“Being A Jerk Is A Feature Of His Candidacy”: The Media Created Donald Trump — And Now He Can’t Be Stopped
Time for some straight talk: We in the media love Donald Trump.
Even when we’re criticizing him — and boy, has he gotten plenty of criticism from people in the media over the last few days — we still love him. There’s just something magical about the guy. I think it resides in the contrast between his transcendent boorishness and his unflagging insistence that everything about him is the height of class and sophistication. And the details — the spectacular comb-over, the downscale New York accent, the wife regularly turned in for a younger model — all combine to make him a truly glorious character, so easy to mock and yet so unfazed by the mockery of millions.
It’s hard to think of too many people who have sustained the kind of celebrity Trump has for as long as he has. After all, he first started appearing in newspapers and magazines in the 1980s. Nothing takes him down, not bankrupcy, not the failure of his political endeavors (remember how he was going to prove that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States?), nothing. He just keeps coming.
So while the Republican Party is hoping desperately that somehow Trump will just go away, he’s not going anywhere until he’s good and ready. And as long as he can turn on the news and see his face, he’s a happy man.
After he seemed to belittle John McCain’s status as a war hero over the weekend (“He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, I hate to tell you”), you could almost hear the collective whoops from GOP headquarters, not to mention from Trump’s primary opponents.
“There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,” said an RNC spokesman, which might be news to John Kerry, since disparaging his service was pretty much the centerpiece of the campaign against him in 2004. After weeks of trying not to say anything impolite about Trump lest they offend his supporters, the candidates finally mustered themselves to a round of condemnation.
It provided a perfect moment for the media, which is why this episode has gotten such enormous coverage. On one hand, it’s Trump, who’s always good for a story. And on the other hand, Trump could have been discovered to have a lab in his penthouse where puppies and kittens are tortured to make cologne from their tears, and it wouldn’t have offended journalists as much as an insult to John McCain.
There isn’t time to go into the details now, but suffice it to say that no politician in at least half a century has benefited from the kind of media adulation that John McCain has enjoyed, and his suffering as a POW is always presented as the justification for that worship. In striking contrast to the way they treat every other politician, McCain’s motives are assumed to be pure, his sins are excused, and his coverage focuses on his best moments rather than his flaws and mistakes. (Even his 2008 presidential campaign was reported with more gentle affection than most losing candidates get.) So even if the presidential candidates were not saying a word, McCain’s admirers in the media would be covering this story with all their might.
Which doesn’t make it much different from what’s been happening with Trump’s candidacy from the outset. As John Sides notes, Trump got much more coverage from his entry into the race than any other candidate, and the coverage sustained its high level even after that initial period. It’s interesting to contemplate whether Trump will still be news if and when he’s falling in the polls instead of rising, but chances are that before long he’ll say something else outrageous, which will lead to a new round of breathless coverage.
I suspect that Trump’s supporters aren’t going to desert him because he insulted John McCain — after all, McCain isn’t much liked among the Republican base, and this actually fits in with Trump’s political brand as the guy who tells it like it is. The fact that he’s getting universal condemnation could even convince the base that he’s exactly the kind of no-nonsense, shake-up-the-system candidate they’ve been hoping for. When he said Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers, his support leaped among Republican primary voters, and they love the fact that he tosses around insults at anyone and everyone. And we in the media love it too.
Trump being a jerk is a feature of his candidacy, not a bug — and we just can’t get enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, July 21, 2015
“Change Is Upon Them, Whether They Like It Or Not”: For Aging GOP Voters, The Times They Are A-Changin’
Donald Trump will not be president of these United States, no matter the preferences of a substantial number of the Republican Party’s most loyal voters. Indeed, he will probably be a punchline by this time next year, even if he pursues the presidency as an independent.
For now, though, the real estate mogul and reality-TV darling is enjoying a moment aloft the polls as the GOP’s man to beat. A recent Washington Post survey showed him as the favorite of 24 percent of registered Republicans and GOP-leaning voters.
In that poll, Trump garnered nearly twice as much support as his nearest rival, Scott Walker, who was the top candidate of just 13 percent. Though Trump’s numbers could drop any day given his propensity for saying dumb things, his appeal so far seems to guarantee him a spot on the stage for the first primary debate, which will take place on Aug. 6.
Needless to say, GOP strategists are tearing their hair out, hardly believing their bad luck. After a grueling series of primary debates damaged their brand in the 2012 presidential cycle, they tried to rein them in, hoping to show voters a cast of serious and sober candidates.
But the superficial changes — including cutting the number of primary debates — don’t get to the much larger problem afflicting the Republican Party: Its strategists have spent decades appealing to the worst instincts of their constituents, and they are now reaping what they’ve sown. It’s the voters, after all, who are keeping Trump’s hopes alive.
