"Trump hacked the media before our eyes" -- Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat, conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times called his Wednesday column "Trump Hacked the Media Before Our Eyes" to call attention to the fact that all the excitement about the "confessions" of a Cambridge Analytica official is really old stuff.   Trump has been doing it for years, just in a different way and without all the digital data.  Douthat writes:

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"Let's get one thing straight:  I am not a fan of Facebook.  I'm confident that social media is a cancer on our private lives and a source of derangement in our politics.  I take it for granted that the tech barons are acquiring the power to tilt elections, and that they'll be happy to play handmaidens to tyrants soft and hard so long as they can monetize our data. . . . 

"But the liberal establishment's fixation on Facebook's 2016 sins -- first the transmission of fake news and now the exploitation of its data by the Trump campaign or its appendages . . . still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it's new when it's the old thing that mattered more. . . .  

"No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook's data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump's surprise victory.   But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn't Zuckerberg's unreal kingdon;  it wasn't even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily.  It was the old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news.

"Start with the fake news that laid the foundation for Trump's presidential campaign -- not the sort that circulates under clickbait headlines in your Facebook feed, but the sort broadcast in prime time by NBC, under the label of reality TV.   Yes, as media sophisticates we're all supposed to know that 'reality' means 'fake.' but in the beginning nobody marketed 'The Apprentice' that way;  across most of its run you saw a much-bankrupted real estate tycoon portrayed, week after week and season after season, as a titan of industry, the for-serious greatest businessman in the world.

"Where did so many people originally get the idea that Trump was the right guy to fix our manifestly broken government?   Not from Russian bots or targeted social media ad buys, but from a prime-time show that sold itself as real, and sold him as a business genius.

"Forget unhappy blue collar heartlanders, forget white nationalists and birthers.  The core Trump demographic might just have been Republicans who watched 'The Apprentice,' who bought the fake news that his television program and its network sponsors gladly sold them.

"That was step one in the Trump hack of television media.  Step two was the use of his celebrity to turn news channels into infomercials for his campaign.   Yes, his fame also boosted him on social media, but there you can partially blame algorithms and the unwisdom of crowds;  with television news there were actual human beings charged with exercising news judgment and inclined to posture as civic-minded actors when it suits them, making the decisions to hand day after day of free coverage to Donald Trump's rallies.

"Nothing that Cambridge Analytica did to help the Trump campaign target swing voters (and there's reason to think it didn't do as much as it claimed) had anything remotely like the impact of this #alwaysTrump tsunami, which probably added up to more than $2 billion in effective advertising for his campaign during the primary season, a flood that drowned all of his rivals' pathetic tens of millions.

"And as cynical as I believe the lords of Silicon Valley to be, the more important cynicism in 2016 belonged to those television execs who were fine with enabling the wild Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P., because after all Republicans deserved it and Hillary was sure to beat him in the end.

"Except that she didn't beat him, in part because he also exploited the polarization that cable news, in particular, is designed to feed.   In 2016 this polarization didn't just mean that Fox became steadily more pro-Trump as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals;  it also meant that a network like CNN, which thrives on Team Red vs. Team Blue conflict, felt compelled to turn airtime over to Trump surrogates like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany because their regular stable of conservatives (I was one of them) simply wasn't pro-Trump enough.

"The depth and breadth of Trump skepticism among right-wing pundits was a pretty solid indicator of his unfitness for high office.  But especially once he won the nomination this skepticism was often filtered out of cable coverage, because the important thing was to maintain the partisan shouting-match model.   This in turn encouraged a sense that this was just a typical right-versus-left election, in which you should vote for Trump if you usually voted for Republicans . . . and in the end that's what most G.O.P. voters did. . . . 

"[T]he business-model of our news channels both assumes and heightens polarization . . . .  it was ripe for exploitation by a demagogue who was also a celebrity. . . . 

"It's also clear . . . . that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news.

". . . . In a sense, you could argue all those tweets matter mainly because they kept being quoted on TV.

"Which is not to say that the current freakout over Facebook doesn't make a certain kind of sense.   Beyond the psychological satisfaction of weaving the often-genuinely-sinister side of Silicon Valley into stolen-election theories, there's a strategic wisdom to the center-left establishment's focus on the internet.

"What Trump did will be hard for a future demagogue to imitate.   The generations who get their information from newscasts are dying out, the web is taking over at an accelerating pace and in the long run there is more to be gained in going after Mark Zuckerberg than in pillorying Jeff Zucker [head of NBC?]

