Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  Importantly, he wanted to have Trump’s executive order reverse Obama’s Clean Power Plan so that the coal-fired power plants that burned Murray’s coal would remain open.

  You know, the little stuff.

  Murray also went straight at it in the most brazen request possible: force people to buy his product. In asking for a direct federal subsidy on top of the regulatory tweaks he dreamed of, Murray’s big-government capitalism was on full display. In the words of the Economist, “Subsidizing coal production is a really bad idea. In the fierce competition for the federal government’s worst policy, this is a contender.”3

  Murray, Craft, and others represent one of the Trump-era paradoxes of the conservative movement. When Obama “picked winners and losers” in the market and subsidized clean energy companies, the collective GOP hissy-fit was incandescent. Members of Congress and the Senate railed like street-corner preachers. Free-market think tanks churned out reams of studies decrying his executive overreach into the energy sector. Now, as Trump uses his regulatory powers to prop up an industry that can’t stand on its own in the marketplace, they’re suddenly enthusiasts for the government saving coal from its dirty, deadly self.

  The illusory “war on coal” is over, but Trump’s promise to restore the industry has failed. By mid-2018 the number of coal plants closing down exceeded that of the Obama era.4 Dirty, expensive, and with enormous downstream costs to both lives and the environment, coal is losing out to clean natural gas and increasingly cheap renewables. It is a stark reminder that markets matter, and that everything Trump touches dies.

  The following transcript was provided by Wikileaks in the Fall of 2024.

  * * *

  – INTERCEPT 4 –

  TOP SECRET//SI//ORCON//NOFORN

  [BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

  [CALL BEGINS]

  OPERATOR: Please hold for the president.

  TRUMP: Is she on?

  OPERATOR: Not yet, Mr. President.

  TRUMP: Hope? Are you there?

  HICKS: Mr. President.

  TRUMP: Hope, I miss you.

  HICKS: Mr. President . . .

  TRUMP: I told you to call me your Donnie.

  HICKS: Mr. President, we can’t . . .

  TRUMP: Hope, I’m just a boy, standing in front of a girl . . .

  HICKS: That’s from Notting Hill.

  TRUMP: When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

  HICKS: When Harry Met Sally.

  TRUMP: I want you. I want all of you, forever. You and me, every day.

  HICKS: Donnie, I love The Notebook as much as anyone, but . . .

  TRUMP: You said you couldn’t be with someone who didn’t believe in you. Well, I believed in you. I just didn’t believe in me. I love you, always.

  HICKS: Pretty in Pink. My mom loved that movie.

  TRUMP: You make me want to be a better man.

  HICKS: Mr. President, did someone give you a list of romantic movie quotes to read to me?

  TRUMP: You complete me.

  HICKS: Jerry McGuire. Mr. President, I have to go.

  TRUMP: Wait, I have more.

  [CALL ENDS]

  13

  * * *

  CLOWN PRINCES OF THE TRUMP MEDIA

  YOU CAN’T HAVE EVEN A wannabe despot without toadies ready to sing the Leader’s praises. You can’t have a strongman without sycophants fawning and scraping. You can’t have a caudillo without women swanning around in gold lamé evening gowns as the city burns around you. If the thought of Ann Coulter reclining on a chaise lounge and throwing Donald Trump a come-hither leer just popped into your mind, I apologize.

  All of the people we’ll discuss in this chapter have had their profiles elevated by their lust to please Donald Trump in spite of the realities of his profoundly flawed leadership and character. These are the outliers, the Trump dead-enders, the Donald über alles folks who even their clickservative brethren don’t pretend not to look down on.

  FOX NEWS, THE FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT

  Trump may not read his daily intelligence briefings, but he is America’s number one Fox & Friends Superfan. Every morning, he sits in front of a wall of television sets, nursing his long grudges against Chuck Todd, Joe and Mika, and, well, everyone at CNN. As his minions carefully spoon out his morning porridge into his spill-proof bowl, Trump’s beady eyes flick from screen to screen, watching for any slight, any deviation from worship. Rage tweets at the ready, it’s a constant contest to see who will draw the ire of Grandpa Ranty.

  One channel, though, is different. One morning show sets America’s national agenda more completely than anything else on TV and any political force in Washington. That show is Fox & Friends, and their power is without measure. Trump’s morning tweets have been demonstrated time and again to be summaries of whatever morning story lines are driving the perky, peppy hosts of the number one morning show. “Are Muslims trying to impose sharia law in your dentist’s office?” “Can President Trump’s bathwater really cure psoriasis?” “Have we won the war on Christmas, or does ISIS still want to destroy us?”

  The waves of adulation and validation Fox & Friends provides is a mutually reinforcing dynamic that shapes Trump’s entire day. Among the people who noticed the causal relationship between Fox’s morning hit show and Trump’s tweets was Dan Snow, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, who posted a brilliant infographic showing the vivid hot spot of Trump’s tweets to the Fox & Friends broadcast window.1

  Trump, ever sensitive to any assertion that he isn’t sui generis in every respect or that anyone, anywhere could have some influence over his “thought” processes, got his back up when asked about his obsessive television viewing habits. “I know they like to say—people that don’t know me—they like to say I watch television. People with fake sources. You know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.”2

  Uh-huh. Documents. Sure, Don.

