by Sid Holt
Moreover, from All the President’s Men to The Insider to Good Night, and Good Luck to Spotlight, Hollywood portrayals of the media always involve prudish conservative villains upended by chain-smoking/disheveled/wisecracking lefty heroes, Robert Redford’s amusingly hunky representation of then-Republican Bob Woodward notwithstanding.
But whatever their personal leanings, influential reporters mostly work in nihilistic corporations, to whom the news is a non-ideological commodity, to be sold the same way we hawk cheeseburgers or Marlboro Lights. Wars, scandals and racial conflicts sell, while poverty and inequality do not. So reporters chase one and not the other. It’s just business.
Previously, at conventions like this, pundits always played up the differences between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, religion, immigration), while ignoring the many areas of consensus (trade, military spending, surveillance, the Drug War, non-enforcement of financial crime, corporate tax holidays, etc.).
Any halfway decent boxing promoter will tell you the public must be made to believe the fighters hate each other in order to sell the fight. The fighters also must be hyped as both having a good shot to win. Otherwise, why watch?
The same principle applies in politics. Or at least it did, until Donald Trump arrived in Cleveland.
Thanks to Trump, we in the media can no longer cast politics as a sports story, because the illusion that both sides have a compelling chance at victory is now a tougher sell.
Instead, we will sell it as a freak show, a tent full of bearded ladies and pinheads at which to gape. Next to sports, freak shows are what the media do best, so it’ll be an easy switch. Shows like Anderson Cooper 360° will become high-tech versions of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or The Biggest Loser, destinations for Americans to tune in for a bit to feel superior to the mutants debasing themselves onscreen.
And it’s here that the irony of a reality-TV star like Donald Trump winning the nomination comes full circle. Trump won because he grasped instinctively that the campaign trail was more TV show than democracy.
He rolled through primary season simply by being a better and more magnetic reality character than the likes of Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush. (You couldn’t build a successful reality show around those pols even if you locked them in a hyena cage with Ryan Seacrest and Tila Tequila.)
Then he went to his convention, and his lineup of speakers, minus the handful of “real” politicians who held their noses through the thing, read suspiciously like an episode of The Apprentice or Flavor of Love. His celebrity guests were a bunch of D-listers ready to eat snails, walk on coals, swap wives or (in this case) publicly support Donald Trump to keep their fading celebrity alive.
The big exception was Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson, an actual huge star who scored cheers attacking the media.
“It’s been a rough year for the media experts,” he said. “They don’t hang out with folks like us who like to hunt, and fish, and pray, and actually work for a living. I don’t even know if they know how to talk to people from Middle America.”
It was hard to listen to Robertson’s defiant spiel and not wonder at the fact that both he and his most ardent fans probably still have no idea that he was put on TV to be laughed at. Duck Dynasty viewers think they’re the experts on hunting, but actually they’re the hunted ones, just another dumb demographic to be captured, laughed at and force-fed commercials for Geico and Home Depot by the Smart People in New York and L.A.
Trump’s voters will almost certainly share the same fate. They will be mined by cable news shows for their entertainment value before ultimately being held up as dangerous loons whose noisy little revolt will serve as the rationale for a generation of Democratic Party rule at the White House level.
Of course, the Republicans blew the one chance they had to save themselves. They could have turned the internal discord to their advantage and held an open convention of ideas, dispensing with the pretense of unity and presenting themselves instead as a big enough tent to embrace and accept many different viewpoints.
Trump should have invited his fiercest critics, the Mike Lees and George Wills of the world, to come onstage and explain why they so fervently disagreed with his tactics and rhetoric. He even should have stopped short of demanding endorsements from all of them. A smart Donald Trump—such a thing is difficult to imagine, but let’s say—would have given his opponents a forum to just whale away at him, even removing time constraints. It would have helped make Trump look more like presidential material.
And this would have accomplished two other things.
First, and most important, it would have rescued the immediate future of the party in the highly likely event that Trump goes on to lose in November.
The Republican leadership from Ryan on down could have walked away from this convention with their pseudo-dignity intact, having spoken out against Trump’s more naked and vulgar form of racism, standing instead on the principle of a more covert, more subterranean, more dog-whistle-y form of race politics—you know, like Mitt Romney lecturing the NAACP about black people wanting “free stuff.”
Second, it would have made for a fascinating run-up to Trump’s final address. Here was a man famous for being so thin-skinned that he stays up at night tweeting insults at judges and editors of New Hampshire newspapers, giving the world’s biggest stage to his critics.
Then he could have ascended the podium on the concluding night and delivered his apocalyptic argument, which he’d describe as believing in so strongly he stacked it up against his fiercest critics. And he’d have plenty of fodder to swing back at, with decades of Republican inaction, corruption and failure to save American jobs to use in service of his case for a radical change of leadership.
Alas, exactly the opposite happened, and everybody, to the last speaker, came out looking smaller than before.
Priebus and Ryan hanged themselves at the start, endorsing Trump despite clearly not wanting to do so. If Trump loses, they go down the drain of history as pathetic quislings. In the unlikely event that Trump wins, a triumphant Donald would replace them at the first opportunity with horses or WWE ring doctors or anyone who didn’t make such a big show of being reluctant supporters when the chips were down.
