Tag Archives: Donald Trump

red white blue bar

When Words Do Not Matter

One British shop owner’s reaction after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  London Evening Standard

We may no longer have the patience to read ourselves into the implicit contracts we must make to meld the private with the public.

I was in high school in April of 1962 when an angry President Kennedy delivered remarks to the nation, expressing his displeasure with the steel industry for raising prices that he thought would prolong a recession. Who remembers presidential comments while running the chaotic maze of high school? For many of us the landscape of national life was different then. Kennedy’s criticism of the steel industry caught our attention because presidents typically did not make disparaging comments about core businesses. With unexpected fury as he noted that “simultaneous actions of United States Steel and other steel corporations, increasing steel prices by some 6 dollars a ton, constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” As was his habit, he talked about the national values. Hence, the rhetorical blow against “big steel,” which still supplied most of the American carmakers. “Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country, and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.” The famous Kennedy style of understated affability had been momentarily wiped away by his revulsion. The chill was consequential even for a high schooler. At the time it seemed as if the nation fell silent for just a moment to ponder the weight of his words.

I offer this example in representative contrast to what has unraveled in the years since then. In 1962 Americans noticed a President’s atypical displeasure. How times have changed, with the words of Donald Trump falling like so many lit matches in a dry and empty forest. The pulse quickens from the spectacle, but fewer seem shocked by a national figure who has constructed his persona around daily taunts and obscene asides. Forget a major American industry like steel, no person has been too small to be picked off in a shooting gallery of rhetorical assaults.

The use of presidential rhetoric for incitement and harassment was rare in 1962. Kennedy and his 1960 presidential campaign opponent, Richard Nixon, kept their comments to each other and their supporters civil. Neither sought to use the plentiful indecencies of rhetorical attack to impugn the character of the other. In the end, the steel price hikes were rescinded, and the nation moved on.

trump

Now, it seems, words from former president Donald Trump seem to rush into the vacuum of what passes for civil discourse. We no longer pay much attention because the nonstop roar of hortatory language in the digital world is more distanced and transactional. In a culture of professional shouters we have apparently come to believe that we don’t have time to care. It seems not to matter that a candidate for the Presidency of the United States can suggest that a heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her,” or that he would deploy the military to handle the “enemy from within,” meaning “radical-left lunatics” like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No wonder former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, has recently noted that the President he served under is “fascist to the core.”  And we should remember that in 2016 Trump indicted himself and the nation even more in the comment that he could “shoot somebody and not lose voters.” As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently wrote, he “has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.”  He has made language a disposable afterthought.

As a rhetorician I have a professional distaste for his sloppy indifference to the advantages of a tempered response. As for his brazen palaver, the acceptance of it by a sizable portion of the county is its own national crisis: maybe less than Kennedy’s confrontation over Cuban Missiles, but certainly more than JFK’s showdown with big steel.

short black line

Because government reaches further into our lives, its rules and stipulations provoke in some a barely dormant impulse to celebrate chaos. 

It follows that his conviction for multiple felonies and an assault on at least one woman seems not to be disqualifying. A discouraging number of Americans have dismissed the details of the former President’s crimes of rebellion against the rule of law. It is no coincidence that the British chose a hasty exit from the EU at about the same time Americans first elected Trump. Both societies behaved like bored middle-schoolers searching for a sense of identity in a confusing world.

The influential conservative writer David Brooks has noted that the United States is “a democracy in decline,” in part because more Americans with lives shrunken to the size of their personal devices are ill suited to deal with pages and paragraphs that are needed to make sense of a complex society. Primary sources have been overwhelmed by influencers and interpreters. With news readership and viewership at record lows, too many distracted owners no longer feel compelled to confront the stressed political environment. It is easy to get comfortable with the realization that no one is really paying much attention.

