I hadn’t been writing too much about Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump, because there’s not too much more that needs to be said. After the Helsinki Humiliation, it should be obvious even to the cult that Trump, who trades on an image of macho aggression, is a meek, submissive servant of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, whether due to blackmail, financial leverage, or a simple case of being kindred spirits. And to the extent that Trump’s Republican Party refuses to hold him in check, whether because they fear his base, they want their agenda passed, or they realize that Trump is actually the most popular and competent politician they have, then they are effectively servants of Putin too. And the only thing we can do about that is simply to vote out any Republican incumbents to create a Democratic majority. I have no problem in saying that if I’m a Libertarian, since power abhors a vacuum, and there is going to be an opposition to the Democrats, and realistically it can no longer be the Republicans, now that they’ve turned the Party of Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis.
However I want to address some of the recent developments, in particular Trump’s continual flailing about for new enemies to bitch over, including not only the press corps in general but former employee Omarosa Manigault-Newman and former CIA head John Brennan.
This Friday, Trump had an impromptu press conference outside the White House after he revoked Brennan’s security clearance, saying “security clearances are very important to me.” Oh yes. That’s why he wants loyal people in the White House. People he can trust. This is why he had Omarosa in the White House, to do… something or other. And when she made herself unwelcome around everyone else with her reality TV power games, nominal chief of staff John Kelly took her to the Situation Room to fire her, a place where you’re not supposed to have recording devices. And yet, they didn’t search her for such a device, and wouldn’t you know, she took one to the meeting.
As NeverTrump conservative David Frum tweeted, “If Omarosa carried for example a cellphone into the Situation Room, then not only did she record conversations there, but so potentially has any country or criminal organization that thought to hack her phone”. Well, it’s a good thing that Trump cares so much about security clearances, then.
This is the ultimate limitation of the bully. The bully is a parasite who games the social milieu in order to take advantage of the same courtesies that he will not honor himself. Someone like Trump wants the benefits of courtesy without having to live with its restrictions. This means that he is ultimately dependent on the social system he wishes to undermine. He wants to assume that other people won’t treat him the way he treats them. So when you have a Washington culture where even security procedures are largely dependent on the “honor system” and none of the participants have any honor, because the standard is set at the top, the results are predictable. Except apparently, if you’re Trump.
Omarosa’s manuever simply proves two things: One, John Kelly was eminently justified in firing her. And two, whatever dumbfuck hired her in the first place needs to be kicked out of the White House himself.
Of course, Trump seems to have underestimated his protege. It could be that she was this underhanded because she knew who she was dealing with. For one thing, everyone who works with the Trump Administration is expected to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and in addition to this being likely illegal to enforce on a public employee, apparently Trump hires weren’t allowed to keep a copy of the NDA after they signed it. Since Omarosa started promoting her new book (that I’m not going to promote here), Trump’s associates have tried to dismiss Omarosa’s accusations against him. Katrina Pierson, one of Trump’s campaign spokespeople, denied knowing anything about Omarosa’s claim that Trump had used “the N word” while taping The Apprentice. Then on Tuesday, Manigault-Newman got on CBS News with a tape where Pierson was discussing the subject with her and saying “No, he said it. He is embarrassed by it.” Just recently, Omarosa came up with another tape on MSNBC where Lara Trump (Eric’s wife) came to her with an offer to pay around $15,000 month as a severance package to take a media position saying “positive” things about Trump, which Omarosa declared was an attempt to silence her. And this Friday it turns out that Omarosa may have a whole bunch of other documentation as to what she saw on the inside as opposed to what the Trump team is saying. You’ll notice I haven’t gone over why Trump actually revoked John Brennan’s security clearance. That’s because I don’t have a good reason why he did, since he doesn’t either.
