by Sid Holt
In his mind, it all makes sense. Drugs come from Mexico; the wall will keep out Mexicans; therefore, no more drugs. “We’re gonna stop it,” he says. “You’re not going to have the drugs coming in destroying your children. Your kids are going to look all over the place and they’re not going to be able to find them.”
Obviously! Because no one’s ever tried wide-scale drug prohibition before.
And as bad as our media is, Trump is trying to replace it with a worse model. He excommunicates every reporter who so much as raises an eyebrow at his insanity, leaving him with a small-but-dependable crowd of groveling supplicants who in a Trump presidency would be the royal media. He even waves at them during his speeches.
“Mika and Joe are here!” he chirped at the MSNBC morning hosts at a New Hampshire event. The day after he won the New Hampshire primary, he called in to their show to thank them for being “supporters.” To her credit, Mika Brzezinski tried to object to the characterization, interrupting Joe Scarborough, who by then had launched into a minute-long homily about how happy he was to be a bug on the windshield of the Trump phenomenon.
You think the media sucks now? Just wait until reporters have to kiss a brass Trump-sphinx before they enter the White House press room.
“He has all these crazy ideas, and [reporters] are so scared of him, they don’t ask him any details,” says Michael Pleyte, an Iraq vet who came all the way from Michigan to watch the New Hampshire primary in person. “Forget about A to Z, they don’t even ask him to go A to Trump.”
King Trump. Brace yourselves, America. It’s really happening.
“Appetite for Destruction”
July 22, 2016
Hell, yes, it was crazy. You rubbed your eyes at the sight of it, as in, “Did that really just happen?”
It wasn’t what we expected. We thought Donald Trump’s version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess.
We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400-piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of “New York, New York” while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read winning, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald’s acceptance speech …
But nah. What happened instead was just sad and weird, very weird. The lineup for the 2016 Republican National Convention to nominate Trump felt like a fallback list of speakers for some ancient UHF telethon, on behalf of a cause like plantar-wart research.
Was one of the headliners really Ultimate Fighting chief Dana White, head all swollen and shouting into the microphone like a man having a road-rage dispute?
Was that really General Hospital star and Calvin Klein underwear model Antonio Sabato Jr. warning gravely that “our rights have been trampled and our security threatened” by President Obama’s policies? And were there really two soap stars in the lineup, the second being Kimberlin Brown, of The Young and the Restless, who drove a spear through the grave of Henny Youngman with an agonizing attempt at warm-up humor?
“Many of you know me from one of your favorite soap operas,” she said. “But since we only have one life to live … I decided to follow other dreams!” Punchline: She grows avocados now, and loves Donald Trump.
There were four categories of speakers. First, the Trump family members, including poor wife Melania, whose speechwriters pushed her into a media buzz saw on opening night.
Then, there were even a few Republican politicians who seemed to want to be there voluntarily, people like crazed Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who came off like a shaved and slightly angrier version of Yosemite Sam. Ex-candidate Ben Carson emerged from a grain-storage chamber somewhere to connect Hillary Clinton to Lucifer and say things about transgender people so outrageous that even Orrin Hatch rushed to their defense.
The third group consisted of Republican officials who had no choice but to be there. People like Republican Party chief Reince Priebus and House Majority Leader Paul Ryan rarely spoke Trump’s name and seemed pained throughout, aware they might spend eternity giving each other back rubs in hell as punishment for participating in this event.
The rest were basically personal friends of Trump’s who owed him a favor.
The nominee seemed to mine the very bottom of his Rolodex for the exercise, to the point where we even heard a testimonial from Natalie Gulbis, the world’s 492nd-ranked professional woman golfer.
“The first time I played golf with him, in 2005, I shared two things I had told countless CEOs, billionaires and politicians before him,” said Gulbis. The two things sort of turned out to be one thing, i.e., that she wanted to open a Boys & Girls Club and she was tired of having such business ideas rejected.
“Those words previously fell on deaf, albeit well-intentioned ears,” she went on. “But that day was different. They finally fell on ears that cared enough to take action.” Trump funded her Boys & Girls Club!
“Trump’s ears cared?” cracked a nearby reporter, stuffing his face with yogurt peanuts while Googling “Natalie Gulbis naked” on his cellphone.
Then there was Scott Baio. Scott Baio, ladies and gentlemen! Not the Fonz or Richie or even Pinky Tuscadero, but the man who played Chachi, a gimmick character in a show about an America that never existed, a time when there were no black people and the last gasps of our apartheid state were called Happy Days.
Republicans have been selling a return to that mythical Fifties golden age for the past half-century, but it took Donald Trump for the sales pitch to come out as such extreme comedy. Make America’s Days Happy Again!
Trump had Baio in the convention lineup just days after wired-on-Jesus former Congresskook Michelle Bachmann described the nominee as a man with “1950s sensibilities,” who grew up in an era when “even … Jews would say Merry Christmas.” Why can’t we go back to those days?
“Let’s make America America again!” is how Baio put it in his speech.