"And pilloring Fox's hosts only helps their brand:  the big tech companies regard themselves as part of the liberal cultural complex, so they're vulnerable  to progressive bullying and shaming;  not so Sean Hannity, whose stalwart support for Trump was and remains vastly more important than any online strategem.

"In the end, as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently for National Review, one implicit goal of the Facebook freakout is to ensure that 'conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.'  If the trauma of Trump's victory turns social-media gatekeepers into more aggressive and self-conscious stewards of the liberal consensus, the current freakout will have more than served its political purpose.

"But like the television channels whose programming choices did far more than Facebook to make Donald Trump president, it won't have served the truth."

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It's important to understand what happened that gave us Trump;  but, as Douthart rightly points out, by the 2020 election things will have changed significantly -- and certainly by 2024.    AND we'll never again (let's hope) have the peculiar combination of Donald Trump's television celebrity and fake reputation as a business genius, plus an older white majority fascinated by that repugnant combination.

At least let us hope this is a one-time, grossly unique phenomena.

Ralph

"Who Is John Bolton?" -- The Guardian

Ed Pilkington writes this for The Guardian as a way of introducing to readers John Bolton, President Trump's choice for his third National Security Adviser, a job that is supposed to be a gatekeeper for the president.  It does not require Senate confirmation.

His job is to receive reports and recommendations from all the different agencies having to do with national security, sort through them and prepare a summary or synthesis of the options and recommendations, so that the president can be informed and make good decisions on such matters.

Of course, NSAs often have their opinions, but they are ideally chosen to be able to present options rather than agendas.   John Bolton, by history, does not seem to fit that mold.   He is a man with a definite agenda.   He favors aggressive military action;  he has in the past advocated taking preemptive military strikes on both Iran and North Korea.   Here is Pilkington's take on him:

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"John Bolton, the incoming national security adviser, will have the ear of Donald Trump at a perilously fraught moment in world affairs.

"A notorious hawk who advocates the unilateral wielding of US might, Bolton is dismissive of international diplomacy, and has called for the bombing of both Iran and North Korea.

"The departure of HR McMaster, who was credited by some as being a  moderating force on the president, and his replacement by one of the most aggressive thinkers in the world of US foreign policy, will spread fear in diplomatic circles that the Trump administration could be poised to take a dramatic hawkish turn.

'The shuffle comes as Washington is already bracing itself for the potential of imminent face-to-face talks between Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over he regime's development of nuclear weapons.

"Bolton, who will leave his post as a senior fellow at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute to join the White House on 9 April, has made clear his preference for how to deal with North Korea -- bomb it.   Last month he wrote an opinion column for the Wall Street Journal in which he made a legal case for a pre-emptive strike. . . .

 "The former ambassador [actually he was the US Ambassador to the United Nations only be a recess appointment by George W. Bush;   the Senate would ot confirm his appointment] whose basic approach to diplomacy is summed up in the title of his book Surrender is Not an Option, has made a similarly combative case for Iran.   He was scathing of Barack Obama's attempt to deal with Tehran's nuclear program through negotiations, writing in the New York Times in 2015 that only bombing by the US and Israel would take out Iran's uranium-enrichment installations and prevent disaster. . . . 

"Bolton's arrival in the Wolff revealed in his inside account of the White Housse, Fire and Fury, that Trump's former senior counselor Steve Bannon had urged the president to hire Bolton.   So too did the late Fox New executive, Roger Ailes.  'He's a bomb thrower,' Ailes said last year, according to Wolff.  And a strange little fucker.   But you need him.'

"Trump seems now to have come round to that way of thinking."

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Breaking: H. R. McMaster out; to be replaced by super-hawk John Bolton

This was my worst fear:  that Trump would replace the rational, scholarly Gen. H. R. McMaster with the radical, war-mongering hawk, John Bolton as National Security Adviser.    It's the NSA's job to take all the information and advice coming from multiple sources and synthesize it into a credible national security policy for the president.    Bolton instead will mirror Trump's worst instincts about all our foreign affairs, especially as we try to thread the delicate nuclear needle with North Korea.

Ralph

A right-on quote that nails Trump

Michelle Goldberg, a frequent guest political commentator on MSNBC and now a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times, finished off her Tuesday column with this zinger about Trump:

"With each day, it's clearer that the secret of Trump's success is cheating.  He, and those around him, don't have to be better than their opponents because they're willing to be so much worse."

On impeachment

Mike Barnicle, MSNBC contributing analyst, speaking about the president's attacks on Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the possibility that he might fire him:

"The reality of it is that we are part of an age right now where most Republicans seem to be more afraid of an assault on them by Twitter than they are about the dangers of a presidency that is unraveling before our very eyes.  That's the fact of our political lives.