The acclaimed literary critic Michiko Kikutani had an article in The Guardian in July, and had a very in-depth and detailed analysis of the culture we’re dealing with, going straight back to the 1960s, when reality itself had become so warped that trying to assert an objective truth seemed to miss the point. “American reality had become so confounding, Philip Roth wrote in a 1961 essay, that it felt like ‘a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination’ … Personal testimony also became fashionable on college campuses, as the concept of objective truth fell out of favour and empirical evidence gathered by traditional research came to be regarded with suspicion. Academic writers began prefacing scholarly papers with disquisitions on their own ‘positioning’ – their race, religion, gender, background, personal experiences that might inform or skew or ratify their analysis. In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis created an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 US election, Curtis says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that ‘in the face of that, you could play with reality’ and in the process ‘further undermine and weaken the old forms of power’. Some Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie The Matrix – in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial) – members of the ‘alt-right’ and some aggrieved men’s rights groups talk about ‘red-pilling the normies’, which means converting people to their cause.”
In other words, the same sort of identitarian bad-faith “logic” that you see on the Left, where opponents’ positions are to be dismissed because they are all biased by perspective, eliding the question of why the speaker should be trusted if their position is necessarily biased.
It gets to something I’ve been thinking about especially as Omarosa again inflicts herself on the public scene.
Trump of course is not only a product of reality TV but an acolyte of a particular pre-reality TV medium: pro wrestling. The pro wrestling business, especially since it’s domination by WWE owner Vince “Mr.” McMahon, has become incredibly “meta” in its creation of narratives and complicated plotlines, which is why fans call it “soap opera for guys.” There is an in-house term for this psychology: Kayfabe, which is basically Pig Latin for “fake.” In fact, pro wrestling has to be scripted, because for athletes to be performing the kind of stunts seen on the TV shows and on tour, week after week with no “off-season”, if they were attempting to beat each other up for real, they would suffer that many more permanent injuries than they actually do. But whereas traditional wrestling tried to present itself as akin to real sports matches, McMahon ended up developing the fakeness as an angle in itself. If you’re a fan, you’ve seen several plot lines involving real family members along with star wrestler Triple H (who married McMahon’s daughter) and other figures like Paul Heyman who ran rival promotion ECW before McMahon bought it out. And you never know who’s on who’s side, until somebody turns on the others, and a few weeks later, everyone switches sides again. And everyone watching knows that there are real backstage relationships involved, and that “inside” knowledge contrasts with the apparent reality, and vice versa. The drama is partly that reality itself is in flux.
Given that Trump is a smorgasbord of psychological issues, it figures that he has been involving himself in a part-fictional but partly real rivalry with McMahon for over a decade, especially since they present contrasts to each other that do not flatter Trump. For instance, Vince McMahon plays a fake billionaire (‘Mr. McMahon’) on TV but is an actual billionaire and wildly successful businessman. Trump is not a successful businessman and not really a billionaire, but he plays one on TV. He has however conclusively topped McMahon at his own game, where style IS the substance, or is at least more rewarding. Devotion to the show over prosaic reality is what it takes to be a Trumpnik. And that doesn’t just apply to the sad, semi-literate rednecks that a lot of us look down on. You could be a libertarian, a populist or a conservative. You could be a Koch, a Mercer, a Bannon or a McConnell. The common factor is that every one of them believes that everyone else is a dupe but THEY’RE the smart mark. They each believe that Trump isn’t going to stab them in the back they way he has everyone else. That’s what happens when you love the show too much to care if it’s real – or what it means if it isn’t.
Now, from what I saw of Omarosa on her media publicity tour, she strikes me as being attractive, classy and well-spoken, whereas most people in the Trump Administration (especially Trump) are the exact opposite. And given that most of those people are white while Omarosa is black, that ought to be a refutation of racism right there. It is also true that she developed an epic reputation for queen-bitch tactics in her reality TV tenure and has cemented that reputation with her latest stunt. After The Election, she was notorious for saying that all of Trump’s critics would have to “bow down” to him. And she certainly didn’t speak out this harshly during Charlottesville and various other incidents of racism or apologism from Trump, but as he himself said, she had nothing but great things to say about him until she was fired.