Those voters have been treated to years of bombast and propaganda as Republican politicians pandered to their fears, their prejudices, their hatreds. The late Lee Atwater confessed that GOP pols perfected a strategy of playing to the bigotry of whites uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Too savvy to denigrate black Americans directly, they used a coded language, Atwater said in an interview: “… You’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites …”
That vile Southern strategy was never retired. It was simply given a 2.0 upgrade that denounces Islam, defames Mexicans and slanders gays and lesbians. Oh, and savages President Obama.
Having been fed that drivel for half a century, aging GOP voters are hardly going to suddenly surrender their gospel truths. Trump, a narcissistic opportunist, knows that, so he’s gone into overdrive coddling their prejudices, saying, among other things, that Mexico is sending to the United States “rapists” and drug smugglers. Guess what? His incendiary rhetoric has catapulted him to the top of the GOP primary heap.
No, Trump’s appeal won’t last. But the prejudices that are animating so many GOP primary voters are more enduring. And that’s where party leaders need to start their work.
They could begin with Roger Ailes, the former GOP strategist who heads Fox News, the premier right-wing communications network. His talking heads regularly pump out the most bigoted ideas, feeding an audience anxious to have its antediluvian views validated. (GOP bigwigs might also try talking to radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh, but he’s likely a hopeless cause.) If Ailes cares about anything other than ratings, he’ll dial back the paranoia.
Then, the Republicans’ biggest names — Mitch McConnell, are you listening? — need to speak frankly to their constituents. Many of them are fearful of a country whose demographics are changing quickly. They can’t quite get their bearings with a black man in the Oval Office, a mosque under construction across town, and a lesbian couple across the street. As an aging (and angry) white Southern reader once said to me: “I’m being told that everything I was taught as a child is wrong!”
OK, I understand that change is difficult, challenging, disorienting. That’s especially true if the changes may make it harder for you to maintain your position at the top of the economic and social ladder.
But the nation, happily, has long been about the business of perfecting the union, coming closer to its creed of equality for all. So change is upon them, whether they like it or not. If they can’t learn to accept it, the GOP will remain shut out of the White House.
By:Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, July 25, 2015
“The GOP Finally Finds The Courage To Attack Donald Trump”: You Can’t Shame Someone When They Had No Shame To Begin With
The GOP may finally have found the means to rid itself of that meddlesome real estate tycoon. And it’s fitting—and really, should have been predictable—that what is uniting Republicans against Donald Trump is his own big mouth. It’s one thing to call Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers—that caused some agita, but not enough to rid Trump’s GOP opponents of their visceral fear of alienating his supporters. But insulting John McCain’s war record? That’s something everyone can agree on, and thus gives the other candidates just the excuse they’ve been waiting for to bring out the knives for Trump.
On the off chance you haven’t heard, on Saturday, Trump said some interesting things about McCain, with whom he has had a little East Coast/Southwest beef of late. The setting was the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, where the candidates go to assure the evangelical voters who dominate the state’s Republican caucuses that they are loyal members of Team Jesus. At a presentation in which he was interviewed by pollster Frank Luntz, Trump essentially said that McCain is sort of a war hero, but maybe not really. “He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
That’s the part you’ve heard about. But the fuller picture shows that as silly as Trump’s assertion was, the really asinine thing in that exchange was the question. Trump and McCain have been arguing about a number of things, but most particularly, McCain said that Trump was succeeding because he “fired up the crazies,” and Trump responded by tweeting that McCain “should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis—dummy!” (the details of all this are explained here, if you care). Luntz said to Trump, “Referring to John McCain, a war hero, five and a half years as a POW, you call him a dummy. Is that appropriate in running for president?”
If you watch the video, you’ll see Trump give a rambling explanation of why he doesn’t like John McCain, saying nothing about his war record, and after a minute or so Luntz can’t take it anymore and blurts out, “He’s a war hero!” It’s only then that Trump says the part about McCain being captured. But what exactly was Luntz arguing here? That no one is allowed to say anything mean to John McCain because of what he went through almost half a century ago? McCain’s captivity was surely horrible, and he showed great courage in enduring it. But the guy has been a politician for more than 30 years. I’m pretty sure it ought to be okay to insult him.
The truth is that there are a whole lot of people in politics, both Democrats and Republicans, who share Donald Trump’s opinion that John McCain is a jerk. But if Frank Luntz was hoping to bait Trump into denying McCain’s heroism and create the moment that would bring Republicans together against him, he couldn’t have planned it any better. This particular comment, far more than all the other stupid or offensive things Trump has said just in the past couple of months, offered the perfect vehicle for them to attack—and without any of the risk that might come from sounding like you don’t hate immigrants. The reaction from everyone in the GOP was unanimous, and Rick Perry summed it up well: “His attack on veterans makes him unfit to be commander in chief of the forces and he should immediately withdraw from the race for president.” Don’t you wish.
