Month: August 2018

This is in response to Robert W. Merry’s column at The American Conservative on August 29, “Why Trump’s Approval Numbers Won’t Budge.”

To Mr. Merry:

In your August 29 piece, you wrote about how the Monday polls from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News showed that Donald Trump’s poll numbers were 44% approval, as opposed to 46% before Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen were convicted of tax crimes. (Your piece was of course written before the Washington Post-ABC News poll.) And you asked the reader, “Why?”

“Because this isn’t about the fate of Trump so much as the future of America. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism. “

Uh, no.

This is just my theory, but I believe what we are seeing is analogous to 2016, when liberals would wail that the election of Donald Trump would mean the end of Western Civilization, even as they fake-acknowledged their candidate’s issues by saying things like “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” And yet, for all the Chicken Littles saying the sky would fall, not that many of them could be arsed to go out and vote for Clinton. And who could blame them? At least she was actually on the ballot, though.

Continued support for Trump in the polls is a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, just as the entire “conservative” movement is now a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, a mindset in which pronouncing “Mexico will pay for the wall” or “we repealed the Johnson Amendment” magically makes it so. But what of the rest of us still living in the real world?

In that world, Republicans have been threatened in special elections, many of which were only necessary because of the number of incumbents who decided to (or had to) retire early. In Ohio’s 12^th Congressional District, Troy Balderson was only this week declared the winner of the August 7 special election, in a district that was “R+14” for Trump in 2016. Most general election races are in districts where the margin was not that favorable to Republicans. This is why I think such base that Trump has is not as tough as it appears, and later in your column, you seem to admit this.

“For those committed to the new world envisioned by the coalition of the ascendant, it is easy to see Trump, with all of his crudeness and vulgarity, as evil. After all, he’s personally distasteful and he wants to destroy the America of their dreams. But for Trump supporters, he represents their last hope for preserving the old America. These people view the stakes as so high that the president’s personal indecency and civic brutishness simply don’t register as problems. They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause. “

That’s dodging the point. Indeed, for much of Trump’s audience (as opposed to the respectable cloth-coat Republicans he pushed aside in the primaries) Trump’s crudeness and vulgarity are features. And if you’re liberal or libertarian, or at least libertine, crudeness and vulgarity are not themselves evil. Rather, the crudeness and vulgarity are incidental to actual evil, which the rest of us are focusing on and Trumpniks are desperately seeking to rationalize. What is it, Mr. Perry, that you think conservatives are getting from this Administration?

In your own website this week, one of your authors points out that the Trump Administration policy of unilaterally siding with Israel on the Palestine issue denies what little right to self-determination Palestinians have, forcing the burden of Palestinian refugees on neighboring Arab states even as the Administration refuses to let Syrian refugees into this country.

And your most prolific blogger, Christian conservative Rod Dreher, has been doggedly focused on the corruption of the Catholic Church, which is not entirely sexual, and may even be at its core financial. In a column written the same day as your piece, Dreher mentioned his attempts years ago to unearth the earlier pedophilia scandal: “I am reminded of the conservative Catholic men who, I was told, was part of a group of laity who flew to Rome in or around 2000, to warn officials at the Vatican not to name McCarrick to Washington, because he was a sexual predator. When I phoned in 2002 to ask one of the men, he told me he indeed went on that trip, but refused to talk about it. When I phoned the second man on my list to ask about it, he answered, ‘If that were true, I wouldn’t tell you for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.’  Well, it’s all out in the open now, and McCarrick’s foulness has tainted two more popes. If those men had cared more about the truth in 2002 than about protecting the image of the Church by covering up for a wicked cardinal, perhaps the McCarrick boil would have been lanced, and Church wouldn’t be facing such a grave crisis today. There is a lesson here for everyone, not just Catholics, and not just Christians. ‘Live not by lies,’ said Solzhenitsyn.”

But never mind that stuff, because obviously it has no analogy to the political situation.

Right now you have Trump telling Evangelicals that Democrats are a threat to “your religion” (not his) at the same time it’s been revealed that the government is refusing to acknowledge the passports of Hispanic citizens. In that regard, do you want people to focus on the lurid immorality that doesn’t affect them, or do you want them to focus on the lurid immorality that affects public policy?

