It only seems unprecedented: https://t.co/lEAVfTQipE
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) April 7, 2023
Another gem from Dave Roth, at Defector:
… The predominant feeling of Trumpism is a claustrophobia edging towards panic: the feeling of sitting in a car in a dead-stopped traffic jam, a television blaring on a commercial break as sunlight pours through the windows, the idle and unreasoning resentment you feel towards someone ordering ahead of you in a drive-through, a darkened room with a computer in it that no one ever turns off, a cocktail reception at which no one is listening to anyone else. Trump has lived his life in this sort of gilded confinement; unnatural as it is, it’s long been his natural habitat. A lot of Americans live like this, too, and if it is lonesome and arid and joyless—and it is—that is also what they see as safe. And lonely though it is, this world is busy and even crowded. It is not a community anymore than those weird old ladies in the parking lot were a choir, but if everyone is fundamentally there for themselves, they are also there together…
Even the better-known clout goblins in attendance struggled to rise above the din of all those simultaneous aggro monologuists at work. Representatives Marjorie Taylor-Greene and George Santos, whose jobs depend upon attaching their respective pathologies to Trump’s more popular program, were instantly mobbed by a press corps that seemed not to know why it was there, but they were quite literally unable to make themselves heard. Their speeches were drowned out by the sound made by dozens of whistles. NBC’s Ben Collins found the man who was giving them out; the man with the whistles was also there to support Trump, and told Collins that the purpose of the whistles was to “make a noise, make a noise, everybody must hear us.” He said that he didn’t know Greene or Santos were even there. Donald Trump, even now, is still the only person that can get this coalition of crabs in a barrel to shut up and look in the same direction, even if they are all just trying to figure out a way to muscle into the shot.
The idea that something is unprecedented means a great deal more to the national news media than it does to just about anyone else, but also that meaning is fluid. So much of what Trump did as president was unprecedented, in its open and overt corruption and its relentlessly brutish presentation, that it overwhelmed the media’s capacity to respond to it. Or, maybe more accurately, the gaudy preening bully-boy dunce shit that is Trump’s sole stock in trade presented as a category error; even into the pandemic, the national press was hunting in vain for the moment when Trump would display “a striking new tone” and start acting like a president.
What Trump did instead, which is the only stuff that Trump ever does—try to get people to give him money and try to stay out of trouble, neither of which he is especially good at considering that they’re all he’s done his whole life—was always plainly not that. The stuff he got indicted for last week and arraigned for on Tuesday was the sort of dumb shit a person would do if and only if they believed that they could never be held responsible for anything.
But he’d done so many things like that, for so long, that even the faint possibility of any of his actions drawing consequences arrived as a surprise. That he’d kept right on doing those things as president, and did them so oafishly, created a problem that the national media still evidently hasn’t figured out; it’s as if the ridiculous and implicating fact that Trump really was elected President of the United States somehow superseded the lurid fact pattern presented by his whole disgraceful life to date. If someone this ridiculous can be president, then the office—and the system it sits atop, and the political process that supports it—is much more ridiculous than any of the people involved in covering it can comfortably admit or allow. When the cable news channels killed clock between the moments when some thin rivulet of newslike goo trickled past, they did so in a tone that suggested something momentous was happening. Trump had makeup on the collar of his shirt and blazer; Maggie Haberman of the Times observed that Trump was “not enjoying this at all.” On CNN, Van Jones said, more in stagey sorrow than equally stagey anger, that Trump looked like “a granddad having a very bad day.”…
That a former president is belatedly kinda-sorta getting in trouble for doing things he very clearly did would rightly stand out as momentous if you were someone who thought about presidents as figures of some inherent significance and reverence. How a person could have not just covered but merely been awake for Donald Trump’s presidency and still believe that is harder for me to figure. But then I have less invested in this status quo, as someone who lives downhill and downwind of it, than I might if I were someone who understood explaining or preserving it as something like my job. More to the point, Trumpism—if that’s what you want to call this combination of smash-and-grab political sadism and shameless disregard for any of that supposedly essential societal stuff—is already hard at work. “The cancer of elite impunity was sooner or later going to produce someone like Trump,” Cooper writes, “who is just taking that culture to its logical end point of dictatorship.”
On the merits, it seems very difficult to argue that this is not what Trump and the opportunists currently carrying that work forward in the states want to do. But if you insist upon understanding his very obvious efforts to that end as aberrations, instead of as “obvious efforts to that end,” you will not just ignore the most important and urgent stuff, but be left only with words like “unprecedented” and a mood of strained and tragicomic somberness. That gambit, which is not any more subtle than anything else Trump does, depends upon both that presumption of impunity on the part of the authoritarians on the make and that strange disassociative reverence and infuriating abstraction from the people covering it and consenting to it. The shamelessness and brutality of the various bad actors angling for the kind of power that Trump had is what makes it go; the reflexive impulse to pour all that ugliness into the old respectable vessels is what lets it keep on happening.
