CSotD: The Spin Cycle
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Margulies starts the ball rolling with an observation which you should hold in mind throughout the rest of what is to come.
First of all, he’s right. Trump reminds me of a wisecrack directed at Jesse Jackson some years ago by Detroit Mayor Coleman Young: “Jesse’s never run anything but his mouth.”
Ditto, the difference being that, when Jesse ran his mouth, he was at least doing it in the public interest. I lived near Chicago in those days and Jesse Jackson brought a lot of necessary, positive attention to issues of poverty and injustice. Young was right that he never held office, but he was imbedded in politics.
By contrast, while residents of Gotham were familiar with the loudmouth in their midst, the only time Trump gained national attention was when he screwed up the USFL by becoming a team owner and pushing the others into disastrous decisions that tanked a previously credible league.
Until he was tapped to play a blowhard millionaire on The Apprentice, whereupon he was embraced as the real deal by a public who also believed that professional wrestling is on the square, or who know it isn’t but assume the entire world is bogus and just there as entertainment.
Even his entry into politics was glitz and bullpucky. He didn’t suddenly appear with tools on the site of 9/11 or spearhead a major improvement to the lives of people. He glided down an escalator being cheered by a claque of paid “supporters” with no idea what they were allegedly supporting, except the guy from the Apprentice or maybe that guy who shaved Vince McMahon’s head at Wrestlemania.
You’d have to be an absolute moron to believe this was a real sport or a spontaneous event, and that may be key to his success.
I’m not making this up, but my elder son was on the T in Boston with what he thought were people from a group home enjoying an outing, but then realized they weren’t actually together but were a lot of separate fans from a recently concluded pro wrestling event.
However, I believe Trump’s core supporters know that neither wrestling nor Donald Trump are on the level, but see it as entertaining and, as the analysis goes, take him seriously but not literally.
And, to moderate things a bit, let me add that reporters don’t have to, and shouldn’t, go to Trump rallies and single out the more outrageous kooks to interview. It would be more interesting, and better journalism, to talk to some of the regular people who follow him.
Anyway, Margulies nailed it: Trump’s got a lot of damn nerve to criticize rock stars and actors for voicing political opinions.
Which brings us to Jake Tapper, who I think is a much nicer, smarter guy than Donald Trump, but whom I classify along with Barbara Walters and Geraldo Rivera as more interested in their own celebrity than is fitting for a reporter.
They’ve each broken some good stories, but, as biographer Brooke Kroeger has said of her most famous subject, “Every story Nellie Bly wrote was about Nellie Bly.”
Allie misses a critical difference between reporting and writing a book, which is that daily journalism doesn’t often let you amass the evidence you need to come to a conclusion. Ninety-nine times out of 100, you need the additional time to do the additional research for a book that digs deeper.
Even Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate coverage was “here’s what we’ve found now” not “here’s what it means.” They waited to write a book not for greed or glory but because, until they had all the pieces in hand, they couldn’t assemble the mosaic.
Hands brings up the oft-asked question, why don’t you cover Trump’s incapacity instead?
As I’ve noted before, I welcome analysis of why the Democrats have made bad election moves, including letting Biden run for a second term.
I wish it were being presented as sober analysis instead of entertaining gossip, and that Tapper weren’t (Yikes!) hawking his book on his own show, but the important point is that reporters are covering Trump’s dishonesty, cruelty and ambition to become a dictator.
They aren’t spoon-feeding voters, but neither are they covering it up.
Plus there are Substacks and newspaper columns galore analyzing the cruelty, dishonesty and jaw-dropping economic idiocy and double-dealing in the current administration.
If you’re not seeing it, you’re not looking.
Lack of comprehension isn’t all coming from within the anti-Biden camp, either. Summers is conservative, but he seems to be reflecting a wide spectrum of empty speculation.
We still don’t know how incapacitated Biden may have been or for how long.
We should know, however, that, over his four years, the economy recovered and was at the start of a boom when he left, despite the up-is-down, black-is-white analysis of the opposition.
Either he accomplished that, or the people around him accomplished it. If Biden did nothing for four years but wave to the crowd, somebody on his team was getting the work done.
If Trump had a debilitating stroke tomorrow, do you think Bondi, Hegseth, Noem, Bashful, Sleepy and Dopey could run things?
And by the way, we not only don’t know how disabled Biden may have been, but we have no idea how his cancer may have played into it. As Smith suggests, it’s become more a matter of paranoid entertainment than of serious analysis.
Me, I can be neutral, because I don’t even have a prostate. I gave it up along with my bladder and a string of lymph nodes almost nine years ago, and only missed two weeks here, while Brian Fies took the reins and I went under the knife.
Which is an indirect way of pointing out that we have no idea how much Biden’s prostate cancer hindered him.
Some guy who knows cancer but hasn’t examined Biden and doesn’t know how or when he was diagnosed said that hormone treatment might perhaps make a person a bit foggy.
Like the guy in Smith’s cartoon, he got some attention without any of us getting any real enlightenment.
Which is an indirect way of my suggesting, on behalf of cancer survivors everywhere, that y’all can just STFU.
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