The Real Reason the Media Has Risen Up Against Trump

This is great. I've talked about this a good deal in recent weeks but I see someone else has picked up the mantle. David Roberts at Vox.

What's efficacious too is that this post was linked to at Real Clear Politics, just above an article from Dana Milbank that is entitled Donald Trump is a Racist and a Bigot.'

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/

Isn't it perfect that these two posts are linked right next to each other? Milbank sort of engages in the obvious. We know Trump has been fomenting this stuff. With the emphasis on foment. In that he hasn't invented it but has spoken to it.

Indeed, some, like Morning Joe's Mila claim that Trump doesn't have to do things like claiming that there were thousands of Muslims cheering. Yes, he does and here's why. The base, his supporters, believe this wives tale that was a rumor in the immediate post 9/11 days.

It's like when people ask why Trump doesn't admit the Birther stuff is a lie, it's because this would be to invalidate his supporters who are Birthers. His whole campaign is about validating his supporters.

Morning Joe, made this point in revealing that his brother is such a Trump supporter, he says he'll support no other GOP nominee but Trump. I'd argue the reason Scarborough's brother feels this way is not despite his talk of cheering Muslims.

So here is Milbank's symptomatic media piece on Trump. Milbank thinks that he stating of the obvious will sink Trump's campaign. Here we have the vanity in the power of the media.

Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.

Some will think this an outrageous label to apply to the frontrunner for a major party’s presidential nomination. Ordinarily, I would agree that name-calling is part of what’s wrong with our politics."

"But there is a greater imperative not to be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and now the disabled. His pattern brings to mind the famous words of Martin Neimoller, the pastor and concentration camp survivor (“First they came for the socialists…”) that Ohio Gov. John Kasich adroitly used in a video last week attacking Trump’s hateful broadsides."
My reaction to Milbank is What a hypocrite, .Remember the wildly sexist 'pranks' against Hillary Clinton he engaged in back in 2008? Sure that's respectable sexism. Now this Vox piece, it gets it: And the fact that normally he thinks that calling someone a racist is just name-calling weakens his argument here. If it's normally name-calling why is it called for here? Usually he can deal with racism and lies but not this time for some reason.

You think of how CNN suspended a reporter just because she tweeted sympathy for refugeess after the House voted to ban them-in effect. Pundits like Milbank just thought she was name calling there and she was suspended by CNN

Vox gets it right:

"The real reason the media is rising up against Donald Trump"

"Something new and morbidly interesting is happening in US politics and media, but no one can agree on exactly how to characterize it. Superficially, it is about the lies told by Donald Trump, but it's about much more than that, as well."

"As Jay Rosen documents in a recent post, the Beltway political media has recently become alarmed by Donald Trump's lies. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, to whom "nothing is shocking anymore," says there used to be "a line that wasn't crossed in years past, a sort of even-partisans-can-agree-on-this standard," but Trump has crossed it. NBC's First Read, the blog of Meet the Press, says Trump has taken lying "to a level we haven't seen before in American politics." The Post and New York Times editorial boards have both publicly wrung hands. Our own Dylan Matthews wrote recently about how Trump's lying has flummoxed the media."

"As everyone acknowledges, politicians have always lied. So what's going on here? How are Trump's lies different? Are they just more voluminous, more flagrant? Or is there something deeper going on that has unsettled the media establishment?"

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828086/donald-trump-media

I agree entirely with this framing. The media reaction to Trump's lies as his lies themselves are. It's not as if Trump is the first Presidential candidate to lie. or make dog whistles about race. Of course, Trump's dog whistles are actually bullhorns which is getting to the problem for the media.

"That was foreshadowing! Because, yes, I think there is something more going on."

Thank you! So do I!. So I will quote at length. 

"Trump has gone from an entertaining player to someone who threatens the game."

