“This is the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”
– Network
On Thursday April 23, Viceroy Donald Trump had his daily press briefing/propaganda rally/Airing of the Grievances and brought out Bill Bryan at the science and technology division at the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Bryan told the press,
“If I may have the first slide please. And while that’s coming up, our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the (corona) virus, both surfaces and in the air. We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus. … If you look at the fourth line, you inject the sunlight into that, you inject UV rays into that, the same effects on line two as 70 to 75 degrees with 80% humidity on the surface and look at line four but now you inject the sun, the half-life goes from six hours to two minutes. That’s how much of an impact UV rays has on the virus.” He went on to say, “We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just bring it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva. This is not the end of our work. “
In response, this is what Donald Trump actually said in his April 23 press briefing:
“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”
This made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move.
I bring up the original context for all the cultists in the Church of Jesus Trump Latter-Day Suckers who think that their Messiah was “taken out of context” as though we can’t just replay the video tape or get the transcript (like I did) and as if the people who wank off three typos in one sentence are going to judge anyone else’s command of English. This was also the excuse of White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany last Friday when she said, “President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing. Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.” Article: “But Trump undercut that defense and others pretty quickly Friday, telling reporters he was just kidding around when he suggested injecting disinfectants: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” he told reporters in the White House, according to a pool report.”
Was hoser being “sarcastic” about a half an hour after posing that idea when he lit into Philip Rucker from the Post, when Rucker said, “You’re the president and people tuning in to these briefings they want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do. They’re not looking for rumors” and Trump responded, “Hey, Phil. I’m the President and you’re fake news. And you know what I’ll say to you, I’ll say very nicely… I know you well. I know you well because I know the guy, I see what he writes. He’s a total faker”? See, that’s the problem. If ANYTHING you say can be taken as sarcasm, how do we know when you’re being serious? Donnie, are you going to say that you were just being “sarcastic” when you ran for President and this whole thing was just an elaborate practical joke that you and the Clintons set up to show what a bunch of gullible power-lusting goons the Republicans were? It would be nice to get the grownups back now that everyone’s gotten the punchline.
With all the dumbass things Donnie has said, and WILL say for the rest of his life, this “injection” musing may just pass in the wind like every other mental fart that comes out of his upper asshole. But it’s kind of telling that it hasn’t yet. Maybe because the one thing that Trump was good at by right-wing standards was getting out of the way of the economy, and as long as that was good, nobody cared if the president acted like a wannabe Mussolini. But it was Trump’s interference with our disease monitoring systems, his refusal to respond to the initial reports from China, and his not being straight with the public because he didn’t want Wall Street to crash that caused Wall Street to crash, because he created uncertainty that didn’t need to exist. And now that this country has far more coronavirus cases than any other Western nation, we would like real leadership and not a “reality” TV clown boy.
I can actually believe that some part of Trump was being sarcastic, or only musing, because this crisis has already revealed that he doesn’t take the whole issue seriously. Like where he justified the shutdown protestors as having “cabin fever,” which apparently is supposed to justify risking actual fever. Or when he said “we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” when the phrase is actually “can’t let the cure be worse than the disease.” But then when he had his injection idea, he said, “I’m not a doctor, but I have a very good (pointed to his head) you-know-what.” The word is “brain.” But given how Trump’s brain is rapidly withering from willful neglect, maybe “brain” and “disease” are the two words that dropped out of his vocabulary last week.
The criticism over April 23 – some of it apparently internal – caused Trump to announce later Friday that the Administration might “scale back” the daily briefings, and over the weekend, in one of his decreasing moments of lucidity, tweeted, “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”
But be that as it may, homeboy went back to press briefings on Monday April 27, this time whining about how we had such a wonderful best economy ever before the China Virus ruined it. But again, at the time China was failing to contain the virus from global spread, Trump was tweeting, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!“
In his defense, Trump might have forgotten about this position for the same reason that he forgot the words “disease” and “brain.”