So when Omarosa was on MSNBC and The Daily Show and all that, I was waiting for someone to ask: How do we know this isn’t just part of the long con? How do we know that Trump isn’t deliberately bad-mouthing her with her knowledge and consent in order to gin up sales of her book and maximize publicity, which is all either of these two really care about? Otherwise we could conclude that she really is on the outs with Trump – in the same way that Steve Bannon is technically on the outs with Trump but still working to promote him. If Trump actually is against her, maybe Omarosa is on the side of the angels by circumstance, but she has to consider how things got to this point. And that’s because she and a whole bunch of other people chose to trust somebody that they knew couldn’t be trusted. And just as Trump with his low character has no right to cry when he gets done the way he would do others, low characters who look up to such a man have no right to cry after he treated them badly. “You knew I was a snake when you took me in.”
Of course the reason Omarosa has an audience for her publicity tour is because the media wants to play it up. Which leads to the other part of the political-media unreality complex. This week, as Trump made his imperial (or at least imperious) proclamation against Brennan, the press wailed that such a revocation of privilege was unprecdented. And in the face of Trump’s escalating hostility towards the press in particular, several newspapers on Thursday jointly published editorials declaring the importance of a free press. The most prominent paper to refuse to do so was The Los Angeles Times. On August 16, the editorial board wrote, “The president himself already treats the media as a cabal — ‘enemies of the people,’ he has called us, suggesting over and over that we’re in cahoots to do damage to the country. The idea of joining together to protest him seems almost to encourage that kind of conspiracy thinking by the president and his loyalists. Why give them ammunition to scream about ‘collusion’?” Of course, given that Trump was going to do that anyway, the press shouldn’t be concerned about casting their policy simply in terms of his reaction. But that also means that in acting en masse, there seems to be actual evidence that the journalist culture as a whole is against the president, and it does play into the impression that in general the press is against a president not for individual reasons (because he’s Trump) but because he’s a Republican who’s against their agenda. And this isn’t an impression that comes out of nowhere.
For instance, Dan Rather was once a highly regarded journalist, who has had some very insightful things to say about this Administration. I do not post anything he says on Facebook or elsewhere. Because he’s a big reason why things got to this point. When working at 60 Minutes for CBS in 2004, during the re-election campaign of President George W. Bush, Rather anchored a story purporting to expose the state government in Texas in its attempts to secure the young George W. Bush with a safe position in the Texas Air National Guard so he wouldn’t be drafted for Vietnam. Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, obtained relevant documents from a former Army National Guard officer that she knew was reported to be an ‘anti-Bush zealot’. The right-wing reaction to this piece was an early example of the power of online media and blogging. Some commentators noticed discrepancies in the documents presented on TV, with Drudge Report and other sites continuing to develop the story. On September 9 2004, CBS released a statement standing by Rather’s piece, but by then the Washington Post and other mainstream media were following the investigation. Analysts concluded that the National Guard documents supposedly typed in 1972 and 1973 were created on a modern computer. Rather defended his article by interviewing a Guard secretary who said that the content of the memos was “exactly as we reported” but the secretary also said that no actual memo was ever written with that information since she was the person who had responsibility of typing her officer’s memos. This caused the New York Times to label the story “Fake But Accurate.” When the Times reporter asked David Van Os, the lawyer for CBS’ source, what role his client had, Van Os said, “”If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 — which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done … what difference would even that make (to the) factual reality of where was George W. Bush at the times in question and what was he doing?” CBS ended up terminating both Dan Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes. Rather has continued to stand by the story on the grounds that “even if the documents are false, the underlying story is true.” The best one can say is that he wanted it to be true, but couldn’t prove it.
The irony being that this epistemic closure and desire to manufacture reality on the part of a largely liberal media outlet helped conservatives justify their own epistemic closure over the course of the following decade, culminating in their refusal to believe anything in the mainstream media simply because it is the mainstream media. Of course media bias isn’t the same thing as outright denial of facts. The Right are responsible for their own reaction to the Left. But their impression of an antagonist agenda, at least at first, was not fantasy.
