by Rick Wilson
One person in Trump’s orbit understood the need to articulate a broader vision than “Look at my bigly hands, America,” and it was Pollyanna Conway. From time to time, she could convince him to read words on a teleprompter or draft a tweet for him that made him look a little less self-absorbed, but Trump’s vision is for his brand, his company, and his bottom line, not the United States of America.
OPTIMISM
For Americans, the future is always coming, shiny, amazing, and prosperous. The Founders were, at their base, optimists. Every generation of Americans has held onto the idea that we’re getting better, moving toward the music of our better angels, fixing the bugs, hacking in new code, and building a better tomorrow. The Down-note Trumpism is fundamentally pessimistic; it’s a picture of America in decline, of evil foreigners beating us at trade, of problems only a strongman can solve, and the idea that the amorphous “left” is winning all the battles. This isn’t Reagan’s sunny optimism; it’s depressingly small and limited in scope. The Trump Train stops in a podunk future that looks like 1930, not 2030.
Big, visionary, prospective leadership has always been informed by the bullheaded optimism that defines this country. We aren’t just passengers; we’re builders, dreamers, doers, fighters. No challenge is too big. No problem is too complex. Every time the world thinks we can’t, we do. “America, fuck yeah” has become “Daddy, save us!” in the age of Trump.
It’s one of the things I find most depressing about Trump. He’s trained his docile followers to believe in an America that is weaker, sadder, and smaller than we really are. I remain militantly optimistic about America, our rich talent and our amazing, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, crazy, passionate people. It’s too bad a central tenet of Trumpism is to run down the people of this country and describe a nation so lost and weak it requires an authoritarian strongman.
FOCUS
Donald Trump has the attention span of a gnat on meth. If he was stonked to the gills on Adderall, he might achieve the attention span of a toddler. This is a man with a notoriously shallow intellect, and a marked inability to stick to a consistent line of thinking. It’s hard to determine if he simply can’t remember what he said at any given moment, or whether the bright-and-shiny objects around him are too much of a distraction.
Because his governance style is a combination of tabloid beefing, tweet rages, and pick-the-worst-policy games, it takes the hallucinatory belief by his followers that Trump is merely playing multidimensional chess, pursuing some secret, brilliantly considered scheme to MAGA . . . right up until he changes the subject again. In Trump we will never have a president able to marshal his and the nation’s attention on any challenge. This is a feature of Trumpism, not a bug.
He depends on the constant, endless chaos and static of exploding our attention span, pinballing from one crisis to the next. You can imagine him saying “I don’t want to talk about Mueller. How about I bomb Syria instead?”
UNITY
Trump has divided us in ways no American of good faith can countenance. He is the ultimate us-versus-them president, a man who stokes partisan tribalism, racial animosity, and political division for sport. He relishes division.
He flirts with racial forces that no sane president would do anything but rebuke and shun. He refuses to make even the most tangential moves toward bipartisan harmony. He encourages a paranoid, constant war with the media. He wrecks the rule of law, ignores the traditions of presidential leadership, and never fails to stoke division when he should bring the country together.
The only unity emerging in the era of Trump is on the negative side: he has drawn people together in vocal, constant, furious anger. No modern political figure, left or right, has had more people hate him with a mad, burning passion than Donald Trump.
RHETORIC AND INVECTIVE
I love a good scrap. I always have. Politics should have a spectrum of rhetorical engagement, from profound philosophical discussions down to a good verbal street fight. Hell, if you’ve ever seen me on television, you know I’m an equal opportunity asshole who doesn’t mind mixing it up. This tradition of hot rhetoric in politics stretches back to the Founding Fathers, who could name-call, smear, and drop ye olde oppo like champions.
Trump-era name-calling is just as tiresome and juvenile as it is nonsensical. It’s not that I mind fighting with Trump’s cheer squad, bot armies, pet journalists, and allies; it’s that it’s so rarely a fair fight.
Snowflake. Social Justice Warrior. RINO. Libtard. Cuck. I could go on, but you’ve seen them a hundred times if you’ve been anywhere near social media since the rise of Trump. A party once defined by the smart articulation of a conservative worldview that sought to limit the power of the state, ensure the primacy of our values, and advocated for free minds and free markets now plays a kind of Hannitean bingo. Random insults from a playbook so sub-literate it barely rises above pictograms are strung into some stochastic pattern and blurted out over the nearest social media timeline.
With the rise of social media as the Trump world’s primary communications domain, you can reliably expect any argument to end with variations on the theme of “Did I trigger your liberal cuck tears, snowflake? What about Benghazi? What about her emails? What about Obummer’s long-form birth certificate? Mueller’s the traitor, traitor. You want sharia communism, don’t you? How much is Soros paying you? You’re the real racist, shill.”
Baffled? Don’t be. Trumpism exists in the shallow end of the rhetorical pool. The very, very shallow end, where its users ignored the “No diving” sign and still suffer some rocking head trauma from the experience.
