It remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President: how long it will be before their forbearance for the man who can’t fill the part is tapped out.
This site is all about maximizing the chances for success in connecting with others. But if we flip that goal over, we get an equally interesting effect by testing the limits of behavior a mile wide of the norm.
I’ve been thinking about this watching television news people on cable networks, trying not to register shock that the President of the United States has just trashed another convention of the presidency. News people are expert for keeping calm in the presence of disorder and rudeness. Serious and accomplished reporters can be very good for taking any act and trying to place it into a context that normalizes it for the beat they are covering. This is partly a function of their self-definitions as professional observers.
Those of us with shorter fuses may not have this kind of professional elan. But that’s what forbearance gives us: the use of euphemism and “just the facts” to keep an offensive act from devolving into a comedy of manners.
We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic examples of “presidential rhetoric.”
It’s not too much to say that this President has seriously undermined the conventional role functions of the Presidency. We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic examples of “presidential rhetoric.” But we’ve had over fifty days of them, and then on one recent Saturday: an astonishing and libelous tweet accusing President Obama of tapping phones at Trump Tower, followed minutes later by a second missive expressing giddy delight that a reality star was cancelling his show. These rants came a few days after Trump gave us the wide-eyed and definitive insight that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
Nobody? That must have struck analysts and experts in three previous administrations as news. No one else had apparently been able to grasp the complexities of American health care.
These combined responses and many more like them seem like evidence for what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a condition where an individual with limited competencies lacks even the capacity to understand how limited they are. No wonder one of the dominant tropes emerging in the coverage of this president is of a man-child.
Donald Trump’s over 500 angry, misspelled and boorish Tweets alone would have disqualified him for leadership in most large organizations. Can we assume that one day these rhetorical ejaculations will greet visitors at his Presidential library?
To be sure, we grant every White House occupant some non-presidential moments: Nixon angrily shoving his press secretary toward journalists, Johnson showing photographers a surgery scar on his fat belly, Ford diving head-first down the stairs of his airplane, Clinton lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush commenting at a press conference on the British Prime Minister’s brand of toothpaste.
But nothing has scratched the mostly pristine finish of the institutional Presidency like Trump. He has entire seizures of misdirected utterance and grotesque overstatement. His willful ignorance, bluster and conspiracy-mongering, are not just unpresidential, but anti-presidential. His penchant for turning almost every claim into an accusation and most statements into shaky affirmations of his fragile ego has made his short tenure an unintended psychodrama: an embarrassment to be endured. His first address to Congress showed that he can follow linear thinking if it is fully scripted. Yet he seems uninterested in the kinds of details and substantive exchanges that the press and public long for. So it remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President. Like a school play, the mishaps and miscues are sometimes funny. But how long will we accept this bad actor before our forbearance is tapped out?
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Gary C. Woodward has written about the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
We seem to love news stories built around the game of politics.
The presidential election season now takes the space of nearly three NFL seasons, where the endless journalistic fascination on the minutia of strategy far exceeds what any sane person wants to hear. Imagine seeing the musical Cats for six hundred performances, and we begin to get a sense of the fatigue factor we have built into our presidential politics.
The reasons for this endless campaign cycle are varied, systemic and ultimately not very interesting. Suffice it is say that no one is really in charge. And so a crazy quilt of organizational needs and commercial opportunities play out in repetitive loops spread over many months. Think of the chaotic rules the parties now use to set up primaries and caucuses. Most of the population centers in the United States must wait for smaller states like Iowa and New Hampshire to weigh in.
Analysis of our campaign journalism reveals that most of what political journalists give us is what communication researchers call “process reporting.”
There is one overriding feature of these endless campaigns that is especially problematic. It’s connected to how they are covered by most of the news media. Analysis of our campaign journalism reveals that the lion’s share of the reporting that political journalists give us is what communication researchers Kathleen Jamieson and Joe Cappella call “process reporting.”[1] Process stories tell us very little about what the candidates will do should they get the opportunity to govern; they tell us much more about what the campaigns are planning as they do battle with their opponents.
Jamieson and Cappella’s research examined print and broadcast coverage, with the goal of coding stories as either focusing mostly on substantive issues or on how various sides are playing the “game” of politics. Substantive coverage includes stories on what a candidate thinks: how he or she would govern and lead, and what policies they would propose. By contrast, the “process” or “strategy” frame of reference is a label given to individual reports focused primarily on political polling, and also what individual candidates and their campaigns are strategizing to win over voters.
Why is a candidate spending so much time in a particular “swing” state? Why did they use this location and this particular audience as a place to focus on pay differentials between men and women? Whose decision was it to keep the candidate away from interviewers at The Washington Post? The strategic questions are endless and often trivial. But as with the comments of “color” commentators broadcasting professional sports, we seem to have an endless reservoir of curiosity about the backstories of individual players. News sites like Politico or television programs like With All Due Respect (Bloomberg/MSNBC) would be nowhere without the “inside baseball” commentary that turns their journalists into connoisseurs of campaign mechanics. We love reports built around public opinion poll results, and the play-by-play on decisions on raising money, picking staffers, and the geographic deployment of the candidate. We expect and get far less analysis of major challenges the country and the newly elected leader will face in the next four years. And that’s a problem.
With this focus on process there is less journalistic curiosity about political substance. Journalists simply don’t have time to follow a campaign around the nation while at the same time getting up to speed on the diplomatic possibilities for making headway to end the Syrian civil war, or for helping the European Union ease its political crisis. The iconic journalist I.F. Stone noted years ago that journalists would do better to stay at home and write stories based on the public record: the policy positions of governments or the position papers of candidates who want to run them.
It may be considered “old school” to expect that campaigns will result in a national dialogue about the great issues facing the nation. And yet when we are consumed with the sideshows of the campaigns, we are also sacrificing the opportunity to clear away the brush to find safe passage through the thorny landscape that lies ahead.
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[1] Kathleen Jamieson and Joseph Cappella, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) , 33-34.