"Media outlets aren't quite panicking yet. They thought they had a good handle on Trump when he emerged — just another Herman Cain, a conservative newcomer who would briefly capture the attention of early primary voters until they, under the guiding hand of party elders, "got serious" and chose an electable moderate like John McCain or Mitt Romney."

"This is a model with which political analysts are extremely familiar. Many still think it fits, that Trump will flame out and the establishment will rally around an alternative."

"Maybe so. But Trump's dominance has gone on longer than anyone predicted, and it is making all kinds of people nervous, including the establishment media — the Sunday shows, horse race pundits, and Villagers who have become such an integral part of the Beltway political class."

It has gone on so long that even Nate Silver's buddy Harry Enten now admits to being surprised.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-future-of-polling-may-depend-on-donald-trumps-fate/

I think the writer, David Roberts, is spot on with his theory. Folks like Tom Brown who have been reading me will recognize this as my theory as well. The problem is not that Trump lies, it's about the power of the media pundits themselves.

"Their trepidation has less to do with the fact of Trump lying than with the way he lies. They don't mind being properly lied to; it's all part of the game. What they cannot countenance is being rendered irrelevant. Trump is not kissing the ring. He barely bothers to spin the media. He does not need them, or give two shits what centrist pundits think. Their disapproval only strengthens him. Media gatekeepers are in danger of being exposed as impotent bystanders."

Yes, this is all about them. Like Milbank is still flattering himself in his piece, He's going to put an end to Trump's rise by calling him a bigot. He and his Beltway buddies have the power to make or break a candidate. Trump is offensive to this belief. Trump diminishes their importance.

He feels the need to kiss their rings no more than to spend money on tv ads-another part of the conventional wisdom for campaigns.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-475-million-buys-you-in-2016-gop.html

Now here Roberts nails something I've tried to frame properly in posts and discussions with Tom Brown. This is why I find the media so hypocritical and phony here:

"It's a mistake to see Trump as de novo. The term is all over the place now, but I wrote my first column about "post-truth politics" back in 2010 (see follow-ups here and here). Conservatives have been bending the truth for many years now. Romney and Ryan lied like crazy in the 2012 campaign. Republicans in Congress have been telling outrageous lies about Obama for almost eight years, everything from his secret Muslim-hood to Agenda 21 to his plan to confiscate guns and to institute Sharia law."

"Remember Sarah Palin and death panels? Swift Vets going after Kerry? Bush and Cheney and weapons of mass destruction? Clinton having Vince Foster shot? Oh, and climate change being a coordinated global hoax? The increasing radicalization and insularity of the conservative movement over the past several decades has made it, in Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann's words, "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science."

Thank you. I mean the Beltway pundits never had a problem with conservative truthiness before. They carried its water for eight years in the 90s-remember Vince Foster and Whitewater or more recently Emailgate?

But these were acceptable, respectable crazy conspiracy theories. I mean the media wasn't incredulous about claims that the Clintons had people murdered or that Bill ran drugs from the White House.

Yet the idea of cheering Muslims is just absurd?

"Of course, all politicians bend the truth, and Democrats do it too. But the parties are not symmetrical in this regard. There is simply nothing on the left like the phenomenon of numerous elected politicians and a third of Republicans believing that Obama is training troops in Jade Helm for a coup. That is wackadoodle, Alex Jones–level stuff, and it isroutine on the right. The other day Ted Cruz speculated, based on a clerical error hyped by a far-right blog, that the Planned Parenthood shooter is a "transgendered leftist activist." It was wildly irresponsible, but it barely qualified as the most outrageous howler of the day."

"Donald Trump's nonsense is not appreciably more nonsensical than much of what circulates in right-wing media every day, the same right-wing media Beltway reporters have been treating with kid gloves for years. Why do his lies rankle so?"

"So it's not that Trump lies more, engages in more conservative truthiness than normal but that he breaks the rules of political lying. Trump breaks the rules of political lying"

"Trump represents, or could represent, the end of that detente. He breaks the rules of political lying"

" Lies about policy are fine; lies about trivial, personal, or easily verifiable claims are not.

