Good piece in the NYT today. At some point the press needs to ignore him.
Donald Trump Will Leave You Numb Frank Bruni FEB. 18, 2017
Almost any five minutes of Donald Trump’s mesmerizing, terrifying news conference on Thursday would have been enough to do another politician in.
Almost every day of his administration so far contains sufficient grandiosity and delusion to be the end of a normal president’s productive relationship with Congress and support from all but the most stubbornly blind voters.
And if you rewind to his campaign, you see the same pattern, with each rally, interview and debate packing in more petulance and vulgarity than an adult in a civilized society is supposed to get away with.
But that’s actually his secret. That’s his means of survival: the warp speed and whirl of it all. He forces you to process and react to so many different outrages at such a dizzying velocity that no one of them has the staying power that it ought to or gets the scrutiny it deserves.
They blend together under the numbing banner of what a freak show he can be, of Trump being Trump. And so the show screams on.
Part of this excess is his nature. Part of it is design. Not by accident did he put on that 77-minute performance for the media — hurling insults, flinging lies, marinating in self-pity, luxuriating in self-love — just three days after the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.
He was cluttering the landscape. Overwhelming the senses. Betting that a surfeit of clangorous music would obscure any particularly galling note. That wager got him all the way to the White House, though he has no place being there, and so he sticks with it. The news conference was a case study in such orchestrated chaos.
It was, in both senses of the phrase, too much. If you became too transfixed by his laughable boast that his administration was operating like “a fine-tuned machine” — an assertion he made twice, for emphasis — you paid inadequate attention to his utterly fictitious claim that he’d done better in the Electoral College than any president since Ronald Reagan.
He wasn’t just a little off. He was spectacularly wrong. He got 304 Electoral College votes. Back in 1988, the first President Bush got 426. Four years later, Bill Clinton got 370. Clinton got 379 when he was re-elected, and Barack Obama, in his two victories, got 365 and then 332.
In fact, only one president since Reagan did worse in the Electoral College than Trump, and that was George W. Bush, twice.
A reporter at the news conference, Peter Alexander of NBC News, corrected Trump, telling him that he was in error.
Trump shrugged. “I was given that information,” he said, as if it’s fair game and above reproach to repeat any old tidbit you’re told. “I don’t know.” More to the point, he doesn’t care. He’s wowed by his win and expects everybody else to be equally impressed. Precise numbers don’t matter. Facts are just spoilers. They get in the way of the proper adoration of Trump.
Such a self-serving hallucination about the Electoral College would have been the takeaway from any other president’s news conference — good for a solid week of media mastication. But from Trump’s news conference, there was an overflow of jaw-dropping wonder.
Like the nonsense that Delta Air Lines, not his own administration’s incompetence, was to blame for the cruel mess of the travel ban’s implementation.
Or like his incessant insistence that Hillary Clinton had been given debate questions in advance. He said this with an air of grievance entirely disproportionate to what happened, which concerned all of two questions across two events during the Democratic primary.
Or like his statement that a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other,” as if this were some profound epiphany and he needed to share it with the many unsuspecting Americans who thought that there were all sorts of holocausts and the nuclear variety wasn’t really so bad.
Or like his narcissistic meltdown when a Jewish journalist raised the subject of rising anti-Semitic incidents. Trump whined that he had been promised a nicer, simpler question, then said, with customary self-congratulation and hyperbole, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.”
“I hate the charge,” he added. “I find it repulsive.” In fact he hadn’t been charged with anything. He had been given the opportunity, for the second day in a row, to make clear that he deplored any hate crimes and that he denounced anyone committing them.
And for the second day in a row, he reverted to me, me, me, me, me. This is why he’ll never be an effective leader or one worthy of our respect. The world he genuinely cares about ends at the tip of his nose.
Early last week someone I was talking with flashed back to Trump’s campaign and asked me: “How is it that he wasn’t ruined when he mocked John McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war?”
