President* Trump Is Ready for His Participation Trophy
At some point in the last week or so, the nation's cable teevee news directors apparently decided to declare Tuesday to be National Bar Lowering Day. The president* was going to give his first speech to Congress! And the cable newspeople decided that this historic moment warranted all day coverage! This came complete with tiny countdown clocks in the corner of the screen and a tsunami of purely speculative analysis, all of it on the sub rosa theme, "Do You Think He'll Bite The Head Off A Chicken Or Not?"
Make no mistake. If El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago manages to get from a subject to a verb without spraining his ankle, we are going to hear much more than we should about pivots, and reboots, and the political genius of Mike Pence, The Great Conciliator. It will all be stuff and nonsense, but the people dealing it out will do so quite convincingly because a lot of the people dealing it out are terrified of the truth: that, on his best day, the president* is an ill-prepared lout and, on his worst, well, maybe he'll blame Barack Obama for his bad press, or he'll blame somebody other than anti-Semitic goons for attacks on Jewish cemeteries and bomb scares at Jewish pre-schools.
Oh, wait. He already did both of those. So maybe he won't do that tonight. Or maybe he will. Who knows? That's why god invented popcorn and poitin.
A couple of times this week, I have heard alleged journalists express dismay that what we may be living under at the moment is a "failed presidency." The panelists all agreed that this would be a catastrophe for the country. Now, as a citizen, I can see their point, I guess, although I'm more afraid that a Congress under Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan will succeed. As a journalist, this attitude revolts me. We are not supposed to care whether a president fails or not. Our job is to chronicle how and why the president fails and inform the public in the (perhaps vain) hope that the public will do better at electing a president the next time. We certainly are not obligated to prop up a failed president just because he got elected once.
This was the kind of thinking that allowed Ronald Reagan to skate behind the crimes of Iran-Contra. In Mark Hertsgaards' seminal account of the press during the Reagan administration, a number of prominent journalists expressed fear of "another failed presidency" so soon after Richard Nixon's collapsed. Two of these people, if I recall correctly, were Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the heroes behind the Washington Post stories that had done so much to help Nixon's presidency auger in. This attitude did nobody any good, nor did it do much for the Republic.
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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53513/trump-speech-congress/