The Republicans are getting ample help from the news media, whose adoring relationship with John McCain goes back two decades. McCain’s Vietnam experience is one of the foundations of that relationship—reporters have unlimited admiration for it, and express that admiration not only in endless retellings of McCain’s suffering, but in the comically false assertion, also endlessly repeated, that McCain is so noble and modest that he would never bring up Vietnam himself. (The truth is that McCain constantly brings up Vietnam to use to his political advantage, and always has, from his very first run for office. Which is his right to do, of course, but the rest of us should at least be honest about it.) So it isn’t only politicians rushing to McCain’s side of this spat; the news media are, too.
If there’s one thing Republicans know how to do, it’s bludgeon someone for showing insufficient respect for “the troops”; it just so happens that this is the rare case when it might be somewhat justified, even if their outrage is utterly opportunistic. Up until now, all the candidates knew they had to get rid of this guy, because he was making their party look both hateful and ridiculous. But they were too worried that if they attacked him, they’d alienate the voters drawn to his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Now they’ve got their chance to beat him down without much risk to themselves, and they aren’t going to pass it up.
If you’re an ordinary Republican primary voter today, you’re seeing every politician you respect condemning Donald Trump, and one might think that would inevitably have an impact on his standing in the primaries. But that may not necessarily be the case. Trump’s support, substantial though it may be, is limited—right now he’s leading the field, but five out of six primary voters are still supporting someone else. And all the evidence suggests that the people who are supporting him, conservative though they may be, are as angry at the party’s establishment as they are at immigrants and Barack Obama.
So it’s entirely possible that once the campaign moves on from the next micro-controversy in a few days, Trump’s standing won’t be too different from what it is now. One thing’s for sure: He won’t be pushed out of the race by the rest of the party. You can’t shame someone into submission when they had no shame to begin with.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, July 19, 2015
“How Do You Solve A Problem Like Donald Trump?”: All Media Is Political, Without Exception; Best To Be Honest About It
As Donald Trump has implausibly moved into a tie for first place in the GOP primary, there has been much discussion in media circles about how to treat his candidacy. Most media organizations (including The Week!) have published an inordinate amount of stories about Trump. The Huffington Post, on the other hand, recently announced it would move all coverage of Trump’s campaign to the entertainment section.
This sparked a backlash from some reporters, such as The Daily Beast‘s Olivia Nuzzi, who argued that such a move is an improper delegitimization of the tens of thousands of Trump supporters out there. “[P]olling competitively and being a registered candidate makes him legitimate. End of story,” she wrote on Twitter.
It’s certainly true that The Huffington Post‘s action is a swipe against Trump’s many supporters. But it is also simply impossible for reporters — who are human beings, after all — to avoid some sort of judgment on the legitimacy of a presidential candidate.
As I’ve argued before, normative judgments are inherent to the practice of all but the very simplest journalism. To demand that Trump be covered like any other “legitimate” presidential candidate is to demand that journalists implicitly legitimize his ideas. On the contrary, it is right and proper for publications to decide how they view a candidate’s policy platform and overall persona; signaling that he will be treated like a trashy celebrity is one way of doing that.
I respect The Huffington Post‘s right to make coverage choices as it sees fit. I’m also not sure I agree with the decision to move Trump into the entertainment section. As Matt Yglesias argues, Trump’s highly unexpected success — especially given that it came immediately after he started up with bilious racist rants against Mexican immigrants — suggests there is a fairly wide constituency for gutter nativism. That is an important truth of our politics and our nation that should not just be shrugged off as some carnival sideshow.
Instead of banishing Trump to the land of Kardashians and superheroes, the media would probably be better off simply reporting on Trump with open contempt. His ideas are disgusting and he’s a vicious, racist bully. But it’s not wise to write him — or the ideas that he champions — off as a self-aggrandizing joke. There are a great many people who would eagerly sign on to an immigration-restriction agenda, and Trump would definitely not be the first colossal buffoon elected to the head of a major state.
And that brings me to Bernie Sanders, who has been the subject of multiple comparisons to Trump (including one from my colleague Damon Linker) as representing the two “extremes” of American politics. This, too, is a mistake by the media.
We’re all grasping for ways to deal with this brainless, hate-spewing hurricane who has somehow managed to attract the support of tens of thousands of Americans in spite of — actually, let’s be honest: because of — his hateful racism. Just as The Huffington Post‘s decision to write Trump off as “entertainment” is understandable, so too is the media’s search to find Trump’s polar opposite on the left in order to give some context to this flagrantly foolish carnival barker.
But to compare Sanders, a serious person with serious ideas, to a clown who rants about how Mexicans are mostly criminals and rapists, is inherently delegitimizing. Putting Trump in the entertainment section makes The Huffington Post‘s perspective clear. So does grafting Trump to Sanders — but in a backhanded and cheap way that’s unfair to the socialist senator from Vermont.