Some say Ted Cruz was the only winner, given that he came the closest to openly defying the nominee. Cruz refused to endorse Trump, giving a remarkably poisonous and self-serving speech in which he preened like a bully wrestler and told people to “vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket,” instantly drawing boos from the crowd. Chris Christie, another quisling whose career will soon be over, felt compelled to shake his head in disbelief, while Cruz went on to repulse the crowd with his 10 gazillionth recitation of his Inspirational Family History, including what trail reporters derisively call “the underpants fable.”
“Love of freedom has allowed millions to achieve their dreams,” he said. “Like my mom, the first in her family to go to college, and my dad, who’s here tonight, who fled prison and torture in Cuba, coming to Texas with just $100 sewn into his underwear … “
“Fuck your mom!” grumbled someone in the cheap seats.
“You suck!” shouted another.
Trump should have let this all play out, but instead he tried to screw with Cruz’s rhythm by entering the hall mid-speech and giving a thumb’s-up. Later, Cruz’s wife, Heidi, was heckled by Trump supporters who yelled, “Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs!” at her, which was both amusing and kind of revolting. Why not yell it at her husband?
But even Cruz wasn’t denouncing Trump’s belittling of Mexicans, veterans, the Chinese, the disabled, Jewish people, Megyn Kelly’s wherever, Carly Fiorina’s face, Super Bowl 50 (“Boring!”) or any of the hundreds of other groups, people and things targeted by the nominee in the past year.
Instead, the next day, Cruz said that he was not “in the habit” of supporting candidates who attacked his family. This was a sensible enough position but not one that particularly marked him
as having stood on principle, especially given that his politics are basically identical to Trump’s, minus the oddball insults. If Cruz turns out to be the one Republican who survives this mess, that will be the cruelest blow of all.
By the time Cruz’s speech was done, it felt as though an improbable collection of America’s most obnoxious, vapid, mean-spirited creeps had somehow been talked into assembling at the Q for the sheer novelty of it (“like X-Men, but for assholes” is how one reporter put it).
As for the subsequent speech by VP hopeful Mike Pence, there’s little to report beyond that it happened and he’ll someday regret it. Pence redefines boring. He makes Al Gore seem like the Wu-Tang Clan. His one desperate attempt at a Hillary takedown—calling her “the secretary of the Status Quo”—was so painful that people visibly winced in the stands. And when it was all over, he left Trump hanging for an excruciating unexecuted air kiss that immediately became the most mocked thing on Twitter since anything ever. It was a mathematically inexpressible level of Awkward.
All of these awful happenings left only one possibility for salvation: Trump’s speech. Unfortunately, by Thursday the multitudinous letdowns had already dented the TV ratings and all but wiped out the possibility of a saving last-night performance. But if anyone could make a bad situation worse, it was Trump. If only for that reason, it was worth attending.
The buzz in the hall on the final night was that Trump might screw things up—how could he not? On the primary trail we had never seen anything like him: impulsive, lewd, grandiose, disgusting, horrible, narcissistic and dangerous, but also usually unscripted and 10 seconds ahead of the news cycle.
We could never quite tell what he was: possibly the American Hitler, but just as possibly punking the whole world in the most ambitious prank/PR stunt of all time. Or maybe he was on the level, birthing a weird new rightist/populist movement, a cross of Huey Long, Pinochet and David Hasselhoff. He was probably a monster, but whatever he was, he was original.
Then came Thursday night.
With tens of millions of eyes watching, Trump the Beltway conqueror turtled and wrapped his arms around the establishment’s ankles. He spent the entirety of his final address huddled inside five decades of Republican Party clichés, apparently determined to hide in there until Election Day.
And not just any clichés, either. Trump ripped off the Republican Party’s last-ditch emergency maneuver, a scare-the-white-folks spiel used by a generation of low-charisma underdogs trailing in the polls.
Many observers called it the most terrifying speech they’d ever seen, but that had a lot to do with its hysterical tenor (the Times amusingly called it “almost angry”), the Mussolinian head-bobs, the draped-in-flags Caesarean imagery, and his strongman promises. It was a relentlessly negative speech, pure horror movie, with constant references to murder and destruction. If you bought any of it, you probably turned off the tube ready to blow your head off.
But it wasn’t new, not one word. Trump cribbed his ideas from the Republicans he spent a year defaming. Trump had merely reprised Willie Horton, Barry Goldwater’s “marauders” speech, Jesse Helms’ “White Hands” ad, and most particularly Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” acceptance address, the party’s archetypal fear-based appeal from which Trump borrowed in an intellectual appropriation far more sweeping and shameless than Melania’s much-hyped mistake.
He even used the term “law and order” four times, and rehashed a version of Nixon’s somber “let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth” intro, promising to “honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.”
In place of Nixon’s “merchants of crime,” Trump spoke of 180,000 illegal immigrants roaming the countryside like zombies, hungry for the brains of decent folk.
