Summary: Eight years of Bush Derangement Syndrome, then eight of Obama Derangement Syndrome, and now we begin yet another cycle. Each clearly seeing the madness of their foes but blind to obvious fact that they are cousins. Both drawn from the American pond, echos of each other in methods and goals. This is beyond sad; it is pitiful. Here James Bowman explains the current madness.
“Methods of Madness“
By James Bowman.
From The New Criterion, 28 February 2018.
Also at his website.
Reposted with his generous permission.
Headers added.
Is Trump sane?
On Tuesday, January 9th, The Washington Post headlined: “The White House struggles to silence talk of Trump’s mental fitness” — which all by itself gives you a pretty good idea of where the Post stands on the subject of the President’s sanity. And on just about everything else to do with him too. The article’s authors, Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, apparently thought so highly of their own subtlety in insinuating that Mr. Trump was crazy, that they tried the same trick again on Wednesday as part of what the Post laughably calls “The Debrief: An occasional series offering insights from reporters.” On this occasion, the “insight” consisted of the following: “55 minutes at the table: Trump tries to negotiate and prove stability” — with what success, in their view, we can again infer from the headline alone.
In the background of both articles, of course, there lay the scurrilous book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
By Thursday, The New York Times’s Editorial Board were prepared to raise the question: “Is Mr. Trump Nuts?” — only to dodge it by concluding that his clinical diagnosis, if any, scarcely mattered, so horrible was he and everything he had ever done or ever would do. But the question was, as they say, “out there” since Wolff had proclaimed on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” that “it is not an exaggeration or unreasonable to say this is 25th amendment kind of stuff,” referring to the Constitutional provision for dealing with the incapacity of the President to perform the duties of his office. He added that those he had spoken to in the White House thought so too. “They would say …we’re not at 25th amend [sic] level yet. The 25th amendment concept is alive every day in the White House.”
Naturally, and in keeping with the media’s Trump-era standards, no one was quoted by name as saying this or anything like it. It was understood that Wolff’s main source was the President’s former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon who, since his dismissal, has provided some independent confirmation of his ex-employer’s opinion that he appears to have lost his own mind when he lost his job. Likewise, another White House Stephen (Miller), who still has his, described his former colleague as an “angry, vindictive person” who was, being “so out of touch with reality,” effectively insane himself.
Truth-telling in the media.
Like the now-ubiquitous charge of “lying” against one’s political opponents, this is not a debating point but a sign that debate has ended — as Mr. Miller’s interlocutor, Jake Tapper of CNN, immediately confirmed by bringing the interview to an end on the ground that Miller was merely toadying to his employer — effectively calling him a liar.
That the media apparently cannot see the extent to which, by their indulgence in this kind of pointless, hateful invective, they have corrupted public debate, rendering it impotent on both sides, might almost suggest that it is really they who are insane, though it wouldn’t do to be so intemperate in one’s language as to call them so.
My own view is that we are all insane since we decided that it was some kind of human right to let everyone choose his own reality — as Wolff actually admitted he did when his sources contradicted one another — from which those who disagree with us can be excluded at will. Since rhetorical nuclear war broke out during the last Bush administration, the Mutually Assured Destruction has been as devastating intellectually as actual nuclear war would be physically but with only this distinction: that the victims on both sides appear to be unconscious of the destruction in question and carry on, like automatons, as if it had not happened.
It just may be, however, that Donald Trump understands this better than anyone else. I have written about an earlier scandal — who can remember which of hundreds it was? — that in Trump the media see themselves reflected — and they don’t at all like what they see. As George Neumayr put it in The American Spectator:
“After a year of scoffing at the claim that Trump’s supporters take him seriously, not literally, journalists are adopting essentially the same standard in their defense of Michael Wolff’s book. Sure, the book is riddled with errors, they say, but it still contains a larger “truth” about this presidency.”
Orwell warned us about misuse of language in politics.
