game that kids would break the third time they played it.
CatFacts
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think Biden’s just so cocooned and so out of touch that he really doesn’t understand that there’s a world outside the feelings and comeraderie of his older white-guy Senate “buddies”. Many of whom are probably laughing after playing him for a fool for years.
On a human level, it’s kind of sad. On a political level, I sincerely hope that the other candidates skewer him for it. Loudly and publicly. It’s the kind of mindset that would lead him to throw everybody else under the bus to protect his Republican “friends'” feelings. And I think he’s so clueless he wouldn’t even realize he’s doing it.
Kay
I’m hopeful for 2020 but I must say the coverage is exactly the same as it was in 2016. So no help there.
They all covered his rally like it was “news” because he said it was news and it was exactly the same rally he always holds, down to attacking Hillary Clinton every 5 minutes. It is a replay and they covered it like he hasn’t been President for the last 4 years, like it’s new.
So, that will be a challenge. For us to overcome.
Another Scott
OT: I just updated Chrome on this MBP and the giant title fonts here are gone.
Yay!
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@CatFacts:
I’m just glad we’re finding out now while there’s still time to nominate someone else. I’m glad he isn’t more organized and disciplined. Better to know.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Plato
The totus thug is a media created and media nurtured monster. They have neither the will nor the desire to take this corrupt clown down.
jl
@CatFacts: It could be that Biden does know what he’s doing. Dumbass out-of-it centrist Democratic political consultants might have persuaded Biden this is the centrist way to go in order to win the nomination and general.
I had some hopes for Biden. At beginning of Obama administration, Biden brought in economic advisers that were on the progressive side, much more so than the people Obama usually listened to. So I thought maybe Biden was getting up-to-date. His candidacy so far has been a huge disappointment.
If he gets the nomination, I hope he knows how to win the general, that is the best thing I can say about him. Klobuchar is a more solid and reliable centrist than Biden, who is turning himself into a jackass, from my point of view.
Geoduck
“Now Fred’s an intellectual,
brings a book to every meal,
He likes the deep philosophers,
like Norman Vincent Peale”
-Tom Lehrer, It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier
It’s actually “Fred” in the song. I assume it’s a conincidence, but I guess Trump Sr. did make something of a name for himself…
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator:
And so lies (no pun intended) the bullshit of “He says what I’m thinking!”
No, you morons. He says what Fox Trash (not News) shits into his skull (h/t Driftglass), and it’s the same crap Fox shits into the skulls of his supporters.
mrmoshpotato
@J R in WV: I’m sure Cronkite and Murrow would be disgusted.
Hell, Mike Wallace might be sickened too at the sheer gall of this crap.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
it’s everything you thought presidentin’ would be
also
RIP
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Jim? You ok, or did Simon Maloy’s tweet kill you?
Redshift
@mad citizen:
Yeah. About the only radio news I listen to is BBC, and there are occasional infuriating segments where they have someone Very Seriously analyzing Trump’s trade policies and strategy, and I just really to scream “There is no strategy! He does tariffs because it’s something he can do without anyone’s approval, and it makes everyone pay attention to him! That’s all!”
Amir Khalid
@mrmoshpotato:
Simon Maloy passed away very recently. It may be too soon for a joke.
hervevillechaizelounge
@mrmoshpotato:
Les Moonves admitted he doesn’t care that Trump is bad for America—he’s good for CBS’s ratings and that’s the only thing that matters.
Link: https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001
And I’d bet my bottom amero Moonves would describe himself as a patriot; who knew cognitive dissonance would become an Olympic sport?
mrmoshpotato
@Amir Khalid: That was an honest mistake. Simon’s name didn’t click in my mind. I was thinking Jim was laughing really hard at the pork chop joke.
Duane
Tonight Trumpov thanked all his family members, including his brother Fred who is of course, still dead.
No mention of Mom and Dad. That seemed odd to me. Everyone thanks Mom and Dad. Not this ungrateful prick.
Bemused senior
Came to this thread after rewatching “Good night and good luck” on Netflix. Murrow’s speech in that film said it all 60years ago.
No One of Consequence
@Brachiator: While I agree with your sentiment, I am not certain of the details. You say that Their Resentment is His Resentment. I’m not sure about that. It seems to me that he resents his betters: legitimately successful business people, people of power (legitimate or not), celebrities with more gravitas or cachet than him.
His supporters seem to me to be resentful of the swarthily-and-darker-skinned among us, Liberals and whatever Fox News, Rush and the echo chamber tell them they should hate that day.
What astounds me, is that his supporters and him have arguably no shared Lived Experience. None.
The things Trump wants to sell are things his followers cannot afford. Conversely, the problems and struggles his followers have with daily living in Our Great Experiment are things Trump cannot understand.
There is only Hate. Perhaps swirls of grievance, insecurity, and a scientifically-measurable aversion to introspection or critical thought.
But pretty much just Hate.
Before Love wins out, I fear there will be blood. I hope that it will not be so.
Peace,
NOoC
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Wag: To be fair, Colbert had the exact same line after Dump fired Comey.
(The relevant monologue.)
That Roth piece is still amazing, though. And for all I know, he’d never seen the Colbert monologue and came up with the phrase himself.
Steeplejack
@Run, Lillian:
Fixed your link: “President of a Blank Sucking Nullity.”