Jackie
“….the man with the whistles was also there to support Trump, and told Collins that the purpose of the whistles was to “make a noise, make a noise, everybody must hear us.” He said that he didn’t know Greene or Santos were even there.”😂😂😂
Margie accused the whistlers of being professional protesters – PAID BY THE LIBRALS!!!
Scout211
AL, thank you for the excerpt and link to the Dave Roth commentary. What an amazing description of Trumpism and his minions. Roth has the best words.
I had read conflicting reports about the guy who supplied the whistles that drowned out MTG’s speech. How funny that he was there for Trump.
Roth’s description: **chef’s kiss**
bbleh
Trump has always been much more symptom than cause, along with a bit of a catalyst.
The problem is modern Republicanism and its social feedback channels. It will not go away soon.
UncleEbeneezer
@Scout211: Every time someone shares Roth I remember “man, I gotta read more of his stuff.” He has a real way with the word-skills
Brachiator
Trump was just Trump. His childish cupidity and greed knew no bounds. But he didn’t overwhelm the press. New York journalists kissed Trump’s ass for years when he was the brash, youngish Millionaire Playboy. The Washington Beltway press was eager to fall in line once Trump became president.
No one paid attention to the danger behind Trump’s breaking of norms, and Trump himself kept behaving as if the presidency was another personal possession.
But although the GOP leadership kept protecting Trump, the Orange Menace pushed things too far, with his pathetic response to Covid, which needlessly cost lives, with his chicken shit support for January 6, and other acts with real consequences.
It’s ironic that what may really nail his ass is his foolish insistence that he can keep classified documents just because he says so.
Trump is a pathetic man baby. Unfortunately, the nation has to put up with his tantrums until somebody finally deals with him.
caring & sensitive
@UncleEbeneezer: I’ve mentioned it before but Defector is well worth the $79 annually. I send BJ $ on occasion, but Defector is the only web entity to which I subscribe. The columnists are great and the commenters (the majority of whom are lawyers) are consistently laugh out loud funny
rivers
Although there was undoubtedly a man handing out whistles who said he was a Trump supporter and who spoke to one reporter, I’ve seen conflicting accounts. From The Washington Post story about the arraignment protests: ” as soon as Greene stood on a makeshift stage, her head popping up over the crowd, anti-Trump activists started shouting, ringing cow bells and blowing into whistles.” I also saw an interview reported with one of the anti-Trump demonstrators who said there had been a call from anti-Trump people on social media asking people to come downtown with whistles and cowbells in order to drown out Marjorie Taylor Greene’s speech. The pro-Trump man evidently got caught up in this – but there’s no question that MTG’s speech was in fact drowned out.
UncleEbeneezer
Whoever first called Trump a “Carnival Barker” absolutely nailed it, right out of the gate. I love a good cult documentary but I always am amazed at how completely unimpressive, mediocre and even downright strange the leaders are who attract these big followings. I guess like-attracts-like and Trump showed we have a lot more fucking weirdos in this country than we probably realize.
SpaceUnit
@Brachiator:
Yeah. If our corporate media lords were honest they’d tell us that their incapacity to respond to Republican misconduct is a feature and not a bug.
bbleh
@SpaceUnit: incapacity or unwillingness? Access, fame, readership, ad dollars, social pressures … see Sinclair, Upton.
MomSense
@UncleEbeneezer:
After decades with no new ideas and endless culture war and grievance politics, it makes sense that the Republican Party would end up being a cult of personality. Without the structural advantages of media, money, electoral college, etc the party would have ended a long time ago.
SpaceUnit
@bbleh:
They stress balance over objectivity and so we end up with both sides.
OzarkHillbilly
Ummmm, Not sure where all that was going and do not have the time to read it all, but these people know it is a totally artificial construct. But it is the one they are left with and they are desperate to maintain the illusion because it is the only thing that stands between them and the rest of us. Their hope is that we continue to buy it.
Jeffro
That’s pretty spot-on. Political theater x pick-pocketing x completely ignoring the whole point of even having a government.
Suzanne
@Jeffro: Also a cult of personality constructed around the psychosexual grievances of mediocre white dudes.
eldorado
“clout goblins”
lowtechcyclist
They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it’s better than drinking alone
BSR
I need to read David Roth more often! His way of weaving words into images I’m familiar with that reflect the ongoing horror of our political environment is uncanny.
It’s beautiful prose….about a slow train-wreck. Intoxicating and unnerving at the same time.
PJ
@Brachiator: The thing about “Trump overwhelming the media’s capacity to respond to his brutishness” is that it would have been no trouble at all to respond to it. Some journalists did, and, of course, many, many citizens did. But for the media to call out Trump and his supporters for what they were, and what they were doing, would mean giving up on the narratives that “both sides are the same” and that “Republicans are our responsible Daddies, while Democrats are our feckless Mommies” that, since the 1980s, they have embraced like baby monkeys clutching at wire-covered milk bottles. That is what was unthinkable for them, so they treated everything Trump and his supporters did as perfectly acceptable.