Their reliance on these simple chains of concatenated insults betrays the reality that something much more profound is wrong with conservative and Republican thought. Movements depend on ideas and an underpinning philosophy. The Word-Finder Republicans aren’t making arguments; they’re just venting, pecking like chickens for tiny fragments of snark, hoping to seem witty without actually possessing even the slightest wit.
Their efforts to insult their betters aren’t exactly a towering intellectual effort, but what can one expect from people quite obviously raised on a diet of plastic-jug vodka and lead paint chips or from those credulous enough to follow a man whose central rhetorical tendency is to berate his opponents with middle-school nicknames?
I know this reeks of elitism in the era of Trump, but would it be too much to ask that before Trump fans sling #MAGA insults they learn the distinction between “you’re” and “your”? Would it take too much time from Real Housewives of Appalachia to learn even the bare basics of English grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation?
Everyone makes spelling and grammatical errors. Hell, I promise you there are going to be some in this book. For most people, those mistakes are occasional bugs. For Team MAGA, they’re a core feature. A Tweetdeck or Chrome “Your Indifferent Grammar Is Killing Me” plug-in would help. Perhaps it’s time for Microsoft to bring back Clippy, the pop-up icon that suggests things like “Are you sure you want to tweet this, moron? You used ‘you’re’ instead of ‘your’ in this tweet.”
Comedy is hard. Wit is harder. Stringing together a recycled package of 20 or so insults over and over is right up the intellectual alley of the average Trump fan. Bonus points for #lots #of #MAGA #hashtags.
Inside the Oval Office
(A Comedy in Five Acts)
– ACT II –
As the Deputy Special Under-Assistant to the President for Unspecified Duties, you have an office so small, your elbows touch the walls. Your desk is barely the size of a milk crate, and you have to engage in some gymnastics to get to your chair. It would be a cliché to say your office in the West Wing is a closet, but this would make a closet look palatial.
You pinch yourself, though, every morning.
You’re working in the White House. For the president. In the West Wing. You’ve made it to the locomotive on the Trump Train and you’re never going to look back. No one knows quite what your
job is . . . including you. The president yelled at Reince that he wanted you promoted because “He looks the fucking part. Get me guys who look the fucking part, REINCEY.” The president hasn’t given you a nickname, good or bad, but you’re at work every morning, looking sharp and ready to MAGA.
Hope Hicks eyeballs you for the first few days, wondering if you’re trustworthy. Kellyanne Conway keeps walking past your office and eyeballing you. She can’t decide whether to ignore you or devour you. Her eyes remind you of those gators you’d see floating in the Mobile-Tensaw River back home.
Jared asks one day, “So, Fartloaf, where did you go to school?” When you tell him Alabama, his eyes glaze over and he wanders away, whispering “Alabama. Interesting.” The next morning, Ivanka stands in the door of your office, sleek and groomed to within an inch of her life. You can’t quite parse her expression.
Her voice is like honey. “Jared tells me you’re Daddy’s mysterious new ideas man. Thank God, because entre nous”—she drops to a whisper that makes you feel both trusted and slightly aroused—“all of Bannon’s public ideas are terrible, and the ones he talks about when he and Miller and Gorka get drunk are probably war crimes.”
She rests her perfectly manicured hand on yours. It’s cool, almost preternaturally so. She stares into your soul and says, “We’re going to be friends, aren’t we, Fairlane?”
You manage a croak, “Of course, Mrs. Kush—”
“Shhh. Jared only calls me that when he’s in the punishment box. Call me Ivanka. . . .” She slides a business card across the tiny desk. “And do call me.”
6
* * *
THE MEDIA
CONSERVATIVES WAGED WAR ON THE media for decades, and the media won. Far from spelling the end of the mainstream press, Trump’s election gave the national, professional mainstream media a moment and a mission that has produced a golden age of journalism. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and MSNBC are expanding their audiences and prospering like never before.
The inverse of the ETTD curse has been a blessing for the national media, as reporters have rediscovered a commitment to working sources, breaking news, and kicking down doors to get stories. Trump combines uniquely newsworthy behaviors: a constant flirtation with the edges of the law; a clown-car administration staffed by the corrupt, the creepy, and the craven; and a temperament better suited to an asylum than to the Oval Office.
For decades, the rallying cry on the right was “But the liberal media!” It was the quickest route to explaining any failing on the right flank of our politics. Failure to repeal Obamacare? Liberal media. Americans’ stubborn love of Medicare and Social Security? Liberal media. The cancellation of Firefly? Liberal media. Duh.
“If only we could overcome the liberal media monoculture, the truth and strength of our ideas would finally break through” was the spoken and tacit assumption in every battle. “If only we could really be heard on economic matters, on foreign affairs, and on race, the Republican Party and conservatism would finally get a fair hearing in the minds of the American people” was a common argument. It wouldn’t have to be a zero-sum game of replacing one set of biases with another; the rightness of our ideas would carry the day.
Uh huh. How’d that work out?
Yes, the mainstream media often deserves a kick in the ass so hard they would reach orbital velocity for their professional missteps, insularity, ideological blinders, vast self-regard, and occasional outright malice against conservatives. Yes, they make mistakes large and small, every day. Reporters and editors have every human flaw and weakness that everyone else has. There are ideological bad actors in the media, as in every other institution.