Wolff is himself the mirror image of his nemesis when it comes to the use of hyperbolical language. While Trump proclaims himself to be a “very stable genius,” Wolff congratulates his own book for supposedly demonstrating that the American president was “a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth.” I love the faux modesty (something Trump would never be guilty of) of that “perhaps.” Such an exaggeration (which can only be called so by understatement) is almost worthy of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who called the Republicans’ end-of-year tax reform act “Armageddon,” and almost makes Trump’s “genius” seem modest by comparison.
If there is some other explanation than mass insanity for the seemingly universal failure to recognize the obvious fact that such extravagant language has become self-defeating, I would like to hear it. Ordinary people who are not passionate advocates of either side in this on-going if progressively less entertaining flyting {insult contest, often in verse} match will merely register that the level of over-the-top bluster on both sides is approaching hysteria — which naturally works in favor of Trump. For he must see and even glory in the essential phoniness of all such rhetoric as his opponents do not and cannot. To his supporters, his parody of the media’s own pompousness and self-importance must look less like vanity than it is like letting them in on a joke at the media’s expense.
I apologize for lingering so long over this latest recurrence of Watergate — and one which has since turned out to be no more than another scandal of the week. By the time you read this, Wolff and the reaction to his book will only be interesting for having made apparent the willingness of the media, should Mr. Robert Mueller and his team of legal sleuths fail to get the goods on Trump, to accept in their stead the evidence of a backstairs gossip of no very great scrupulosity as to his unfitness to command — possibly with the assistance of a posse of Ivy League psychiatrists who have never met the President but proclaimed him non compos mentis all the same.
Liberal horror about Trump saying what many people believe.
In fact, by the Friday morning of the same week, the rhetorical apocalypse heralded over the previous weekend had already been displaced by something much more horrifying than Fire and Fury: the President, in a private conversation in the Oval Office, had referred to certain insalubrious parts of the globe from which the people are understandably eager to migrate to this country with what “family newspapers” used to describe as “a barnyard epithet.”
All such decorous restraints were thrown off when Trump said the fatal word, presumably never before heard in the hallowed precincts of our halls of government, and it was repeated, repeatedly, without benefit of asterisks wherever it could be, and without regard to those tender sensibilities of younger, or feminine, readers about which editors had once been so solicitous. Who cared about them when “a White House official who asked for anonymity to describe a private conversation” had a juicy bit of potential scandal to offer? Nancy Pelosi must have been kicking herself for using the word “Armageddon” to describe a triviality like the tax reform bill when there was this to come!
Of course, it didn’t tell us anything about Trump, who was only saying what many other presidents (and journalists) have said before, but, like Wolff’s book, it does tell you something about the state of loyalty, honor and trust in this say-anything, “fake news” media environment.
Yet if our crackerjack “investigative” and adversarial media didn’t like the insertion into the public sphere of such undiplomatic language, why didn’t they just, you know, not report it — possibly with a flea in the ear of the anonymous “official” (who turned out to be no White House official but Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois) for being a contemptible little sneak? That’s what generations of newsmen before them have undoubtedly done with the many profane or scatalogical remarks they have encountered when covering Trump’s predecessors — and taken it for granted that their professionalism, not to say their patriotism, required them to do so. But then they were in the news business, while their successors have little interest in the news unless, like this news, it can be turned to some scandalous account.
The new rules for journalists.
It’s a redundant demonstration of the corruption of our media and political culture, of course, but it seems to me that it also goes a long way toward explaining the rhetorical incontinence of Trump himself, which has been the despair of so many conservative supporters and would-be supporters.
When the media seized upon the Billy Bush – Access Hollywood tape at the height of his campaign for the presidency, patently in order to kill it, he must have realized that, if he won anyway and such hostility continued (as of course it has continued), he could never have a private conversation again while there was anyone present (as when would there not be?) wishing to ingratiate himself with the media by betraying it to them. Therefore, he must have reasoned, he would have no secrets, no confidences, no private thoughts for the media triumphantly to uncover but would instead let it all hang out, as we right-on types used to say back in the sixties.
Then or earlier, conscious or unconscious, some such idea must have been in his mind. It amounted to a bold, even reckless strategy in our scandal-obsessed media culture, but it has at least paid the dividend of keeping the media’s ostentatious outrage perpetually at top volume as a distraction from any more substantive coverage of his presidency, which could only be hostile and probably more effectively so. It has also reduced the impact of any single scandalous revelation and, at the same time, exposed for all to see the media’s white-hot hatred of him and all his works — which, more and more ludicrously, they continue to deny.