It’s one thing for leftist propagandists to call right-wingers racist, authoritarian theocrats, but it’s another thing for “conservatives” to actively justify such opinion and spread it even among those who were neutral to or hostile to the Left. And you’re on track to lose a historic number of House seats because your only real achievement was a tax cut that doesn’t benefit most voters and actually kills deductions for people in a lot of crucial states. On policy, you were still going down the spiral, but you at least had the image of morality to pull you back up to public esteem eventually. Now that’s gone. Your moral capital is at a net negative. As Dreher said in another column this week, “People will not take you seriously as a proclaimer of Truth if their aesthetic and moral senses tell them otherwise.” Which is why it does no good to make pronouncements on “evil” or cast the culture war in apocalyptic terms when you are eagerly racing to become the very thing you swore to destroy.

As for “They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause” – dare I suggest, maybe you’ve become too repellent for your pick of candidates? Heck, Condoleeza Rice would be a more wholesome leader for the conservative movement than your precious little boy, and I can think of at least two reasons why y’all wouldn’t want her.

“All of this supports the view, which I have posited in the past, that while Trump may have been brilliant in crafting a successful electoral coalition in 2016, he hasn’t managed to turn that into a governing coalition. This can be seen in part by his lack of any apparent inclination to talk to Americans who aren’t already part of his base. “

Well… yeah.

Trump was brilliant at identifying Americans’ grievances, but since his only concern was self-aggrandizement, he had no plan to address them. Nevertheless, people were so fed up with the status quo under Democrats and establishment Republicans that Trump won just enough votes for the Electoral College. Likewise, if people are mad enough at the status quo, it doesn’t matter whether or not Democrats have any constructive ideas, what matters is flushing out the status quo.

This is what happens when you hitch your star to somebody who doesn’t share your long-term goals or even have any long-term goals at all besides staying one step ahead of investigators and lawyers.

Even you guys in the Pat Buchanan camp, and the various corporate sponsors, the kind of people who could in theory craft a competent version of American authoritarianism, are in practice acting emotionally and reactively and refusing to admit that your Great Helmsman has all the concentration and direction sense of a squirrel on meth.

But if you actually had an idea how to accomplish all those “new directions” like re-assessing immigration priorities (as opposed to simply targeting brown people) or rebuilding our manufacturing base (as opposed to simply pandering to coal country while jobs continue to go overseas), then you would have been able to sell those ideas without Trump. You need him for the same reason that you obey him: because you’ve got nothing else to sell.

There is no greater purpose than Donald Trump to defend, because the “conservative movement” has nothing to offer even the people who should be attracted to it. The modern Republican Party is a beast that can no longer exist in the wild. It is a fantastic chimera, with two squabbling heads, one Christian fundamentalist and one fiscal libertarian, trying to pull a body composed of working class populists who could care less about either of them but just want to save their jobs. Those are the people who actually vote for the Republicans, as opposed to the people who fund them or write the policy agendas, and after Trump, the folks have figured out that they don’t need those guys anymore. Of course, the joke is on them, sort of. They don’t care about free markets, and Trump doesn’t either, and they don’t care about Jesus, and Trump doesn’t either. They do care about coal and steel – and Trump doesn’t. But he acts like he does, and that’s more than “flyover country” had gotten from the two parties before.

Now even in optimal circumstances, Democrats will never get 67 Senators to vote for an impeachment. So we’re all stuck with Trump for two more years. And in those two years, you will all be saying to yourselves, over and over and over and over and over and over again, “Neil Gorsuch was SO TOTALLY WORTH IT.” Because I predict that things will get a lot worse for your party in the next two years. And I bet that you think so too.

The now born-again Christian Blackie Lawless likes to tell a story about his time with the shock rock band W.A.S.P., most famous for the song “F*ck Like A Beast.” Blackie would pose on posters with a spandex costume and a codpiece with a buzzsaw blade coming out of it, and on stage, he would frequently arm the codpiece with various explosive rockets so that they would fire off of his groin during the set. Well, one show, the explosive charges misfired and exploded inside the codpiece, leaving Blackie with screaming pain and a seriously burned crotch, as happens in these situations. And his bandmates came to visit him in the hospital, with the bandages on his crotch, and his guitarist told him, “y’know, Blackie, we wouldn’t have to do these gimmicks if we could just write better songs.”

That’s kind of how I feel about the Republican Party.