  As the great Andrew Marantz wrote of Trump, “ ‘Reading documents a lot’ is high on the list of activities it’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump doing, along with foraging, Pilates, and introspection.”3

  With all things Trump, the vaguely ludicrous proposition that the president of the United States is watching a morning talk show with the intellectual weight and policy depth of a Katy Perry video would be risible if it wasn’t so damn terrifying.

  It’s not all the rude grunting of lowest-common-denominator outlets like Breitbart. A new species of DC conservative sprang out of the Trump waste pile like some kind of hypocritical mushrooms.

  Meet the clickservatives—conservative media types more interested in web traffic and ad revenue than ideology—who have embraced Esoteric Trumpism at the low, low price of their integrity. It’s a deal with the Devil, and far too many in the conservative intellectual class and the commentariat couldn’t wait to sign. “Eternal damnation later for making libtard snowflakes cry now and raking in those hot clicks? Bargain!” Defending the principles of limited government, personal liberty, and strict adherence to the Constitution is old and busted. The new hotness? “Nationalism is the new black.” So many of them dropped their panties and put out on the first date because Big Donnie talks dirty to the media.

  After Trump’s win in November 2016, it was particularly painful to watch principled conservatives (a term now said with ironic air quotes and that hits the ETTD rule squarely) become advocates for Donald Trump on a scale that ranged from grudging to toadying for a singular reason that seemed to overwhelm all other factors: Trump attacks the press.

  They seem perfectly happy to embrace tactics they’d rage about if a liberal president deployed them, and that they’d condemn in the hands of any foreign strongman or authoritarian.

  After all their talk of fundamentally returning the country to its Constitutional roots, reducing the power of the state, dem
anding America be a nation of laws, they sold themselves to a vulgar authoritarian statist because he tweets mean things about reporters.

  All it took to break the spirit of far too many in the conservative class was for Trump to leaven his deranged, autocratic rantings with “fake news” and “duh librul media” bait. People who think of themselves as being smarter than the average sack of hair still seem to miss that they’re either the latest victims of the Trump Con or willing patsies. Neither is a good look in the war of ideas.

  We now routinely see a formulation something like this: “Well, Trump isn’t perfect, but at least he’s attacking the media.” I wrote in the Daily Beast, “This outsourcing of media aggression is the haute-bourgeois pleasure of watching someone else to do your dueling.”4

  Now, even elite intellectual conservative writers who tore the bark off Barack Obama since 2008 for “picking winners and losers”—conservative shorthand for clumsy government intervention in the marketplace—are delighted by Trump for doing the same and largely silent on pie-in-the-sky blowout budgets with massive new debt and deficit spending. They direct a large fraction of their ire to mainstream media outlets scrambling to find a way to process the election and governance of Trump.5

  Rather than examine his daily assaults on conservative values, common sense, and that little thing we used to value called “the truth,” they look politely away, at best, and at worst strap on their kneepads and grab their pom-poms. “Conservatives” who have for decades sung the praises of free trade, low tariffs, and multilateral trade agreements now mutely nod at the brute stupidity of Trumpian economic populism, largely because he yells at Maggie Haberman and batters CNN, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed.

  Of course, intellectual conservatism is a rather small pool in the great scheme of things. What really mattered then and matters now is that a half-dozen gatekeepers in the conservative movement decided Trump would be lucrative fodder for their audience. They monetized the transition from promoting conservative ideals to selling the umber con man with the same vigor with which they pitch reverse mortgages, catheters, survival food, and gold.

  This constellation of media players could have slammed the brakes on Trump and Trumpism during the 2016 election, and could do so now. At any moment, Rupert or the sons could have told Roger Ailes, “Okay, that’s enough, Roger.”

  They and others actively elected to elide Trump’s endless catalogue of ideological sins, thinly veiled racism, moral shortcomings, mob ties, Russian money men, personal weirdness, endemic cheating, trophy wives, serial bankruptcies, persistent tax shenanigans, low-grade intellect, conspiracy email–forwarding kooky grandpa affect and disregard for American values and standards.

  The “populist movement” explanation for 2016 isn’t entirely wrong, but it took conservative sellout media enablers to promote Trump as the singular remedy for the alleged moral, economic, and political collapse they decried each day for their credulous readers, viewers, and listeners to make that “movement” happen. Tune in Fox today, and it meets every clichéd liberal critique of the past twenty years: counterfactual conspiracy nonsense, yahoo-ism, least-common-denominator jingoism, deep and overt bias in story selection, and out-of-context smears.

  It turns out some Republicans didn’t want fair and balanced after all; they wanted an insular, partisan media environment biased toward the lunatic fringe and that delivered 24/7 Trump adoration. The all-in crew of Fox, Breitbart, social media, and talk radio built an ecosystem for Trump voters where all the news was good news, where the beet harvest always exceeds the Five-Year Plan, and where Donald Trump is a singular, uncontested voice.