The next day, Baio labored through a confused and contentious appearance on MSNBC with host Tamron Hall. The headline that emerged from that uncomfortable segment involved Hall confronting Baio over a tweet in which he appeared to call Hillary Clinton a “cunt.” But the real shocker came at the beginning of the interview.
“Did you write your own speech?” Hall asked.
“I did,” said Baio. “I was asked to do this Thursday. I wrote my speech in church on Sunday morning.”
Donald Trump did not nail down Scott Baio, perhaps Earth’s most conspicuously available actor, as a speaker for opening night of the Republican Party Convention until four days before it started!
It didn’t get any better when the so-called professional politicians spoke. As if in one voice, they all repeated a mantra more appropriate for a megachurch full of Rapture-ready Christians than a political convention: We are not safe, the end is nigh, run for the hills and vote Trump on your way out.
“There’s no next election—this is it,” screeched Rudy Giuliani (or “9/11’s Rudy Giuliani,” as he is jokingly dubbed in the press section).
The former New York mayor’s “there are terrorists trimming their beards under your bed as we speak” act has been seen a million times before by this political press corps, but even that jaded group was stunned by the hysterical heights—or depths?—to which he rose/sank in his appearance for Trump.
“To defeat Islamic extremist terrorists, we must put them on defense!” he shouted, with his usual bluster at first.
Then, suddenly, in a frenzy of violent hand gestures, Giuliani found another gear. “We must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them!” he bellowed, with a flourish that could only be described as Hitlerian. It was a daring performance that met with some roars on the floor, but also plenty of murmuring.
The thing is, the convention crowd wasn’t exactly the fevered revolutionary rall
y the press had been predicting for months. It was, in fact, a sadly muted affair, with many delegates quietly despairing at what had happened to the Grand Old Party.
The Republican Party under Trump has become the laughingstock of the world, and it happened in front of an invading force of thousands of mocking reporters who made sure that not one single excruciating moment was left uncovered.
So, yes, it was weird, and pathetic, but it was also disturbing, and not just for the reasons you might think. Trump’s implosion left the Republican Party in schism, but it also created an unprecedented chattering-class consensus and a dangerous political situation.
Everyone piled on the Republicans, with pundits from George Will to David Brooks to Dan Savage all on the same side now, and nobody anywhere seeming to worry about the obvious subtext to Trump’s dumpster-fire convention: In a two-party state, when one collapses, doesn’t that mean only one is left? And isn’t that a bad thing?
Day two of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, a little after 6:30 p.m. Roll has been called, states are announcing their support for the Donald, and the floor is filled with TV crews breathlessly looking for sexy backdrops for the evolving train wreck that is the Republican Party.
Virtually every major publication in America has run with some version of the “Man, has this convention been one giant face-plant, or what?” story, often citing the sanitized, zero-debate conventions of the past as a paradise now lost to the GOP.
“The miscues, mistakes [and] mishandled dissent,” wrote Elizabeth Sullivan in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, “did not augur well for the sort of smoothly scripted, expertly choreographed nominating conventions our mainstream political parties prefer.”
The odd thing is that once upon a time, conventions were a site of fierce debates, not only over the content of the party platform but even the choice of candidates themselves. And this was regarded as the healthy exercise of democracy.
It wasn’t until the television era, when conventions became intolerably dull pro-forma infomercials stage-managed for the networks to consume as fake shows of unity, that we started to measure the success of conventions by their lack of activity, debate and new ideas.
A Wyoming delegate named Rick Shanor shakes his head as he leans against a wall, staying out of the way of the crews zooming to and fro. He insists dissent is always part of the process, and maybe it’s just that nobody cared before.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. “You’ve got to have the discourse. You’ve got to have arguments about this and that. That’s the way we work in the Republican Party. We yak and yak, but we coalesce.”
The Republican Convention in Cleveland was supposed to be the site of revolts and unprecedented hijinks on the part of delegates. But on the floor of Chez LeBron, a.k.a. the Quicken Loans Arena, a.k.a. the “Q,” it’s the journalists who are acting like fanatics, buttonholing every delegate in sight for embarrassed quotes about things like Melania’s plagiarism flap.
“The only safe place to stand is, like, in the middle row of your delegation,” one delegate says, eyeing the media circling the edges of the floor like a school of sharks. “If you go out to get nachos or take a leak, they come after you.”
A two-person crew, a camera and a coiffed on-air hack, blows through a portion of the Washington state delegation, a bunch of princely old gentlemen in zany foam tree-hats. The trees separate briefly, then return to formation.
Meanwhile, the TV crew has set up and immediately begun babbling still more about last night’s story, Melania Trump’s plagiarism, which Esquire’s Charlie Pierce correctly quipped was a four-hour story now stretching toward multiple days.
Nearby, watching the reporters, one delegate from a Midwestern state turns to another.
“This is like a NAMBLA convention,” he says with a sigh. “And we’re the kiddies.”
Outside, it’s not much better.