And before your anodyne conclusion, “This has been a resilient nation over its 230-year history. It will need all the resiliency it can muster as we move forward”, you theorize: “The country is split down the seams, and some kind of Hegelian synthesis will eventually have to emerge that incorporates elements of the two competing visions of America that today are roiling national politics—and which seem irreconcilable. “

Oh, so an integration of America’s generically liberal political idealism with the practical considerations of culture, economics and national security. Yeah, Robert, I remember when such a synthesis still existed. It was called conservatism. You mind telling me what happened to it?

Today, Reuters reported that tributes were given to John McCain at the monument in Vietnam depicting his capture as a Naval pilot in 1967. The communist government announced that it would sponsor a study tour for Vietnamese students in the United States, to be named in honor of both McCain and fellow veteran Senator John Kerry, in respect to their attempts to rebuild America’s relationship with Vietnam after the war.

It remains to be seen if the McCain family will receive a similar peace gesture from the Republican Party.

After his release from Vietnam, McCain was appointed the Navy’s liaison to the US Senate from 1977 to 1981, when he retired from service. He took this experience as a transition to the world of politics. He was elected an Arizona Congressman in 1982 and in 1986 succeeded Barry Goldwater as Senator from Arizona. At the time, McCain, as a pro-military, anti-abortion Senator, was a strong figure in the Republican Party. McCain went his own way as a Senator, at least at first, and in doing so became a target for Rush Limbaugh and other conservative trend-setters. He agreed to confirm Bill Clinton’s choices for the Supreme Court, liberal centrists Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. His signature legislation after Clinton was co-sponsoring a campaign finance reform act with liberal Senator Russ Feingold, which was only signed in 2002 by President Bush after a great deal of opposition from McCain’s fellow Republicans.

And while McCain decried the current tone in politics, he is largely responsible for creating it. When he was running against (then) Senator Barack Obama in 2008, he decided to pick as his running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose know-nothing resentment made her the John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Cheeto Jesus. When McCain died, Vox did an article showing exactly how McCain’s choice of running mate set the stage for “reality TV politics.”  Of course while Vox put a proper degree of blame on McCain for his choice, they buried the underlying reason for that choice: “McCain was prepared to put Palin a ‘heartbeat away from the presidency’ without even checking if she could do the job. Instead, he picked her because she seemed like a good play to the base.”

Rather than McCain setting the tone for the GOP, the rot had already set in by 2008, and McCain chose Palin because he chose to go with the trend of his Party. So despite his “maverick” reputation, McCain ultimately pleased neither the moderates who saw him as a standard against the new Right nor the new Right who saw him as a RINO.

This is the problem with presenting oneself simultaneously as a “straight talk” character and a politician who strives for “civility.” The common thread between the two postures would be a desire to stand up for the right thing regardless of politics. But the end result with McCain was quite often the worst of both worlds: a centrist position that alienated both the progressive Left and conservatives, especially on foreign policy, where McCain’s hawkish position was in opposition to both the Left and right-wing factions (libertarians and paleoconservatives) who were opposed to America’s continued military adventures. McCain’s civility also served as cover for uncivil conservatives like Palin, and however much he attacked Donald Trump indirectly, he and fellow “good” conservatives like his junior Senator Jeff Flake did not take specific actions in the Senate to shut down procedures of the Trump agenda. For example, both men voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. McCain also supported Trump’s controversial arms deal to Saudi Arabia. Considering that McCain’s last act in the Senate was to vote against Republicans’ last attempt to repeal Obamacare, it is hard to say why he would take that act of defiance in the face of a larger pattern of Republican orthodoxy, and hard to say how things would have been different if he had been half the maverick that his reputation suggested.

John McCain was famously humble for a politician… and often for good reason. But even then his humility and ability to take stock of himself seem to be lacking in public figures today. It also meant that, after a life of physical hardship and two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, his continued career meant he understood that “public service” meant serving the public even if the public did not reward his desire for prestige. Again, a rare trait. And of course, John McCain was well known for his sense of humor. McCain was the guy who said, “the nice thing about Alzheimer’s is that you can hide your own Easter eggs.”

That’s what I liked about him.

The death of John McCain is not literally the death of the Republican Party, but it is certainly the death of McCain’s brand of politics. In the wake of his loss, anyone who cares about this country is going to have to consider how to stand outside the political divide to consider what is actually the best policy for this country. That was a standard that he set but often failed to uphold, and that few have bothered to follow.

 

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.