“The number of new illegal-immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015,” he cried. “They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities, with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.” The tragic story of Sarah Root, killed by a released immigrant, was just Willie Horton without the picture.
He mentioned cities in crisis, a rising crime rate, and an opponent who promised “death, destruction, terrorism and weakness” for America. His argument really came down to that: Vote for me or die.
As for his populist critiques of money in politics and the pay-for-play corruption in both parties that made up so much of his stump speeches, the same critiques that Bernie Sanders used to throw a scare into Hillary Clinton, they took a back seat in crunch time.
Trump was always just smart enough to see that the same money backs the Jeb Bushes and Hillary Clintons of the world. But he never had the vision or the empathy to understand, beyond the level of a punchline, the frustrations linking disenfranchised voters on both the left and right.
Presented with a rare opportunity to explain how the two parties stoke divisions on social issues to keep working people from realizing their shared economic dilemmas, Trump backed down. Even if he didn’t believe it, he could have turned such truths into effective campaign rhetoric. But such great themes are beyond his pampered, D-minus mind. Instead, he tried to poach Sanders voters simply by chanting Bernie’s name like a magic word.
In the end, Trump’s populism was as fake as everything else about him, and he emerged as just another in a long line of Republican hacks, only dumber and less plausible to the political center.
Which meant that after all that we went through last year, after that crazy cycle of insults and bluster and wife wars and penis-measuring contests and occasionally bloody street battles, after the insane media tornado that destroyed the modern Republican establishment, Trump concluded right where the party started 50 years ago, meekly riding Nixon’s Southern Strategy. It was all just one very noisy ride in a circle. All that destruction and rebellion went for nothing. Officially now, he’s just another party schmuck.
Archibald MacLeish once wrote a poem called “The End of the World,” about a circus interrupted when the big top blows away. The freaks and lion-tamers and acrobats are frozen mid-performance, and the “thousands of white faces” in the audience gasp as they look up at the vast sky to see, after all the fantastical performances in the ring, the ultimate showstopper: emptiness, an endless black sky, “nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.”
Trump’s finale was like that. When we finally pulled the lid off this guy, there was nothing there. Just a cheap fraud and TV huckster who got in way over his head, and will now lead his hoodwinked followers off the cliff of history.
The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump
October 14, 2016
Saturday, early October, at a fairground 40 minutes southwest of Milwaukee. The very name of this place, Elkhorn, conjures images of past massacres on now-silent fields across our blood-soaked history. Nobody will die here; this is not Wounded Knee, but it is the end of an era. The modern Republican Party will perish on this stretch of grass.
Trump had been scheduled to come here today, to kiss defenseless babies and pose next to pumpkins and haystacks at Wisconsin congressman and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s annual “GOP Fall Fest.”
Instead, the two men declared war on each other. The last straw was the release of a tape capturing Donald Trump uttering five words—“Grab them by the pussy”—during an off-camera discussion with former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about what you can do to women when you’re a star.
Keeping up with Trump revelations is exhausting. By late October, he’ll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery. There are not many places left for this thing to go that don’t involve kids or cannibalism. We wait, miserably, for the dong shot.
Ryan, recoiling from Trump’s remarks, issued a denunciation (“Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified”), disinviting Trump from his Elkhorn celebration, which was to be the first joint campaign appearance by the country’s two highest-ranking Republicans.
As a result
, the hundreds of Republican faithful who came spoiling for Trumpian invective, dressed in T-shirts reading things like DEPLORABLE LIVES MATTER and BOMB THE SHIT OUT OF ISIS, and even FUCK OFF, WE’RE FULL (a message for immigrants), ended up herded out here, as if by ruse, to get a big dose of the very thing they’d rebelled against.
They sat through a succession of freedom-and-God speeches by Wisconsin Republicans like Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Sen. Ron Johnson, Gov. Scott Walker and Ryan, who collectively represented the party establishment closing ranks and joining the rest of the country in denouncing the free-falling Trump. Once an unstoppable phenomenon who had the media eating out of his controversial-size hands, Trump, in the space of a few hours, had become the mother of all pop-culture villains, a globally despised cross of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Charlie Sheen and Satan.
To the self-proclaimed “Deplorables” who came out to see Trump anyway, Ryan’s decision was treason, the latest evidence that no matter what their party affiliation, Washington politicians have more in common with one another than with regular people.
“Small-ball Ryan,” groused Trump supporter Mike Goril, shaking his head, adding to this election cycle’s unsurpassable all-time record for testicular innuendo.
Speaker after speaker ascended the stage to urge Republican voters to vote. But with the exception of Attorney General Brad Schimel, who got a round of applause when he grudgingly asked the audience to back Trump for the sake of the Supreme Court, every last one of them tiptoed past the party nominee’s name. One by one, they talked around Trump, like an unmentionable uncle carted off on a kiddie-porn rap just before Thanksgiving dinner.
Metaphorically anyway, Trump supporters like Goril were right. Not one of these career politicians had the gumption to be frank with this crowd about what had happened to their party. Instead, the strategy seemed to be to pretend none of it had happened, and to hide behind piles of the same worn clichés that had driven these voters to rebel in the first place.