Who knows what Trump will do next? Will he make Ivanka the Senate pro tem? Will he replace Dr. Fauci with Dr. Oz? Will he declare the official language of the United States to be Swedish? Nobody knows! Not even him! Tune in tomorrow at 5:45 (or whenever he feels like walking out) for The Trump Show! ™
But this week I want to go back to a hidden truth in Trump’s Sunday tweet, where (to repeat) he said “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”
Like much of what Trump says, this piece is inadvertently confessional. On several levels. First: it’s his decision to have these press briefings in the first place. Secondly, whether you think the press “asks nothing but hostile questions” it isn’t true that they refuse “to report the truth or facts accurately” or that the result is “Fake News.” Leaving aside the point that in Trumpspeak, “Fake News” is not fake news but any information that contradicts The Leader or makes him look bad or feel bad. When news networks cover these events they usually just let the camera roll. They are reporting the facts accurately. The event itself is the news.
But then there’s the kicker: “They get record ratings”. And they do. In late March, the events were marked as having ratings of around 8.5 million viewers, which caused Trump to brag that even Teh Failing New York Times was showing he had better ratings than the “Bachelor” finale.
In large respect, this whole foofaraw illustrates the love-hate (or rather, co-dependent) relationship Trump has with the media. He picks on them almost the way Hitler picked on the Jews. (No, Trumpniks, I’m not saying your innocent little boy is Hitler. Hitler actually ran a successful economy for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.) And yet, one could argue that if it weren’t for the media, Trump would not be president. These guys gave Trump all sorts of free media, and you know Trump loves nothing more than not having to pay for something. And it was all because everyone, especially the media, knew that Hillary Clinton had all the appeal of shredded wheat, and they dreaded the prospect of covering her coast to the coronation and subsequent four years with nothing more than the business-as-usual scandals to look forward to. Trump was their godsend. His job was to be dumb for public consumption, and despite being more “extreme” in his platform than the third-party candidates, news networks latched on to him because he was an entertaining buffoon who was great for ratings.
Trump is much more their creation than he is that of Vladimir Putin or even Mark Burnett, and that has to create a certain tension, even in the doubtful event that he is aware of it. The fact that he needs attention like a lawn needs manure, the fact that even now he needs the media more than they need him, just reinforces the point that Trump isn’t the invincible Sun King and is not a self-made man. Everything he has is from someone else’s largesse, and being made aware of this makes Trump realize he’s a fraud. The real tension is that his only recourse to confirm his importance is to go out and hog the spotlight and talk about what he’s supposedly doing, and the more he does this, the more obvious it is that he’s a fraud.
The few times I’ve seen Morning Joe on MSDNC recently, Joe Scarborough and to a lesser extent Mika Brezinski have been pushing the idea that Trump is going senile, which as I’ve already implied is very easy to believe. But I think the reason these two in particular are pushing the insinuation so hard is because they used to be friends with Trump in his pre-Caudillo days, there’s been a certain amount of bad blood between them as his behavior in politics has alienated them personally, and most importantly, they know for these reasons that Trump is watching their show.
I’ve said more than once that “gaslighting” only works if your target already has little sense of objective reality, and since Trump’s only sense of outside reality is “the shows”, he is far more vulnerable to gaslighting than the liberals who complain about it.
A similar point was made in Pajiba, no less. There seems to be a deliberate effort to lionize virus specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, not just because he’s genuinely competent, but because that perception antagonizes Trump. (Remember, Trump pushed Alex Azar out of the coronavirus czar role and gave it to Mike Pence as a publicity stunt, then took over the coronavirus briefings cause he didn’t like Pence getting the attention.) Dustin Rowles: “This is all coming to a head, because we have a feckless, thin-skinned idiot for a President, and also because the media has been dying to see this play out. Everyone in the media knows exactly what Anthony Fauci thinks of Donald Trump. The entire world knows what Anthony Fauci thinks of Donald Trump. Anthony Fauci rang the bell on this pandemic early on, and the President didn’t listen to him. If the President had listened, thousands of lives would be saved. But Fauci is honest to God trying to do what’s best for the country, which is to give us the truth while also trying to remain on the President’s good side by [pretending to give] him the benefit of the doubt. Fauci wants to keep his job, because his job is so important to our health.