"The media has been cowed from making any judgments about policy, which is why Jeb Bush can claim he'll create 4 percent growth by fiat and not become a laughingstock.Every Republican candidate who has put out a tax plan has relied on a whole series of fantastical judgments about the ability of regressive tax cuts to spur economic growth, but Chuck Todd hasn't denounced them as liars."

Yes, And this is what I've been raving about. In reality lies about policy are much more harmful to actual Americans; lives than lies over whether or not Al Gore invented the Internet.

Yet in 2000 the media called Gore a pathological liar over trivial questions about whether his ad tried to make it look like he was paddling a canoe in deeper water or not and whether he was at a Buddhist temple-why it mattered if he was never was explained.

Meanwhile. W's lies about his budget and tax plans were given a total pass and Gore's criticism was seen as mere nitpicking.

"But when a politician lies about little things, personal experiences and anecdotes, the media pounces. This was notoriously on display during Al Gore's 1999 presidential campaign, during which reporters uncovered (or in many cases, fabricated) endless misstatements or contradictions about trivial particulars. When Hillary Clinton said she once landed in Bosnia "under fire," the media went nuts. They went nuts about the details of Kerry's war record. They're going nuts now about Ben Carson's biographical anecdotes. Exposing (or hyping) stuff like this is what the media now views as "tough."

"Trump is lying about policy, of course, but he's also telling a whole string of smaller lies that are easy to refute. He knows they're easy to refute, he knows they've been refuted, and he just keeps repeating them. There's the nonsense about seeing Muslims cheering 9/11. There's ISIS building a luxury hotel in Syria. There's his campaign being self-funded. There's 300,000 veterans dying while waiting for medical care. It's endless; Kevin Drum has a list of 26 and counting."

"These are the kinds of random, specific lies the establishment punditry feels empowered to call out. And they have called them out. But neither Trump nor his followers care. The emperor has no clothes."

Now he gets down pat the Modus Operandi of Krugman's Very Serious Pundits of the Sensible Center. Everything is about being evenhanded between both parties.

"Lies are fine as long as an "other side" is provided."

"As long as both sides have their claims and counterclaims, studies and counterstudies, experts and counterexperts, the objective media knows its role. Quote this one, quote that one, opinions differ, done."

"This is the part played by the conservative network of think tanks and media outlets — to provide a "side" to back any conservative claim, so there are always two. That way, the media feels safe sticking to "he said, she said." It's a comfy arrangement."

"But Trump is a free agent. He's not tapped into that network and doesn't seem to need it. He feels no obligation at all to supply the media with institutional support that might legitimize his positions. He rarely mentions studies or experts, other than occasionally name-dropping Carl Icahn. He rarely mounts anything that could even be characterized as an argument. He simply asserts."

"By doing this, he disrupts the arrangement. He doesn't offer journalists any cover for their refusal to make a judgment. He calls their bluff, forcing them to be with him or against him."

"Nine lies are fine as long as the 10th is retracted."

"Every so often, when a politician goes overboard and makes an obviously, verifiably false claim about a matter of recorded fact, the media will browbeat him or her into retracting it and apologizing. (Even Carly Fiorina is still subject to this; she retracted a claim she made in the debate after some outraged media fact-checking.)"

"An occasional victory like this on some trivial matter validates the media's role. More to the point, it affirms that the politician in question respects the media's role, that it stillmatters if the media unites in protest to a particular claim. Given this occasional prize, the high-profile campaign journalists of the world will let more complex and consequential falsehoods fly under the radar."

"But Trump does not back down, retract, or apologize, ever, not even for the most trivial thing. He refuses to allow journalists and pundits to validate their watchdog role. He recognizes that capitulating to the mainstream media is far worse for any conservative than clinging to a lie. (Fiorina, for instance, was pilloried for backing down.) They have no power over him at all, and now everyone knows it."

