Focus puller

Don't fix your face in a funhouse mirror

Political news these days — of the latest disastrously unfit appointee, the latest AI atrocity, the latest Republican threat against the media — is like an endless fever dream. This was to be expected, especially if you read my post-election series on, well, what to expect.

But you shouldn’t let it get to you too much. I don’t mean the facts — I mean the news, especially now, during this period between the election and the inauguration, when the main character isn’t actual in power to do anything and reporters have to make shapes out of the clouds of hot gas he and his goons emit.

Take this New York Times story: “Can Wall Street Billionaires Deliver on Trump’s Blue-Collar Promise?” The lede:

When Donald J. Trump first ran for the White House in 2016, his closing campaign advertisement lamented the influence of Wall Street in Washington, flashing ominous images of big banks and the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros.

Now, as president-elect, Mr. Trump has tapped two denizens of Wall Street to run his economic agenda. Scott Bessent, who invested money for Mr. Soros for more than a decade, is his pick for Treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, will be nominated to lead the Commerce Department. Mr. Trump’s choices to lead his economic team show the prominence of billionaire investors in setting an agenda that is supposed to fuel a “blue-collar boom” but that skeptics think will mostly benefit the rich.

Number one: It’s not that reporters Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson don’t report facts, but that they portray them as evidence of — well, I was going to say “hypocrisy,” but that’s not a charge that a casual reader would take away from it; rather, Rappeport and Swanson make it look like a fascinating paradox: Hmm, he’s employing billionaires and they’re “setting an agenda” to enrich the working class! Wonder how that’s gonna work! Maybe send a kid down to the morgue to see whether he or any Republican has ever done that before — nah, skip it.

Number two: They don’t tell you why “blue-collar boom” is in quotes. I had to look it up myself.  It’s from an earlier Trump lie — was it #23,090 or #23,900? I forget — in his 2020 State of the Union address, one that’s been dusted off and reintroduced by Trump factota like Larry Kudlow (“The Trump trade on Wall Street is predicting a blue-collar boom for the economy”).

Maybe Rappeport and Swanson figure all their readers readily recall punchlines from old SOTUs, or else they read it in so many Republican press releases, or heard it coming out of so many airport TV monitors, that they came to accept it as folk wisdom like “it never rains but it pours.” It’s amazing how one’s idea of objective reality can be altered by the repeated blasts from the Mighty Wurlitzer played on CNN.

Later in the story, we’re told that “Democrats and left-leaning groups… assailed Mr. Trump for giving top jobs to rich donors,” lol those Democrats, and then, the silver lining:

Yet the decision to tap Mr. Bessent and Mr. Lutnick is raising speculation that Mr. Trump could take a more market-friendly approach to many of his economic policies than some had feared because of his professed love of tariffs, which had the potential for igniting a global trade war.

Mr. Trump’s promises to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on goods from around the world, and tariffs of 60 percent or more on products from China, have worried business owners. But many investors still seem to be betting that he will not fully pursue those plans.

So upon further review he may actually be full of shit — but that’s a good thing because what he said he’d do is really fucked up! Though, we’re told at the end, “it is also possible that Mr. Trump’s pro-tariff policies could still win out…” Check back later!

Some outlets, meanwhile, acknowledge the bullshit and encourage their slightly less gullible subscribers not to fall for it. This is an improvement, but often these writers gild the lily by offering readers a comforting counter-fantasy.

At The Atlantic, for example, Tom Nichols reminds us that “stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic,” and that “if citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day,” so remember that “Trump cannot simply will things into existence,” “Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat,” etc.

All well and good. Being who he is, however, Nichols tries to encourage us by telling us some Congressional Republicans have of late made shows of independence — there was this Idaho Senator, for example, who did some advise-and-consent harrumphing! This, however, does not take into account that Republican resisters have room to do a little Kabuki of their own at a time when there is no cost to it, perhaps to take the temperature of their own constituents before zero hour. When Tubby ascends the throne and starts dishing out vengeance for real, we’ll see how well the Pete McCloskey caucus stands up. (Prediction: Not well.)

Plus we’ve already seen how some of our vaunted democratic institutions have responded to Trump’s pressure:

I do take the point that we can’t know for sure what’s going to happen in every instance, and panic can be a way of ceding ground. And I understand the impulse to buck up one’s readers to make them less inclined to panic — especially when you’ve got an educated liberal readership that needs a little hand-holding, and may pay to have it held.

But I would also say that at this point all white knights are speculative. We have no idea where relief will come from, or even if it will come.

The important thing in my view is to wave away the media miasmas and focus on what’s real — which can, at times, be more encouraging than the fantasies.

It’s pretty well observed now that the repeated insistence on Trump’s electoral “mandate” by his own campaign and the rightwing press (but I repeat myself) is not borne out by the actual sub-majority size of his victory. But it was slurped up by the Prestige Press right after the election. In Politico, of all places, Michael Shaffer notices that “even as the counting progressed, Trump’s victory was described as ‘resounding’ by news organizations ranging from the Associated Press to the The Washington Post to the The New York Times to POLITICO. Others offered ‘commanding win,’ ‘runaway win’ and ‘dominant victory.’”

Noticing and saying that you’ve noticed is healthy. And the press has begun to notice, and adjust. (Sometimes they forget to be terrified of Tubby and revert to their traditional status anxiety and fear of embarrassment.)

But there’s plenty more hot gas where that came from. Here’s a headline in the Washington Times yesterday: “Trump forgives his enemies.” The solitary evidence offered of this alleged generosity of spirit is Trump’s appearance on the Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski show. Most of us took that as yet another shameful capitulation by onetime resistance-y Prestige Press poohbahs trying to get in good with the incoming Führer, but columnist Everett Piper characterizes it as pure Christian charity and proof that Trump is not the monster his opponents describe. The idea is risible even before Piper attempts to support it with a Trump quote:

Here’s part of the statement Mr. Trump issued after the meeting: “I am not looking for retribution, grandstanding, or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly or even badly beyond comprehension. I am always looking to give a second and even third chance.”

That sounds like a B-movie gangster talking about how nobody knows what a great guy he is. But Piper and a hundred other advance men will still try to pump that bilge into the information stream. They’re counting on the hoi polloi to buy it, and maybe a few credulous Prestige Pressies, encouraged by their bosses to find a counterintuitive angle that might get the MAGA flaks to ease off on them a little, to pick it up as well.

Before you can count on anything else reversing the trend, you have to get your own mind right. And the first step toward that is to notice.