“How is it that he wasn’t ruined when he suggested that gun-loving Hillary haters might think about putting a bullet in her?” I said.
My question was my answer. Each fresh Trump astonishment overrides an old one, as if it were a new file on a hard drive that has reached storage capacity. And the accumulation of astonishments lowers the bar for what’s expected of him and turns all the astonishments into a blur.
How long can it continue to work? I stopped trusting my Trump-related intuition on election night, but I do think that his fine-tuned machine is in palpable trouble, and not just because a Gallup poll released on Friday put his disapproval rating all the way up at 56 percent and his approval rating down at 38 percent.
His administration’s fate rests largely with Republicans in Congress and how much they’ll turn a blind eye to, and I have to believe that they watched Trump’s news conference in horror and slept fitfully that night.
John McCain traveled to Munich afterward, and in remarks there about the state of the world and of the West he rued “the hardening resentment we see toward immigrants and refugees and minority groups, especially Muslims.” He expressed alarm about “the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.”
I think he was talking about America, and about Trump, who has succeeded at nothing so much as devising an analogue to the shock-and-awe military campaign: It’s the appall-and-anesthetize political strategy.
Donald Trump and the Enemies of the American People
"Trump calls media ‘the enemy of the American People’"
By David Remnick February 18, 2017
President Trump seems determined to exploit the public’s mistrust of the media to the hilt, if only to distract his base from the disappointments that are sure to come. PHOTOGRAPH BY JABIN BOTSFORD / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY
When the leaders of the Bolshevik movement—Lenin, Stalin, and the rest—used the term vrag naroda, an “enemy of the people,” it was an ominous epithet that encompassed a range of “wreckers” and “socially dangerous elements.” Enemies included clergy, intellectuals, monarchists, Trotskyists, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and well-to-do farmers. To be branded an enemy of the people was to face nearly inevitable doom; such a fate was soon followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night, a prison cell, the Gulag, an icy ditch—a variety of dismal ends. To be called an “enemy of the people” did not mean you had to hold oppositional thoughts or commit oppositional acts; it only meant that the dictator had included you in his grand scheme to insure the compliance of the population.
Robespierre, one of the architects of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, set out to “horrify” the opposition, and his instruments were the epithet, righteousness, and the blade. “The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation,” he said. “It owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.”
In 1917, the same year as the Bolshevik seizure of power, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published an essay in Pravda called “Enemies of the People,” in which he lionized the Jacobin Terror as “instructive.” His party, “the Jacobins of the twentieth century,” he wrote, should follow suit, if not with the guillotine then with mass arrests of “the financial magnates and bigwigs.” Once in power, Lenin was far more brutal than the revolutionary French. He built the first outposts of the gulag archipelago. Stalin, Lenin’s energetic successor, expanded the system from western Russia to the Sea of Okhotsk, ten time zones to the east.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! 8:48 AM - 18 Feb 2017 -
For months, cool, responsible heads have been counselling hot, impulsive heads to avoid overreacting to Trump. We must give him a chance. We must not in all our alarm compare him to all the tin-pot dictators and bloody authoritarians who have disgraced history. The Oval Office—its realities and traditions—will temper his rages. His aides, his son-in-law, and his daughter will “soften” his impulsivity. Besides, he doesn’t really mean all he says. Even as Trump was signing one chilling executive order after another—all with the cool counsel of Steve Bannon, late of Breitbart—we were assured that everything was fine. He was simply fulfilling the agenda of his campaign. Calm down. Don’t react to every tweet. Don’t take the bait.
Then came his press conference, last week, his first solo press conference in office, and it was epochal. Ostensibly an occasion to announce a replacement appointment to the Department of Labor after the first had to step aside, Trump instead took it upon himself to denounce repeatedly and at length the sinful, dishonest press and the “very fake news” it produces. It was unforgettable. With all his nastiness, his self-admiring interruptions and commands (“Sit down! Sit down!”) Trump resembled an oversauced guy at a bar who was facing three likely options in the near term: a) take a swing at someone, b) get clocked by someone else, or c) pass out and wake up on a hard, alien cot.