At the same time, one of the reasons that the enemies of the press can score points on them is that there was a certain amount of kayfabe, or at least accepted etiquette, in the relationship between the government and the press corps before Trump showed up. In The American Conservative, James Bovard reviews journalist Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter and goes over the point that Hersh often struggled with publishers as much as the government: “Any journalist who has been hung out to dry will relish Hersh’s revelations of editors who flinched. After Hersh joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times, he hustled approval for an article going to the heart of foreign policy perfidy. Bureau chief Max Frankel finally approved a truncated version of Hersh’s pitch with the caveat that he should run the story by ‘Henry [Kissinger] and [CIA chief] Dick [Helms].’ Hersh was horrified: ‘They were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about.’ A subsequent Washington bureau chief noted that the Times ‘was scared to death of being first on a controversial story that challenged the credibility of the government.”
If this hostility and servility seem contradictory, it is because while there might be a liberal cultural bias among individual reporters, there is a corporate bias among the owners of mass media, who want to protect their institutions and their profits, (not to mention access to sources who can cut off reporters if they are too hostile) and while these motivations clash, they co-exist.
And let’s not forget that the same media people who realize all too late that Trump threatens them as much as he threatens women, gays and migrants were all too happy to give him free publicity when he ran for president because they wanted to add some drama to Hillary Clinton’s coronation and the Annoying Orange was “great for ratings.” Trump himself has often tweeted that the press wouldn’t let him get defeated for re-election because it would kill their business. He may be right. The problem now is that the Trump Organization took over the promotion and wrote a script that the press had no part in composing.
It is indeed the case that Trump is often acting with precedent, and when the press fails to point this out, it just so happens to coincide with the point that the press was not sufficiently critical of “how things are done” in Washington when more normal people were in charge, and would rather not emphasize their actions at the time. As nymag.com put it in reference to Trump’s recent signing of a defense bill with add-on statements asserting a privilege to ignore Congress’ directives: “When Bush began regularly appending signing statements to legislation as an alternative to the line-item veto the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional (most notoriously to override a ban on torture enacted in 2005), constitutional scholars warned that this represented a dangerous expansion of executive powers. When Obama continued to employ them in this manner, his progressive critics rightly lambasted him for doing so, pointing out that even if he was using this power to good ends, the next guy wouldn’t. Sure enough, the next guy turned out to be Donald Trump.”
At the same time, such critique of the president, while arguably not sufficient, was previously considered normal and proper. The innovation of the Trump Administration is to proclaim that any critique marks one as “the enemy of the people” – “the people” in Trump’s mind being equivalent to Louis XIV’s phrase, “L’etat, c’est moi.” Previously, the press corps’ relationship to the White House Press Secretary was a case of “you pretend to be honest, and we pretend to believe you.” But when Sean Spicer came out the day after Trump’s inauguration and proclaimed that the ceremony had the largest inauguration crowd ever, in direct contradiction of both boots on the ground and photographic evidence, every journalist in America had to regard it as an attack on both his and their professional standards, if not a direct insult. Since his firing, Sarah Sanders has been that much more surly and combative in asserting Opposite Day as the position of state. So while the press’ relationship to the White House (this White House or any other) is not really innocent, one side has clearly done more to degrade the standards.
As I say: It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. It is true that Trump is the natural result of a long-fermenting political dysfunction rather than a rogue element in an otherwise healthy republic. It is also true that even in that regard, Trump is dangerous and disruptive to the system, and not in a good way. It is true that the press takes an adversarial stance towards Trump more for commercial, ulterior motives than out of professed virtues. But even acting on ulterior motives means that the press is serving as a check in the system against executive power, a role that should properly be played by the (Republican-dominated) Congress and Supreme Court, a role they refuse to assert. And in examining what is known about Trump, and what is reported against him even in often-friendly sources like National Review and The American Conservative, the overall picture does not lend to any reason to trust this guy and creates an overall imperative to oppose him. And given that there is an observable interest on the part of the press to puff up Trump for the sake of sales while ignoring real problems that started under other presidents and are exacerbated by this one, it is possible to oppose Trump not because of the position of the press, but even in spite of it.
Of course one can only reach such a conclusion if one is capable of reviewing various sources of information, thinking critically, and reaching an independent judgment. And if there’s any one reason that we’re at this point, I think it’s because such traits have never been prized by society and these days seem to be actively discouraged.