This is why I've been so contemptuous of the media's attempts to rap Trump's knuckles. I agree with this Vox piece so much-which is why I've quoted him in such detail.

Simply establishing that Muslims didn't cheer after 9/11 is pretty meaningless if your real concern is the truth. I mean the media rules of making mountains over molehills-a Buddhist temple,did Hillary really want to become a Marine,. who invented the Internet-is hardly a status quo of truthiness worth fighting for.

So the service, that's right, that Trump has provided here is showing the utter irrelevance of the Very Serious Pundits.

"Trump is revealing that the referees are irrelevant

All this rule breaking has the same effect: It disrupts the game as the media is used to playing it. It steps all over the unspoken agreements among various sectors of the political class in DC. It threatens the gatekeeper media, the VSPs, with something far worse than being wrong or biased. It threatens them with being irrelevant. Trump doesn't need or respect them, and they can't touch him. They can only point and gawk."

But Trump is the creation of conservative truthiness.

"But it's wrong to view this as a result of Trump's idiosyncrasies. He's just an opportunist who was in the right place at the right time, taking advantage of a faction of the electorate that has been primed to respond to someone like him."

Republican billionaires and political operators have spent decades building a self-contained epistemic bubble in which they could pump up the right-wing base with fear and paranoia. Now the Frankenstein's monster has lumbered off the table and crashed into the cocktail party. It no longer heeds the GOP establishment, and it utterly disdains the media. All Trump does is give it voice. He is what happens when conservatives stop being polite and start getting real."

"For now, the political class is on tenterhooks, waiting with nervous anticipation to see whether the familiar order will reassert itself, whether Trump will fade and be replaced by someone with more respect for the way the game is played in DC."

"And maybe that will happen — maybe this has all been a disturbance in the force that will calm itself before 2016 — but the social and demographic trends driving the Trump phenomenon are far deeper than Trump himself. They will outlast him."

As to those social and demographic trends, we looked at them earlier today.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/12/trumpism-as-angst-of-working-class.html

This is why I've had a problem with the concern that Trump is doing lasting damage to Tom Brown's Reality Quotient in American politics. In what way does Trump affront the truth that the Whitewater and Vince Foster conspiracy theories didn't?

I see the pre Trump media status quo as contemptible and have no interest at all to return to the pretenses of the Very Serious Pundits-who really aren't serous about anything except their own phony images.

"There is a faction of the US electorate that is positively wroth: angry that they are losing their country, angry at immigrants and minorities who want "free stuff," angry at terrorists for making them feel afraid, angry at liberals for rejecting good Christian values, angry at the economy for screwing them and denying them the better life they were promised, angry about Solyndra and Benghazi and Obamaphones and Sharia law and ACORN and Planned Parenthood and black-on-black crime and a government takeover of health care and Agenda 21 and Syrian immigrants on the loose and UN climate hoaxes. They are angry at all institutions, including the Republican Party and the media, that have failed to halt America's decline."

"They are mostly white, mostly older, and entirely pissed off. And Trump speaks for them, less in what he says than in his total contempt for those same institutions."

"The anger is understandable, even justifiable in many ways, but unfortunately it also involves believing lots of nonsense. And no amount of understanding and empathy can make Jade Helm anything but, factually speaking, nonsense."

"Thus the dilemma. The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee. But what they confront now is aggressive, unapologetic nonsense, piped up from a nationalist, ethnocentric, revanchist conservative base through the mouth of one Donald J. Trump. He is forcing them to choose sides, to accept his bare assertions and make a mockery of their purported allegiance to accuracy ... or to call him out and, in the eyes of his supporters, formally align against him.

The conceptual space for neutrality has all but disappeared. Media outlets are being forced to take sides, and facing the grim possibility that even if they do, they have no power to affect the outcome. Their twin idols — objectivity and influence — are being exposed as illusions. That's what has them so anxious about Donald Trump."

Just like the GOP Establishment gets no sympathy here, neither does the Very Serious Media. They are reaping what they've sown.