That denial could also serve as the precedent for his own subsequent denial that he had said what it was being reported that he said, thus adding a further (ho hum) outrage to the ever-lengthening bill of indictment against him. Wasn’t it obvious, now, what a liar he was? Of course to them he has been a liar since he announced his candidacy. Why don’t you tell us something we don’t know? Moreover, the denial was not a lie, and not only because the original report, as even Jake Tapper admitted had been garbled in transmission. It was also an assertion, though an obviously futile one, of the President’s right to demarcate for himself a zone of privacy that the media now violate routinely and with no more compunction than Michael Wolff or Steve Bannon.
B.S. (Before Shithole), David Brooks devoted a New York Times column to “The Decline of Anti-Trumpism“:
“We anti-Trumpers have our lowbrowism, too, mostly on late-night TV. But anti-Trump lowbrowism burst into full bloom with the Wolff book. Wolff doesn’t pretend to adhere to normal journalistic standards. He happily admits that he’s just tossing out rumors that are too good to check. …
“The ultimate test of the lowbrow is not whether it challenges you, teaches you or captures the contours of reality; it’s whether you feel an urge to share it on social media. In every war, nations come to resemble their enemies, so I suppose it’s normal that the anti-Trump movement would come to resemble the pro-Trump movement. But it’s not good. I’ve noticed a lot of young people look at the monotonous daily hysteria of we [sic] anti-Trumpers and they find it silly. This isn’t just a struggle over a president. It’s a struggle over what rules we’re going to play by after Trump. Are we all going to descend permanently into the Trump standard of acceptable behavior?”
Of course, as a paid up member of the anti-Trump media, Mr. Brooks can’t quite see that the emulation works the opposite way: the Trumpists are merely condescending to the low standards of discourse already reached by the media, which have dropped their own standards not in response to Trump but to the challenge of “lowbrow” social media.
As we can see from this column, Wolff has made his own contribution to the Trumpian effort to discredit the media by reinforcing in the popular mind the Trump narrative about his war on “Fake News.” Wolff himself admits that, in the book, his standard of truth has been: “if it rings true, it is true” — which turns out to be the same test applied to the book itself by those for whom it doesn’t ring true. Accordingly, outside of the hysterical media, there was no groundswell of support for invoking the 25th amendment or anything like it, just as there was no general acceptance, except among his most vociferous detractors, that the President was (as the media were constantly calling him) a liar. People just figure that each side is calling the other vile names not because they are true but because that is how the political game is played these days. And they are right to think so.
Likewise, in the unlikely event that someone out in flyover country should pick up a copy of Politico and read the headline: “Washington’s growing obsession: The 25th Amendment” he would be right to be skeptical, since he would already be well aware that, to Politico as to other members of the Washington-New York-West Coast media, “Washington” means themselves and not anyone like him. “Fake News” in fact amounts to just this: news chosen not because it is important or interesting or even because it is news but because it advances the agenda of the news-writers. And even flyover country is not so “lowbrow” that it can’t see the difference between that and real news.
———————————–
The bottom line: Trump’s job approval
No substantial change in Trump’s job approval numbers since May 2017, per Gallup. Massive political capital has been expended attacking Trump, with little to show for it.
About James Bowman
Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002. He has also contributed to a wide range of other major papers.
Mr. Bowman is perhaps best known for his book, Honor: A History
See his collected articles at his website, including his film reviews going back to 1994.
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Pres Trump will disappear and be forgotten but the media will be with us and journalistic impartiality can not be restored. Faith and trust has been betrayed.
Humpty Dumpty can never be put together again.
7zander,
In 1979, Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions poll showed that 51% of the US public had a “geat deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers. In 2017, 27% did.
“Humpty Dumpty can never be put together again.”
“Never” is a big word. But that will not happen soon.
The significant aspect of Trump’s approval ratings is that despite a strong economy, he is an extremely unpopular president. Like one of the most unpopular we’ve ever seen.