However, as a justification for every one of Trump’s failings, reveling in their misery falls wildly short of the mark. A movement that once took pride in its intellectual rigor and was graced by the ideas of Burke, Hayek, Weaver, Friedman, Kirk, and Buckley today views the feces-flinging by Breitbart and in a constellation of kook-right conspiracy sites that would make Lyndon LaRouche blush as highbrow conservative commentary.
It’s not an argument for mainstream media malpractice, Obama, Clinton, social justice silliness, George Soros, or the Pentaverate to say that imitating the worst behavior of the press doesn’t exactly honor the ideals we claim to serve or elevate the conservative message. Instead, it makes a mockery of our ideas if we believe a Trumpcentric media monoculture is a positive outcome and that screaming “Fake news!” is a substitute for advocacy and argument.
Yes, in 2008 the press lost their damn collective minds. The first Obama campaign benefited from a tidal wave of largely uncritical adulation. The superlatives flowed in a ridiculous, flowery stream of praise that bordered at times on the creepy. Yes, “the One” was a media absurdity. I remember emailing a reporter this snarky note after reading one of her pieces: “Are you practicing writing ‘Mrs. Katherine Obama’ in loopy script in your mash book?” (Name withheld to protect the embarrassed.)
They spoke and wrote about Obama in terms so glowing and so toadying that it was easy to caricature the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squeeing and fainting at his every utterance. That nearly mindless rah-rah remained a constant element in Obama’s coverage until he walked out of the Oval Office. Conservatives rightly mocked it, but the smarter types recognized it as an example of the normative power of media and pop culture. The two had combined in one fell swoop to overcome Barack Obama’s thin résumé, his lack of experience, and questions about his ideological underpinnings. Donald Trump wasn’t the first celebrity president. Yes, the press treated Hillary as Her Majesty the President-in-Waiting Glass-Ceiling-Shatterer-for-the-Epoch and ignored her terrible campaigns and clunky persona and the defective-robot affect she displayed on the campaign trail.
That’s no excuse for the coverage of the 2016 Republican presidential campaigns or of this presidency, where coverage was driven by Infowars and Breitbart. Trump fans aren’t looking for up-the-middle coverage; they’re looking for partners in the fake news explosion that helped Trump win the election. If being a Republican means buying into stories so obviously, barkingly insane that they sound like Roger Stone’s conspiracy rantings after a three-day meth bender, then we don’t have a political party; we have an inpatient mental health facility. To remind you once again, a meaningful fraction of Republicans believed that Hillary Clinton was running a global child sex and cannibalism ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.
If conservative media is to mean something outside the narrowest confines of the base, it needs to be honest, direct, and critical of our failings. Conservatives who legitimize the creepy authoritarianism, unalloyed racism, and apocalyptic religious and cultural war fantasies on the pages of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and the dog’s breakfast of other Trump fan “news,” they’re not building conservatism. They’re creating a filter bubble as wrongheaded and as dysfunctional as the one they imagine exists at the New York Times or MSNBC.
Good journalism ought to matter on the right and not fall into the slavish corruption of basic journalistic practices in service to the preferred narrative. Good writing and reporting ought to matter. As for my friends in the mainstream press, you’re not off the hook. No matter how much Republicans claim to hate the media, let’s be very clear: without the active participation of the mainstream media in the Greatest Scam on Earth, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president. The mainstream media helped elect him through its constant attention to his every utterance.
Why did they do this? Didn’t they hate Trump and love Hillary? Sure, quite a few thought he’d be easy meat for Hillary in the general election, but as with everything, money explains most of their behavior. Finally, the networks had a presidential election that had all the draw of professional wrestling and all the heat of a table-flipping, hair-pulling reality-television show. CNN president Jeff Zucker had produced Trump’s The Apprentice and knew good television wh
en he saw it.
Rupert Murdoch had already pushed Fox into a position where it would net more than a billion dollars, but CNN had long lagged behind Trump State Television’s profits. In 2016 CNN’s ratings and gross profits spiked sharply higher, crossing the $1 billion mark for the first time in its 36-year history.
Donald Trump, as heinous as he is as a person, a leader, and a president, is must-see television, and American cable networks made several billion dollars proving that Americans love reality television, the more vulgar and loud the better, even when the fate of the nation is involved.
Inside the Oval Office
(A Comedy in Five Acts)
– ACT III –
The first early morning call is a little shocking. It’s 5:54, and you’re clearing in through White House security. You’ve been in line for fifteen minutes already. While you’re walking through the mags, your phone beeps with a blocked number. You answer.
The president of the United States bellows, “Fruitloop! Listen to this Tweet idea! Listen!” He reads it and your mind is blank. Something about a witch hunt, Mueller, Crooked Hillary, and the Wall. It was so fast, you could barely process it. Then the president is back: “Do you like it? I like it! Should we do it?”
You respond the only way you know how: “Yes, Mr. President. It’s a great one!” or something similar. You honestly can’t think of another way to do it.