Gotta remember to close the link after you insert the URL—click “/link” to change it back to “link”.
ronno2018
Holy crap, that passage basically puts into words what I have been thinking all along (I just had no way to express it). The guy has talent. Damn we need that dufus out of the white house.
Plato
Fuck hopped up chris fucking hayes.
Cacti
The best revenge Putin ever got for Russia losing the Cold War was installing Trump in the White House.
He’s equal parts stupid and malicious. He’s the grown up version of the kid who likes to rip the wings from butterflies.
He’s all of the worst aspects of American culture, and none of the best ones, rolled into a fat orange ball.
bluefish
Delurking to say thank you so much for introducing me to this fabulous writer. Sensational writing. Insightful, funny, sad as hell, and real comforting. It’s so damn sad, all of it. Many thanks.
TriassicSands
Levitsky and Ziblatt, in there 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” point out that our belief that our democracy and its norms are or were sturdier and more resilient than those of other democracies that fell into authoritarianism is largely an unsupported conceit. The norms have been eroding for decades with the GOP being by far the more serious violator. The Democrats are not completely blameless, but as Mann and Ornstein have pointed out in their op-ed essays in the Post (2012) and Times (2017), Republican violations have been more frequent and vastly more serious. With Democrats, it’s been a matter of degree: with Republicans, it’s a difference of kind. Refusing to approve (or slow-walking) the other party’s judicial nominees is one thing; refusing to even allow hearings for a Supreme Court nominee (Garland) had never been done before.
Also, there is a difference between limiting the filibuster because the other party won’t cooperate in processing (legitimate) judicial nominees, and getting rid of it simply so you can force confirmation of a nominee (and an illegitimate one at that) you know is unlikely to get more than a few “yea” votes from the other party. (Three Democrats voted “yea” on Gorsuch: Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, and Joe Manchin. All three were up for re-election and both Heitkamp and Donnelly lost anyway.)
There are some weaknesses in “How Democracies Die”, but it should be essential reading for anyone who voted for Trump — especially those who plan to vote for him again in 2020. One of the problems that arise when people try to compare Trump to other dictators, especially Hitler, is that people think of the fully realized dictator, particularly the1940-45 Hitler. That means World War II, concentration camps, and the Holocaust. But we aren’t in the second decade of Trump; when thinking of Trump in terms of Hitler, think 1930-33.
While it is essential that Trump supporters* read “How Democracies Die” (or a book like it), it is worth reading even for those ardent Trump haters who think they already know all they need to know about Trump’s authoritarianism. The authors describe the steps that other successful dictators took on the path from democracy to dictatorship. It will come as no surprise that many, if not all, of those steps are precisely what we frequently see and hear Trump doing and saying. It’s as though he read “Dictatorship for Dummies” or “Democracy to Dictatorship: A Step-by-Step Guide.” In truth, he’s just cut from the same cloth as other dictators. He’s doing what comes naturally.
*Of course, they are the people least likely to read such a book.
tobie
Leah McElrath has an interesting and alarming read of Brad Parscale’s strategy for Trump in 2020. Parscale is predicting another electoral win, as in electoral college, not in the popular vote. And her thesis seems to be that Trump held rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin in the final weeks of the campaign in 2016 not because he thought he would win the popular vote but because he needed to create the impression of a groundswell of support so that no one would question his victory in the states he needed for the electoral college majority.
msb
Thanks for the link and excerpt. The article captures trump exactly, and the thing that amazes me about people’s reactions to him: how can anyone meeting him or reading about him not know that he’s an obvious, crass and boring con artist? Apart from horror, the main feeling he arouses in me is boredom. This is a really dull guy, after one has seen his shtick once.
OzarkHillbilly
@tobie: They had no strategy to win then and their strategy to win now is to do the exact same thing they did the last time, except they still haven’t figured out how it is they won the first time around. But History’s Greatest Monster ™ isn’t running in 2020 and somehow or other I don’t think incessantly chanting “Lock Her Up” at rallies is going to have the same effect this time around.
Sherparick
@Brachiator: So true. Trump is thirty years of Rush Limbaugh BS concentrated in human form.
Sherparick
@OzarkHillbilly: oh, they figured that out. It’s the white supremacy that give a thrill down leg to at least 35% of the country, that with Trump in WH they have one like them who believes his white skin makes him part of the master race. The other 15% are greedy fucks who just want all the money – see James Baker.
Chris Johnson
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You’re not black, Joe.
Next question!
VOR
@Jerzy Russian: Roger Moore’s movie “Farenheit 11/9” blames Gwen Stefani for Trump. She got a raise on “The Voice”, IIRC. He claims Trump starting running as a way to put pressure on NBC to increase his salary for “The Apprentice” to match. Then he got hooked by the adulation of the crowds. Howard Stern has said much the same thing, saying Trump never intended to win, only without the Gwen Stefani theory.
The Lodger
@VOR: I think the surviving Roger Moore would be upset at being credited with a Michael Moore movie.
jc
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think Biden is trying to cut into Trump’s base. And it’s true that Trump can’t afford to lose any of his base, but Biden is foolishly tempting *his* base to bail.
Sherparick
@OzarkHillbilly: oh, they figured that out. It’s the white supremacy that give a thrill down leg to at least 35% of the country, that with Trump in WH they have one like them who believes his white skin makes him part of the master race. The other 15% are greedy fucks who just want all the money – see James Baker.