PJ
@UncleEbeneezer: All of these cult leaders just tell their followers what the things they want to hear. If Trump, or any Republican, said to their followers, “Actually, your grievances are not the fault of “those people”, or the government, or the coastal elites, or whomever – you, in fact, are the cause of the vast majority of your problems”, they would be forsworn in a heartbeat.
PJ
@lowtechcyclist: Man, what are you doing here?
ian
@rivers:
For which the good people of New York have not received sufficient thanks.
Keep up the excellent work, spunky residents of Gotham.
karen marie
You misspelled “instigation.”
Jeffro
@Suzanne: add it to the list!
oatler
@lowtechcyclist:
In a way it’s okay to wake up with yourself
Anoniminous
@Suzanne:
Shut down the Internet tubez. They have been won.
Anoniminous
@lowtechcyclist:
Paul the real estate novelist who never had time for a wife,
He’s taking to Davey who is still in the Navy and probably will be for life
Weird that didn’t cause a ruckus when released on the air waves.
Villago Delenda Est
The MSM’s focus on ratings, ratings, ratings, and not actual news, is its ultimate undoing.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense: The cult of personality angle was there with Nixon, and definitely there with Reagan. They’ve been trying to get revenge for Nixon’s fall for 50 years now.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
This nation has been putting up with him for decades. Mostly he failed at everything on a private level and while his holdings are worth something, his cash value is likely rather minuscule, especially considering the level he had, and had stolen from his siblings, when he started failing. Which was those same decades ago. And as long as he would have stayed on that private failure level, he’d be just another rich boy without a freaking clue. But of course he couldn’t do that, he had to move up to a far higher level to prove that he could fail there as well. And of course he did. What is really amazing is that so many think he’s basically god, and they are people who he wouldn’t give half a shit about if they all got struck by lightning at the same time. His valuation of himself is so out of wack that there isn’t a mathematical formula at any level or any type that could be used to justify it.
prostratedragon
@Ruckus:
Why be merely clueless? Raise your profile and broaden your stage so you can be CLUELESS!!! //reverb
BruceFromOhio
So tired of reading, hearing, seeing, and having occasion to think about this shambling rectum.
Ruckus
@prostratedragon:
Exactly. Raise clueless to it’s highest level! Be a jackoff supreme. Revel in disgust. Earn that title of Shit for Brains.
Jackie
Well hell. Blumenthal broke his femur during a parade.
https://connecticut.news12.com/sen-blumenthal-fractures-femur-at-uconn-parade-will-undergo-surgery
RaflW
“If someone this ridiculous can be president, then the office—and the system it sits atop, and the political process that supports it—is much more ridiculous than any of the people involved in covering it can comfortably admit or allow.”
This is the boiled down essence of why so many in the press have been pantsed endlessly by Trump. They cannot compute that a person – and a party! – could so thoroughly shit on what was seen as an ineffably sacred office. But they did. And they’d gladly do it again.
bbleh
@Suzanne: hey, let’s not forget good ol’ status-anxiety linked tightly to insatiable materialism.
El Muneco
Defector and a few other sports media sites, and Teen Vogue, put pretty much all of the MSM other than possibly WaPo to shame. They could be doing this if they cared to.
prostratedragon
@Ruckus: 😅😅!!
prostratedragon
@Jackie: Ouch!! And I see he’s 77, so recovery won’t be easy, though I guess it’s very likely. Best wishes to him.
I know someone whose momentary entanglement like that gave them major tears of both quad tendons. A few months in hiphigh casts. We should try to watch our feet.
SomeRandomGuy
That’s actually the easiest part for me. I know this trick, because of Condeleeza Rice’s lies about the aluminum tubes, which,
A) were not able to be used for centrifuges (as she claimed) and
B) were being used to reverse engineer rockets.
The IAEA reported points A and B, before the war. No one else, of significant reach, reported it.
When it became obvious that Rice had no more information than the rest of us (i.e., no super-secret intel), it proved she lied.
Among the major news outlets, no one cared. They didn’t report the IAEA as one of the “critics” and didn’t report that “it is now obvious that Rice lied to us about the aluminum tubes.”
And that’s when I realized that, if enough people, who are reasonable in most ways, repeat the same bullshit, it will automatically look reasonable, to most people, because large groups of people don’t believe things for no reason, and if the reason is bullshit, most people realize it (and stop believing). But some bullshit is sticky….
Anyway: I know Republicans. They demanded that courts support their law to ban “partial birth abortion” because *CONGRESS* issued a finding of facts declaring it to be unnecessary, in all situations. They just make up shit, and get the caucus to caucus on it, and the sheep follow, believing themselves to be wolves. The appeal of Republicans is not in the day to day facts – it’s in their now-religious hatred of “enemies of the state”.