Trump’s racist views do have the support of a substantial minority. But Sanders’ agenda is far more popular. About three-quarters of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $10.10. Social Security is likely the most popular government program of all time — and 82 percent would raise the payroll tax across the board to keep it solvent. Sixty-eight percent support increasing taxes on the rich.
Now, that is not to rule out all positive coverage of Trump, or negative coverage of Sanders. Conservative publications will do both, no doubt, as is their right. The point is that coverage should be grounded in a clear normative view, not some faux-omniscient view from nowhere. All media is political, without exception. Best to be honest about it.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, July 20, 2015
“A Bond Far Stronger Than Politics”: Trump Awakens Kerry’s Vietnam Anger With Slam On McCain
John Kerry was angry.
“Listen to this. Listen to what Trump just said about John McCain,” Kerry was saying over the phone. “‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.’
“That’s unbelievable,” Kerry said. “That’s beyond outrageous.’”
“John and I have some serious differences on a lot of things but he is nothing other than a hero and a good man. Where was Trump when John got shot down over North Vietnam? In school? At a party? Where was he?”
For many months now, years even, Kerry has been point man in Barack Obama’s attempt to restrict Iran’s plan to develop a nuclear bomb. He has been a walking high-wire act, traveling a region that is nothing less than a geographical bonfire filled with the debris of failed nations, countries that have collapsed into chaos and terror largely because of the contrived plans of men like Dick Cheney who dreamed of the day when Saddam Hussein could be toppled. The conservative ideologues got their wish while the United States got a larger, longer war and the Middle East became an even bigger source of horror and death.
Trump’s assault on McCain evoked immediate anger in Kerry because it resurrected feelings within him that are always there, certainly beneath a surface calm but always, always there: a long gone war called Vietnam.
“All of us sat for weeks and months around a table trying to get this deal done,” Kerry was saying. “The Russians, the Chinese, the French, the British, the Germans, all of us. And every once in awhile I thought about that other table, that other time, and that was nearly a half century ago.”
He was talking about the Paris Peace Talks that began in 1970 and concluded with an agreement signed on January 23, 1973. Henry Kissinger represented another president, Richard Nixon. John McCain was in Hanoi, in captivity. John Kerry had returned from Vietnam to help organize Vietnam Veterans Against The War. Donald Trump was somewhere else.
As talks in Paris dragged on, more than half of the 58,195 names carved into the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington were killed. Thousands more were wounded and carry those wounds still, today.
Both Kerry and Obama are firm believers that conversation is a better starter-kit than combat when it comes to dealing with a country like Iran. Neither man is naive about that nation’s aspiration to dominate the region.
“But the Iranians are not suicidal,” Kerry pointed out.
Clearly, the Iranians are well aware that Teheran would be turned into a field of glass and sand if they ever stepped toward open war with Israel or Saudi Arabia. And every nation around that table in Vienna knew that the sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy and caused Iran to accept a deal would soon collapse under the weight of countries like France, Russia and China that were eager to begin doing business in Teheran, the dollar emerging as the strongest weapon of all.
So as he shuttled back and forth between Washington and Vienna, his leg broken, his spirit determined, Kerry found himself thinking about that other time and those other talks. He is a student of history and in his mind’s eye he saw another president, Lyndon Johnson, broken by a long war that still lingers in the American psyche. He thought about the Ivy League sophisticates that surrounded John F. Kennedy and then Johnson, men named Bundy, Rostow, McNamara, and others who spent the lives of so many younger men pursuing their old men’s dreams of defeating communism in the lethal laboratory of Vietnam.
In a trick of history and irony communism collapsed on a deathbed that Ronald Reagan helped make up by…talking; talking to Mikhail Gorbachev. A wall fell. One continent, Europe, changed forever. Two nations, Russia and the United States, altered their behavior toward each another because of a handshake and a conversation.
Last week, John Kerry returned to the United States. After months of discussion, Germany, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Putin’s Russia along with the U.S. had a deal with Iran. Now it goes to a Congress more than half full of politicians who place a higher priority in defeating anything Barack Obama supports than educating the country and the world with an honest debate about a deal structured to insert more than a decade’s worth of roadblocks in Iran’s drive to develop a nuclear weapon.
And as John Kerry came home, his mind filled with facts, the ups, the downs, the potential, and the politics of getting an accord with Iran through the Congress, he was brought back to his own war five decades ago. A war that won’t go away. A war that awoke him one more time because of a libelous slur uttered by a real estate man against a friend of Kerry’s who will line up against him on the treaty with Iran. But that didn’t matter because brothers in arms form a bond far stronger than politics.
By: Mike Barnicle, The Daily Beast, July 19, 2015
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