  Attacks on the media have become the definitional characteristic of this administration and today’s Republican Party. In terms of today’s discourse, the endless whining about the media isn’t just something they do; it’s essentially all they do. From Trump himself to his minions, the press is the Main Enemy, and the reporting of Trump’s problems is the problem.

  Although Donald Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in the most solemn political oath in the American system of government, he is notoriously not good at abiding by agreements. Every oath Trump has ever sworn, every promise he’s made in business, or his personal life is contingent on his moods, personal beefs, incoherent rages, bizarre conspiracy theories, poor impulse control, horndog nature, and raging venality. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a shock that Trump’s view of the First Amendment and the protection it affords a free press is somewhere between dismissive and Saddam Hussein.

  I wish this was just a game played by a president more suited to the World Wrestling Federation than to the Oval Office, but it’s not. This constant attack on a central pillar of our liberties isn’t good politics for Trump; it’s his only politics. Of all the norms Trump has shattered, of all the damage he’s done to the Republic, the war on the press is the deepest affront to our traditions, values, and freedoms.

  I wonder where the same conservatives will be on the day when some leftist statist in the Oval Office decides to try to shut down Fox or Limbaugh or moves in even more sweeping directions to regulate, control, or suppress conservative voices online. If conservatives don’t see the downsides of this future, they’re working with a set of mental predicates that assume there will never be a tough election ahead, and never be a moment when the jackboot is on the other foot.

  The media’s flaws are our flaws. The media’s shortcomings are our own. The members of the press may not all look like and vote like Middle-American conservative evangelicals in red Trumper hats, and that’s okay. It’s not a secret. The frictionless media world we live in today makes it easier than ever to fact-check, argue, debate, and contest biased coverage on all sides. The way to move past bad or biased media is to produce better media, not to engage in state threats.

  The press is never perfect, and will never please all sides, but the idea of the leader of the free world revving up his mob to intimidate reporters or to use the awesome power of his office to shut down media outlets would have been repugnant to the Founders.

  Trumpism now demands its votaries believe that conservative values and conservative policies are better served by government intimidation, bullying, and restrictions on the rights guaranteed under the Constitution than by the Constitution itself. It’s a sign of how fallen, compromised, and sick the conservative movement has become under this man’s spell. Free speech is still too rare in the world. Having the president of the United States as an implacable enemy of that freedom is a grotesque example for the rest of the world. Trump’s ideal media looks like the press in places like Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Venezuela, and North Korea. In those nations, the liberal media know their place and print only what their respective Dear Leaders find pleasing.

  When independent journalism is allowed at all, censorship, spying, and demands that media outlets follow state propaganda templates make it nearly impossible for informed public discourse. Print and broadcast outlets are strictly licensed and controlled, and often are owned by the families of leading government officials. Online reporting is subject to intense government monitoring. Harassment, violence, and physical intimidation are routine features of the lives of reporters in nations lacking the fundamental press freedoms our Founders wrote into the operating system of the United States.

  In those nations, censorship and state control of the media are features of their political landscape. “I can’t believe the media is allowed to write anything they want” is the language of despots and tyrants. In many ways, this attack on the press and the roaring approval by Republicans illustrates the real divide in American conservatism today. It isn’t simply about Trumpism versus conservatism. It is about statism versus constitutional freedom. Republicans are failing the test of our time, and slipping into the warm bath of totalitarian language, practice, and politics.

  The conservative critique of oppressive states once centered on the suppression of speech and on the use of state power to silence dissent. Today, conservat
ives are rushing to embrace Trump’s attacks on NBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and any other media outlet refusing to bend the knee.

  The reasons the clickservatives flood the zone for Trump isn’t because they embrace the same nationalist hooey as Breitbart or Gateway Pundit. They know better. For many, it’s a shtick, playing the rubes for clicks and ad revenue. For all that conservative websites, writers, and blogs mocked the BuzzFeed model of AI-driven listicle storytelling, they’ve become what they loathed. “Five Reasons Robert Mueller Is Satan” is the clickservative equivalent of “You won’t believe these cute puppies playing on Kim Kardashian’s bed!” or “Take this quiz to learn what Disney Princess you’d be in Medieval France!”

  Some see the Trump culture of endless media confrontation as a felicitous moment to write clickbaity, hair-pulling essays about “the Left” and “the media” being infinitely worse than a man who fails every standard of conservatism. I had this old-fashioned notion that standards were part of what made conservatives what they are. The “But the liberal media” excuse feels increasingly thin as Trump’s failings are increasingly obvious.

  SEAN HANNITY

  Sean Hannity plays a singular role in Team Trump’s media cheer squad. The biggest name on the biggest cable network, Hannity also hosts the number two–rated radio talk show in the country. He is a bright, bright star in the newly defined conservative firmament, because all that matters now is constant, endless, fawning praise of Trump and endless vitriol for his opponents. Already successful, Hannity rose to new heights during the era of Trump.