That being said, the Dems’ strategy of treating Trump like a unique aberration in American politics seems very stupid. And why they’ve staked everything on issues like democratic norms and Russia is mind-boggling. The most successful protests since Trump took office – things like Women’s March, Kaepernick taking a knee and now the Parkland students’ protest have all been centered around some particular issue, not opposition to Trump. These things have driven the right into ferocious rage yet the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be paying much attention. It’s like the leadership have no interest in actually winning.
Toki,
(1) “despite a strong economy …”
No. First, there are many factors affect the President’s job approval — not just the economy.
(2) “he is an extremely unpopular president. Like one of the most unpopular we’ve ever seen.”
That is false. Most modern-era presidents had a period of approval below Trump’s low of about 36%. See Gallup’s job approval polls.
More broadly, a defining characteristic of our time is both parties have low approval levels. The absolute approval levels doesn’t win elections. The level vs. the other party wins. The gap between GOP and Dems, or Trump and likely opponents, is not large (vs. similar gaps in history).
(3) “things like Women’s March, Kaepernick taking a knee and now the Parkland students’ protest”
I’ll take the other side of that. All three of those set Leftists’ hearts aflutter. I doubt that any of those changes a single vote. They don’t even make much sense.
(a) The Women’s Marches had no specific political content. That is, individuals had strong political intent, but the March included a wide range of contradictory messages. The opposite of the great civil rights marches. They were street parties, peasants’ protests. Valuable to the governing elites, allowing the proles to blow off steam that might otherwise drive coherent political action.
(b) Millionaire pro athletes expressing contempt for the nation that made them rich isn’t the stuff that wins elections. Again, no useful political content except to those that think Hillary’s “deplorables” comment was political genius.
(c) The Left doesn’t want students to own guns (too young), but their wisdom should set public policy. The “do it for the children” meme has become cringe-worthy to many people due to its obvious hypocrisy.
(4) “These things have driven the right into ferocious rage yet the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be paying much attention.”
Rephrase that as “These things entertain the faithful but have no other political utility, so the Dem Party’s leaders wisely pay them little attention.”
Um no, he’s historically unpopular: http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-new-approval-ratings-show-he-least-popular-president-enter-second-774961. Sure the economy isn’t the only factor but the point was that his extremely low approval and a strong economy are at odds with the historical data. No one said the economy was the only factor so I don’t know you felt like refuting a point no one made…
I hate to break it to you but King was one of the most hated men in America before he was assassinated. If you’re looking for social change that doesn’t draw the hatred and condemnation of the right, then you’re hoping for a unicorn. We won’t be able to tell the effects, if any, these protests will have for years but since they’ve drawn hysterical hatred from the right – a box any effective social movement has to check – it’s hard to see how these aren’t better avenues to pursue than the feckless agenda of the Dem party.
Toki,
(1) Don’t justify your statement by adding conditions. “Historically unpopular” is not the same as “historically unpopular at this date in his administration.”
(2) “Sure the economy isn’t the only factor but the point was that his extremely low approval and a strong economy are at odds with the historical data.”
Can you cite some supporting evidence for that? Sounds unlikely to me.
(3) “I hate to break it to you but King was one of the most hated men in America before he was assassinated.”
The civil rights movement (don’t personalize it) was one of the most successful social reform movements in US history.
These articles discuss Trump’s unpopularity and also in the context of a strong economy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/08/trumps-unpopularity-is-amazing-given-the-strength-of-the-economy/?utm_term=.53793218f6b6
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/19/trumps-ends-year-one-as-the-most-unpopular-president-on-record-it-could-have-been-worse/?utm_term=.b37038a5884e
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-far-less-popular-than-the-economy-suggests-he-should-be/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-year-in-trumps-approval-rating/
The civil rights movement (don’t personalize it) was one of the most successful social reform movements in US history.
And something like 63% of Americans disagreed with King before he died. So successful social reform movements don’t have the approval of the right or even the center, particularly when they are active. Exactly the point I was making above.
Toki,
The first article doesn’t even remotely show data to justify the assertion. Its first graph clearly shows there is no relationship. The regression line is almost certainly not statistically significant, showing only a weak relationship with only 15 data points.