But the venue was not a bar. It was the White House, and this was hardly a joke. What Trump resembled at the lectern was an old-fashioned autocrat wielding a very familiar rhetorical strategy.
Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, makes the point that autocrats from Chávez to Erdogan, Sisi to Mugabe, all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a more oppositional tone and role. “And then that paves the way for the autocrat’s next move,” Simon told me. “Popular support for the media dwindles and the leader starts instituting restrictions. It’s an old strategy.” Simon pointed to Trump’s lack of originality, recalling that both Néstor Kirchner, of Argentina, and Tabaré Ramón Vázquez, of Uruguay, referred to the press as the “unelected political opposition.” And, as Simon has written .. http://www.cjr.org/opinion/trump-chavez-media.php , it was the late Hugo Chávez who first mastered Twitter as a way of bypassing the media and providing his supporters with alternative facts.
Trump, as indulgent parents say of an indolent child, is “not a big reader.” He may not hear every historical echo in his “enemy of the American people” tweet. What he does know, however, is that the American trust in “the media”—that generalized term that stretches from the Times to NewsMax—is miserably low. He is determined to exploit that to the hilt, if only to distract his base from the disappointments that are sure to come. On Saturday evening, he held a rally in Melbourne, Florida, and doubled down on the familiar theme: putting himself in the same league as Lincoln and Jefferson, he told the crowd, “Many of our greatest Presidents fought with the media and called them out.” The agenda is always to divide. “They have their own agenda, and their agenda is not your agenda,” he said.
At the same time, there are distinct signs that Trump is losing ground among members of the conservative media who had initially cut him some slack, not least because they felt the liberal media had been besotted by Barack Obama. The attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, on the intentions of the intelligence agencies, and on the patriotism of the press have become too evident, too repulsive to be discounted as mere sideshow. Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman from Florida and the co-host of “Morning Joe,” tweeted .. https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/832724853346033666 .. a telling call to the right on Friday: “Conservatives, feel free to speak up for the Constitution anytime the mood strikes. It is time.”
It’s true that Trump has not arrested any journalists. He has not shuttered any newspapers or television stations or Web sites. I went to work at The New Yorker on Friday and helped close a new issue that includes a deeply reported and tough-minded Letter from Washington, by Nicholas Schmidle, about the Michael Flynn affair .. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/michael-flynn-general-chaos , as well as a Comment by George Packer that notes that Trump, at his press conference, “behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic.” Yes, there was a little trouble with a Xerox machine, but no one at the office counted it a threat to the First Amendment. In the meantime, the New York Times and the Washington Post are engaged in a ferociously competitive battle to cover this new Administration that has bolstered the forces of fact and truth, and no one has shut off their computers or phones, either. At CNN, Jeff Zucker, the network president, has gotten telephone calls of bitter complaint from Jared Kushner about the coverage of his father-in-law, but if the performance of Jake Tapper and others there is any indication, the attempt to intimidate CNN has not deflated any spirits. The journalists at Mother Jones, MSNBC, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, NPR, The National Review, the Marshall Project, ProPublica, and many other outlets are doing their work with determination and seriousness.
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as in every genuinely authoritarian state, there are no “enemies”—or, at least, none with the capacity to challenge power. Calling on all the repressive means available in such a state—compliant courts and legislatures; the elimination of political competition; comprehensive censorship of television—soaring popularity ratings are achieved. President Trump may wish for such means, just as he wishes for such popularity. For all the chaos and resulting gloom these past weeks, it has been heartening to see so many “enemies of the American people”—protesters, judges, journalists, citizens of all kinds, even some members of Congress—do their work despite Presidential denunciation, not necessarily as partisans of one party or another but as adherents to a Constitution.
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