There are also other forces at work. Speaking in broad strokes, because government reaches further into our lives, its rules and stipulations provoke in some a barely dormant impulse to feed a backlash that celebrates chaos. Many no longer have the patience to read themselves into the implicit contracts with civil institutions such as schools and libraries that meld the private with the public. The ubiquitous use of film violence targeting men offers a clue. It seems to function as an opportunity for vicarious release from the work of living in an interdependent and culturally diverse society. To self-identify as dispossessed is reason enough not to care.

Making Sense of it All

Too often political reporters are reluctant to use the kind of everyday language we might apply to people who have lost touch with reality.

American journalists covering this political campaign are facing the challenge of reporting on one of the candidates who repeats fictions that are sometimes so ludicrous that they probably should be reported as the ravings of a man who has lost touch. The problem is that strait journalism in the legacy press—sources ranging from CNN to the Associated Press—tends to grant rough equivalency between candidates running for office.  Does it violate journalistic rules to call out the one who no longer lives in the reality-based world?

Too often these days candidate Donald Trump does not feel tethered to even an approximation of the truth in the observations and accusations that show up in a typical stump speech. For example, he recently noted that his crowd size was up to 30 times larger than his competitor’s rallies. That implies numbers larger than would fit in a stadium for the Superbowl. In addition, he has asserted that the Harris campaign is using A.I. to make her crowds look bigger. As we all know, the former reality show star puts a lot of stock in audience sizes. Other recent fictions include the statement that thousands outside a half-empty hall were still trying to get in (not so, according to the Associated Press), or that he has spoken to the biggest audiences in American history, including those that crowded the national mall to hear Martin Luther King in 1963.

Trump is a fantasist. The lies stack up like so much cord wood at a lumber mill. But except for a few set pieces with the latest lists of “bizarre claims” most of his muddled thinking gets lost in routine synoptic coverage.

A Bias Toward Coherence

The problem here is an old one for those assigned to describe various sides of a dispute. As The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg has described it, journalism has a “bias toward coherence,” where reported events are cleaned up in the retelling. He recently noted that we get “careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines” that might better account for all the fantasies that get passed on as fact.

Trump escapes the full effects of fully revealing journalism by being protected by two norms of journalism: a bias for equivalency, and a second and natural norm to frame most events as stories, which curbs the impulse to let the actual incoherence of an event remain. This is partly Goldberg’s point.

The first norm of equivalency assumes two matched sides to a campaign or—for that matter—almost any event. Each side is presented in a seemingly neutral form to preserve the appearance of objectivity and neutrality. If one driver goes over the speed limit by 10 miles per hour, and a second has exceeded it by 70, both can be described as scofflaws. Recently a Vice Presidential candidate misspoke by describing carrying a gun in combat, which he later noted was not accurate. He carried guns in his military service that spanned more than two decades. But he did not see combat. So maybe it seems to even out the coverage at any point in time if the GOP campaign fudges the numbers on actual audience sizes. This is norm keeps audiences placated, but it is intellectually dishonest.

The second norm is to reorganize events into a story format with a framework of actors, action, purpose, and scenes. Campaigns are normalized by filling in the blanks to make each story a complete account of another day. Never mind that the contradictions represent incoherent acts. Few editors want to pass that incoherence on to their readers or viewers. You have maybe experienced the sensation of attending an ordinary event like a city council meeting– a meeting that was bewildering and aimless–that has since been transformed by the local press that into a more conventional narrative discussions followed by action.  Our instinct is almost always to make sense of it all, not to let the nonsense show through.

These are basic themes are played out in more detail in what is sometimes called “media frame analysis.”  But what it often reveals is that a person unfit to run for the highest office in the country is protected—as CNN demonstrably in 2016 —from an uglier and non-sensical process.

This problem of constrained journalistic norms is doubled by the fact that reporters are reluctant to use everyday language we routinely apply to people who seem less grounded in reality. Columnists may talk about the “delusional” and even “pathological” candidate. Goldberg uses the term “bonkers” to describe Trump’s ideas: an everyday term that hits the mark, but still sounds odd coming from a journalist. In fact, most reporters are reluctant to use terms that suggest the abnormal responses of a person barely able to adapt to their world.