“But the press? They’re pushing Fauci, basically daring him to sh*t on the President, because we all need the clicks, because the ad rates are gone. And so, the media wants more than just another NYTimes investigation showing without any doubt whatsoever that Trump’s slow response to the pandemic led to the massive loss of life, the media wants the most trusted man in America right now to weigh in on that investigation and indict Trump for his failures.” His conclusion: “The political media is more interested in pitting a hero (Fauci) against a villain (Trump), which may provide a few more (mostly worthless) clicks, but it is decidedly not in the interest of our collective public health. Baiting Trump into firing Fauci, which seems almost inevitable at this point, will not make us safer. “
All this ties into a debate that is often held within the media itself as MSDNC stars like Rachel Maddow vocally question the worth of these little shindigs and others (like Ari Melber) flat-out cut away from the press briefings once they drift away from any public-information purpose. One of the few reporters who deliberately takes the traditional “sunlight is the best disinfectant” position is Olivia Nuzzi, now writing for New York Magazine, who did a piece on April 28 saying among other things, “Just like the reality-TV contestants who have walked the corridors of Trump’s West Wing, I’m not here to make friends. If members of the press endeavor to do so, I believe we’d more likely be protecting the president from himself, while helping him prove that the press condescends to the public it claims to serve.
“What a lot of Trump critics miss is that the biggest threat to his presidency isn’t the pandemic and the collapse of the global economy. It’s Trump. The more we see him — rambling, ranting, casually spitballing about bleach and sunlight — the clearer that becomes. But that’s not the media’s problem, and taking the spotlight off of him as he displays the full extent of his inadequacies would only serve to help him and to make the public less informed about what the federal government is doing — or not doing.
“Watching Trump dangerously improvise is, in itself, information. It’s pure access to his thoughts and ideas and emotional state, presented to the world in real time.”
This is itself a confessional statement. If you’re a right-winger convinced that Teh Librul Media are out to get Our President, or a left-winger convinced that they’re not doing enough, the fact is that nothing Teh Librul Media could do to slant the news will set the American people against Trump more than just keeping the camera on him to show what he really is.
But if anything that is an even bigger reason to put a stop to all this.
If Trump is being too cute by half in acting as though his press briefings are more public information than self-promotion, then so are the media. We are certainly not taking the spotlight off Trump to make the public more informed about what the federal government is doing or not doing. We are not putting nearly as much attention on the fact that at least one Governor felt the need to procure personal protective equipment from South Korea and have the state National Guard secure it at an undisclosed location to make sure Trump’s federal government wouldn’t hoard it. We are not emphasizing how much of this bailout went to the people who already have money and influence while most taxpayers got a one-time check of $1200. And some didn’t even get that.
No, the press would rather cover The Trump Show.
In her article, Nuzzi says that the other approach to presenting Trump unfiltered is the observation of an Australian journalist who said it was a “shock” to endure 30 minutes of “unfiltered meanderings” because when Trump’s words are processed through the media, the effect is that Trump sounds more coherent than he is. “I realized how much of the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.” (In other words, translating Trumpspeak into coherent English, and assuming that there is substance to translate.)
This is a good point, but it avoids the other reality: The medium is the message, and the message is the medium. What Trump counts on is the air of authority that comes from being President, and his lust for power and the trappings of office are a means of justifying the self-image that had always been contradicted by his grubby reality. The fact that homeboy is on TV matters to him more than whether what he says is helping him. Because he knows that certain people will go along with anything he says because he’s the one saying it. This is why liberals and mainstream gatekeepers were wailing about Trump offering quack medical advice in stream-of-consciousness observations, while others said, “Oh, it was just musing out loud, it’s not like anyone was taking it seriously.” Well, no less than Fox News said that poison control centers have reported an increase in calls regarding exposure to cleaners and disinfectants, and that was on April 20, before the press conference in question.
Trump is in all ways unfit for office, is too emotionally incontinent to handle the stresses of the office, and his uninformed opinion is at least a factor in getting people killed. It is in fact, not good for him to be out there engaged in a mutual baiting game with the press. It increases the likelihood that he is going to act out and do something really dangerous. And if the press realizes this and continues playing the game anyway, then they too care more about self-promotion than informing the public.
The same press keeps telling us to practice sanitation and social distancing because when there is a virus you have to prevent it from having a vector. In the absence of a serious treatment which may be months away, we have to do everything to prevent the disease from being communicated. And some people would flaunt common-sense guidelines because they have a short-term conception of freedom. Yet the same press, rather than protecting the president from himself, or protecting us from him, would rather maintain themselves as a medium for political contagion than abandon their short-term business priorities.
The only treatment is social distancing.