The vast demilitarized zone set up between the Q and anywhere in the city that contains people is an inert, creepy place to visit. Towering metal barricades line streets cleansed of people, with the only movement being the wind blowing the occasional discarded napkin or pamphlet excerpt of The Conservative Heart (the president of the American Enterprise Institute’s hilarious text about tough-love cures for poverty first littered the floor of the Q, then the grounds outside it).
Thus the area around the convention feels like some other infamous de-peopled landscapes, like Hitler’s paintings, or downtown New Orleans after Katrina. You have to walk a long way, sometimes climbing barriers and zigzagging through the multiple absurd metal mazes of the DMZ, to even catch a glimpse of anyone lacking the credentials to get into this most exclusive of clubs: American democracy.
Concepts like “free speech zones” or the idea that the general public may not come within a half-mile or so of the actual event seemed insane when they were first introduced years ago. But the public has since become inured to the notion, which perhaps is a reason the protests here have been far tamer than in years past.
In 2004, the first year that both parties were unembarrassed enough to actually use the Orwellian term “free speech zones,” there were large demonstrations for and against issues like the Iraq War, and the zones themselves.
But this time around, it is only the press that turned out in massive numbers, apparently hoping to catch a repeat of 1968, when a violent street ruckus upended the Democratic Convention. But 1968 was exactly the sort of televisable show of dangerous dissent these zones are designed to preclude.
Eleven a.m., Day Three, Cleveland’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Rumors had circulated that something big was going to happen here this morning, like thousands of Latinos building a human wall around the Q.
But at the appointed time, there are just a few dozen protesters wearing hand-painted burlap “Wall Off Trump” costumes … and about a million journalists.
The joke in the past few days had been that there were 10 cops for every reporter and 10 reporters for every protester. But under the monument at this moment, you can actually see the math.
“Welcome to the photographers’ convention!” seethes videographer James Woods, a.k.a. James FromTheInternet (no relation to the unhinged actor).
An executive producer at the popular indie press outlet act.tv, the burly, bearded Woods is a fixture on the protest circuit, a one-man TV production unit who has been spotted chronicling everything from the Ferguson riots to anti-war marches to the unrest that rocked New York after the Eric Garner grand jury.
Woods came to the RNC on the off chance that some real anarchist craziness might finally happen. But he was quickly dispirited when it became a scene where everyone in America with a blog or an iPhone showed up to take selfies while “covering” the historic event, a kind of journo-tourism.
“It’s like everyone who’s been sitting around for four years decided to scrape the dust off their cameras and show up here,” he says, shaking his head.
After a brief attempt at an interlocking-hand “wall” that stretches for perhaps 15 people, the anti-Trump group begins moving in a single row toward the Q, chanting, “Wall off Trump! Wall off Trump!”
They are followed, no joke, by groups of reporters six or seven rows deep on both sides. And when a pair of pro-Trumpers show up quietly holding American flags along the street’s edge, they are suddenly set upon by photographers in search of a confrontation.
One of the pro-Trumpers, a 31-year-old Los Angeleno named Shawn Witte, is walking in silence carrying a flag. “Just fucking walking,” as he puts it. But the mass of reporters, detecting him, seem anxious to clear a lane between him and the human wall, perhaps hoping they will bite one another or something.
The day before, Witte says, the same thing had happened. When he went outside with his flag, reporters rushed back and forth between Witte and some Black Lives Matter protesters, pointing them out to each other.
“Everybody in Black Lives Matter, they were cool with it,” Witte says. “Th
ey were like, ‘Right on, man. I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but you have a personal right.’ Media was trying to hype that shit up.”
The 1968 narrative never materializes, much to the obvious chagrin of the monstrous press contingent (the “human centipede of bastards,” as one sketch artist dubbed them). Handfuls of protesters do their thing peacefully, on the permitted side of the DMZ, and it is weak-beer TV no matter how you look at it.
That the press seemed let down by the lack of turmoil on the streets was odd, given that the Trump convention itself was, after all, a historic revolt.
Thirteen million and three hundred thousand Republican voters had defied the will of their party and soundly rejected hundred-million-dollar insider favorites like Jeb Bush to re-seize control of their own political destiny. That they made perhaps the most ridiculous choice in the history of democracy was really a secondary issue.
It was a tremendous accomplishment that real-life conservative voters did what progressives could not quite do in the Democratic primaries. Republican voters penetrated the many layers of money and political connections and corporate media policing that, like the labyrinth of barricades around the Q, are designed to keep the riffraff from getting their mitts on the political process.
But it wasn’t covered that way. What started a year ago as an amusing story about a clown car full of bumbling primary hopefuls was about to be described to the world not as a groundbreaking act of defiance, but as a spectacular failure of democracy.
The once-divided media class now came together to gang-troll flyover America for its preposterous decision, turning the coverage of the convention into a parable on the evil of letting voters make up their own dumb minds. This was the Fatal Attraction of political coverage, a warning disguised as a story: Look what happens, you rubes, when you step outside the lines.
One of the great propaganda successes of the past few decades has been the myth of the liberal media. The idea that a monolithic herd of leftist snobs somehow controlled the news spread in part because of a seemingly key but really irrelevant demographic truth, i.e., that most individual reporters lean blue in their personal politics.