The Bully’s Pulpit

On February 26, 2020, Donald J. Trump informed us that Vice President Mike Pence would be in charge of the administration’s Covid-19 response. Trump was in India at the time and insisting that the situation in the U.S. was under control. A typical Tweet from those days, only a month ago:

“Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape.”

The appointment of Pence to this role was a response to that bunch of deep-state never-Trumpers known as the Center for Disease Control saying that the spread of the virus in the U.S. was all but inevitable, and various “advisers” whispering in Trump’s ear that some sort of action was called for.

Putting Pence in charge was a no-brainer.  If the virus was indeed nothing, Pence would be in charge of nothing. If it was as bad as those “scientists” were saying, Pence would be at fault and Trump would have a great excuse for dropping him from the 2020 ticket in favor of someone more aligned with his long term goals of self-enrichment and re-shaping the position of President into something more akin to Pharaoh.  Don Jr. would be perfect!

Anyway, something unexpected happened to cause Tweety to rethink this plan: people were actually listening to Pence and giving him a lot of kudos for the job he was doing. And he was on TV everyday for an hour or more. Clearly this could not stand.

So after a week or so, the daily Covid “briefings” were taken over by Tweety himself, with Pence standing dutifully and silently behind him, as better befits his true role in the Trump administration.

And the briefings themselves were transformed from a daily update on where we were with Covid-19 to a daily campaign rally where the usual Trump exaggerations, misinformation, and preposterous lying were combined with vicious attacks on the reporters asking for information and constant carping about what a mess Obama left him.

The beauty of being Trump is that his daily eructation of nonsense is so voluminous that there is simply no time to try to tease out actual information before the next day’s output. And, of course, no chance to hold him accountable for outright lies, even when they put the health and even survival of others at risk.

This enables him to say absolutely anything at all with the same air of conviction and self-righteousness as when he said the exact opposite, perhaps just the day before. A nice example of this is Tweety suddenly asserting on March 17th that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

The mind-numbing effect on his audiences of this daily whipsaw has always worked for Trump. If he had ever been elected to a position like Mayor or  Governor or even hall-monitor, where he was held accountable for his own actions, maybe things would be different now.  I remember those days of innocence after the 2016 election when we all thought that this crazy behavior would have to end, as the Presidency was not a joke, and anyway we had two other co-equal branches of government, congress and the courts, who would rein him in. And, of course, there would be plenty of clear heads in Trump’s own party who would call him on his bullshit.

If only.

Over the last three years, virtually every avenue of resistance has been eliminated. Not only has the attrition of honest Republicans like John McCain, Jeff Flake or Bob Corker made way for more sycophants, but those who supported Trump every inch of the way, like Jeff Sessions or Paul Ryan have been purged for trying to do their jobs as they understood them. Just one ambiguous action or remark can be a career-ender.  Even Trump’s most vociferous critics before the election, like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and even Mitt Romney have gone silent.

The other day Lindsay Graham, once McCain’s best friend and a vocal Trump critic, accused Nancy Pelosi of “the most shameful, disgusting statement by any politician in modern history.”  She had said Trump’s delayed response to the Corona virus would cost lives.

Of course it’s true. The problem created by Trump’s wild pronouncements is that his foot-soldiers out there in the heartland, i.e. republican governors, have to repeat and act on them. If he says Covid-19 is no worse than the flu, or that it’s a hoax, or that it’s completely under control and no one should change their behavior, well, OK, that is now reality, and policies will be announced reflecting it. But unlike Trump, those “leaders” on the ground can’t walk it all back the next day. Even if they could, the damage is already done: people congregated where they shouldn’t have, businesses stayed open when they shouldn’t have, respirators and ventilators remained un-manufactured for another day.  And, of course,  the average voter in those states doesn’t know what to think or what’s real.  Pelosi simply stated the obvious, but Graham was required to fight about it.

Trump’s de-fanging of the fourth estate is now complete. Not only is any news he doesn’t like immediately dismissed as “fake”, but he has now moved strongly against those who only wish to hold him accountable for his own words. He has issued an order that his critics Cease and Desist from quoting him in campaign ads.  According to this Slate piece, the order “threatened to sue critics of the president in a brazen effort to censor Trump’s opponents into silence”

There are no credible voices left to dissent to Trump’s war on science, expertise, and truth, and his re-election is all but assured. During this time when Trump is spewing on all media for hours every day, Biden is nowhere, completely irrelevant. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Trump’s approval ratings have spiked upward during the last few weeks.

With Trump’s grip on information tightening every day, it is no longer newsworthy when he says something that is manifestly untrue, which he does dozens of times every day. On the contrary, it is now a news story if someone in the Republican Party disagrees with him, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan did this week.  Citing Trump’s assertion that Corona Virus testing problems have all been solved, he said “that’s just not true.”

Hogan made the statement during an NPR interview, so there is virtually no risk of anyone in Trump’s thrall hearing it, so he may escape the inevitable wrath from the bully’s pulpit.  But I doubt it.