"And eventually it's going to come down to three C's.  It's going to come down to their character, their conscience, and their common sense [as to] what they [Republicans] do with this presidency."

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John Dean, White House Counsel during the Nixon administration, eventually became a cooperating witness in the Watergate trials, and served a prison term for his involvement in the coverup before that.  He commented on CNN on the current Trump actions:

"What I think we're witnessing is a very public obstruction of justice.  He's already, as I see it, exceeded everything that Nixon did.  He's much more involved than Nixon ever was in the cover-up.  Nixon did it behind closed doors, so people were surprised when it came out on tape.   But Trump is just right out front on it, dealing with it very publicly.

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We're not likely to see impeachment this year with just over seven months before the election.  Even if the Republicans wanted to, there's hardly time to prepare for it.  But it feels to me that it's moving inexorably toward impeachment.    If the women don't get him first, which could happen.

Ralph

In Memorium

An old friend from another life died Monday evening, so my thoughts are there and not on our perilous political times.

Jane Davis Holmes (1932-2018) was a woman of many talents and impressive intellect.   She was the mother of our two daughters, Joanna and Barbara, and grandmother to David, Adam, and Em Reed.

Jane and I were married from 1954 to 1998.   That we eventually needed to go separate ways, in order for each of us to be our true selves, need not negate what was good about our relationship:  mutual respect, shared interests, especially our wonderful family -- and, yes, love.

May she be at peace now.

Ralph

Check back later today

Former CIA Chief Brennan slams Trump

Andrew McCabe was the Acting Director of the FBI during the time between President Trump's firing of James Comey and the confirmation of his replacement, Christopher Wray.  Since then, McCabe has been FBI Deputy Director.  He has had a long, distinguished career at the FBI that spans more than 20 years -- and he was set to retire yesterday.

However, he ran afoul of Trump, and Republicans accused him of improperly disclosing information about the Clinton investigation and then lying about it to investigators.  McCabe has strongly denied doing anything improper, saying that it is part of the Deputy Director's job to give helpful information to the media, and he did not cross any lines of confidentiality.

Trump and Congressional Republicans have painted him as the epicenter of all that they say is wrong with the FBI, part of a cabal out to get the Trump administration, even though McCabe is himself a life-long, registered Republican.

Trump pressured Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire McCabe.  Instead, Sessions referred the matter to the Justice Department's Inspector General.  The IG issued its report last Wednesday, saying that McCabe did handle the Clinton matter inappropriately and recommended his firing.   I don't know the details, so I can't make an independent judgment on that finding.

What I do know is that the handling of McCabe's firing was highly inappropriate, even cruel.   Here's what transpired.   The decision was up to Sessions.   McCabe had already announced he was retiring, and his last day was to be March 18th -- the first day that he would be eligible for a full pension for his years of service.

Sessions waited until 10 pm on Friday the 16th -- then he fired McCabe, some 26 hours before he would be eligible to get his full pension.

Here was Trump's very unpresidential reaction (by Twitter, of course):
   "Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI.  A great day for Democracy.  Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy.  He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI."

McCabe has written a response that is both forceful and, by Trump standards, measured and professional.   He essentially says that this is part of an effort to discredit him and the FBI and to undermine the Mueller investigation, because McCabe would have been a witness as to what Comey told him at the time of Trump's attempt to get him to end the Flint investigation, which led to Comey's firing -- i.e., McCabe would be a witness in the obstruction of justice case against Trump.

McCabe also kept detailed notes, like Comey, of any individual meetings he had with Trump.  CNN reports that Mueller already has McCabe's notes about those conversations.

According to reporting by The Hill, Former Attorney General Eric Holder responded to the firing:  "Analyze the McCabe firing on two levels:  the substance and the timing.  We don't know enough about the substance yet,  The timing appears cruel and a cave that compromised DOJ independence to please an increasingly erratic President who should have played no role here.  This is dangerous." -- Eric Holder.

And then, THIS . . . from former CIA Director John Brennan, addressing Trump.
   "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.  You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America.   America will triumph over you."

This is so blunt and condemning that I even doubted whether it was authentic, from Brennan himself.   But it has been reported by both HuffPost and Reuter's;   and Brennan has been very critical of Trump in the past, especially about his attacks on the FBI and CIA.   Earlier this month, Brennan said there was "deep deep worry and concern" about the safety of America under the Trump administration.

WOW.    True . . . but WOW!!!

Ralph

PS:  Several congressmen have offered McCabe temporary jobs in their offices so that he could fulfill finish his federal employment time to be eligible for his full retirement (one or two days).