The “he’s less popular than other presidents after one year” is goofy. It would be significant if there was some serial correlation in presidential popularity. That is, popularity at 365 days told us something about the trend or future levels of popularity. That seems possible but unlikely because events largely determine popularity. There is nothing special about this point in time for an Administration. This is just more desperate data mining by the “resistance.”
Their reliance on trivial or outright meaningless metrics is one reason their massive barrage on Trump has had so little effect during the past 8 months or so.
Trump is unpopular, but not unprecedented so. Claims that he is so are in the same category that he’s unusually vulgar for a president, that he’s a Russian agent, that his morals are very low vs. other presidents, and so forth. That is, bogus. He isn’t even (so far) remotely the worst president (Buchanan’s traitorous behavior gives him the top spot, imo). Trump’s unique quality as president is that he is a clown, with astonishing poor self-control (I doubt he even tries).
They could focus on Trump’s actions. He’s a bog-standard GOP president, working for the 1%. But that is difficult, since so many media and Democratic Party leaders like many of his policies.
As for the civil rights movement, I suggest that you look at what I said. Your rebuttals are irrelevant to what I said.
Follow-up note:
The unemployment ratio is a poor measure of — pretty much anything. It is subject to both demographic changes and complex employment dynamics (such as people becoming “discouraged workers” and so no longer counted as unemployed — a bad thing but decreases the unemployment rate (i.e., the U-3).
Perhaps the major weakness is that typical changes are too small for people to directly see. A two percent change is a large swing, but directly imperceptible to people. People know about it by the magnitude and framing of the news coverage — which is largely affected by journalists political preference. As Bush Sr discovered, when he lost the election due to journalists’ relentless exaggerated negative depiction of the economy.
There are better measures. Surveys of consumer optimism and conform. Changes in per capita real or nominal GDP, or personal income. To measure the labor market, use the Fed’s Labor Market Conditions Index.
A broader examination of these will show that the political impact of economic changes is mostly affected by extremes — booms and recessions — and to a lesser extent, their inflection points. This has been well understood for decades (though obviously not be everyone). One of the first books I saw about this is Power and Wealth by Tracy G. Herrick (1989), a distinguished economist and investment advisor.
From the first article:
Not only is Trump well-below average — even dropping below the average at 4 percent! — he’s seen his approval rating go down along with the unemployment rate! In other words, as unemployment has dropped over the course of the year, so, too, has Trump’s approval rating.
From the second article:
On Friday, NBC and the Wall Street Journal released data to the latter point. Trump’s approval rating was 39 percent in their poll, lower than the figure at the end of Barack Obama’s first year (50 percent), George W. Bush’s (82 percent, thanks to 9/11) and Bill Clinton’s (60 percent).
Figures from Gallup’s historic polling show something similar. The most recent figure for Trump has his approval at 39 percent, same as the NBC-Journal poll. That’s eight points lower than Ronald Reagan or Clinton, who were each at 47 percent around the time of their first anniversaries as president.
From the third article:
Every president since Jimmy Carter had a higher overall net job approval rating than economic approval rating in October of the first term. For example, President Obama averaged a net job approval rating of +11, according to FiveThirtyEight’s approval tracker, and an economic net approval rating of +4. On average, presidents have had a net overall rating 14 points above their economic rating. Trump’s is closer to 20 points below his economic rating.
The data shows he is very unpopular. It’s not controversial. Saying he’s ‘extremely unpopular’ is totally consistent with the polling data. Do you actually have a point to make?
I wouldn’t call approval ratings ‘trivial or meaningless’ either but they shouldn’t be given more significance than they deserve. It’s a metric, it’s got some use but can be misleading and that’s about all it’s worth. You’re the one that brought up the f**kin’ popularity chart in the first place so why you’re going on and on about ‘meaningless metrics’ and ‘desperate data mining’ now is kind of mysterious and pretty funny. I’m still not exactly sure why you disagree with my original statement that Trump is a very unpopular president but it’s a stupid tactic to treat him as some uniquely bad aberration.
These things entertain the faithful but have no other political utility, so the Dem Party’s leaders wisely pay them little attention
There is obvious political utility though – we just saw a group of high-school students humiliate a Republican senator on national television though I don’t remember Rubio breaking a sweat during his last senate campaign. More broadly though, the political potency of these things is in actually taking a popular stand that would get people who usually don’t vote to turn out for elections – not changing votes of people who will vote ‘R’ down the line no matter what.
Millionaire pro athletes expressing contempt for the nation that made them rich isn’t the stuff that wins elections
Let’s just ignore the glibness and the fact that this is exactly how athletes like Mohammed Ali were criticized for having clear stances on civil rights and Vietnam. The point is Kaepernick’s actually drawn attention to issues that aren’t contingent on who’s in the Oval Office. Why taking stands on issues like police brutality and inequality would not win elections is not clear to me – maybe you could explain that one. If you’re saying that because he offends people, the Dems should just take stances that offend the fewest number of conservatives – isn’t this just the same third-way triangulation that’s been a disaster for the party?
New Von Crevald Interview on “Rebel Yell” podcast. Hand maiden’s tale. Dystopia or utopia?
dashui,
Neither. Just warnings.
What I find interesting is two continuing but dissonant themes in US politics for the last four (Trump included) Presidents.
1. Each President, including Trump, generally continues the policies of the previous administration regardless of what they promised on the campaign trail. The two classic examples of this are Bush’s continuation of nearly all Clinton social programs and Obama’s continuation and expansion of Bush’s security programs.
2. Each President is viciously attacked by their opponents for doing things that the opponents would have applauded if the President had been a member of the other party. For example, Obama created his entire healthcare plan from Republican proposals that the Republicans then successfully disavowed as “crazy leftist fantasies.”
As FM has previously suggested, this indicates that the wheels of government are moving according to the desires of people who are making their decisions off-screen while the voting public is misinformed, transformed, and exhausted by meaningless “issues.”
Who is guiding the ship of state? Is it the “Deep State” or the Plutocrats? Are other groups involved? Are the people making behind the scenes fully aware of each other? Are they in agreement or in conflict? I lean towards the latter based on things I’ve seen but it would be easy to be wrong in this environment.
Pluto,
“Who is guiding the ship of state? Is it the “Deep State” or the Plutocrats? ”
States are seldom run by one group. That would make them unstable. There are multiple powerful groups. They jockey for power but unite to defend the oligarchy from outsiders.
One nitpick. Derangement isnt a cycle. Its a manifestation of the left.
Derangement is a mental disorder. Its what happens when leftistm is not confronted with rational forces or visceral (pain inducing) truths. Such as 8 years of obama.
Few republican reps were openly losing their shit over obama. Sure, they had their moments but there was nowhere near the kind of histrionic fever we see from the majority of dems and a good portion of the general population.
And without media protection, obama is actually one strange bird with a rather shady past and rootlessness and “interesting” handlers that never got the scruitiny it warranted.
The lefts is unique in its pathologies. For example, the violence. Or how anyone openly admitting to voting for or otherwise supporting trump or his ideas is taking a real risk.
Half the voters in this country must shut up and keep their heads down while the media lies and foments hate and the average meatsack presumes that anyone to the right of Mao is deplorable and deserves to be harmed in some way.
There is simply no equivalent that flows right-to-left. Leftism is totalitarian to the core. No tolerance. No diversity of ideas – and in reality, no diversity at all aka white genocide.
Im no repbulican either. And i do largely agree that we have a uniparty, deep state power structures or whatever else you want to call the brokers and beneficiaries of public treasure bleeding into private coffers.
But to equate the reaction of the left when displaced in power vs the right, is missing the essence of the left. Which is steeped in lies. And IMO, evil.
Gaza,
(1) “One nitpick. Derangement isnt a cycle. Its a manifestation of the left.”
The Right was just as nutty about Obama as the Left is about Trump. The oddity is that neither side sees this.
(2) “Derangement is a mental disorder.”
It is just a behavior that people exhibit when the social mechanisms break down that keep people more self-aware. Let’s not pathologize normal behavior.