The powerful media compulsion to normalize him as president
Rick Wilson (anti-Trump Republican pundit) asks:
Why’s it so hard for us to say out loud that Trump has lost his mind?
Reporter Joy Reid has an answer that I don’t really get.
Chalk it up to the powerful media compulsion to normalize him as president. He is president, so the things he says and does are done in the name of the office, and so media writ large strains to import even the crazy stuff into the normal formula for covering a president.
I don’t get why it’s not the other way around. I don’t get why the media compulsion is to normalize him as president as opposed to normalizing the office by refusing to normalize him. Why him at the expense of the office rather than the office at the expense of him?
Why, in other words, don’t they see the office as more important than and less temporary than this one aberrant guy?
Especially since a great many of the things he says and does really are not done in the name of the office. They’re done while he is president, but not in the name of the office. His ridiculous blurts about Debra Messing and Kanye West and similar irrelevancies aren’t done in the name of the office, they’re just explosions from his id, which (I would think) is exactly why the guy ought to be reported separately from the office much of the time.
She might just mean they do it so that they can go on being White House reporters after Trump is back in Manhattan, which would be not so much compulsion as self-interested ass-protecting.
Are we sure he ever had it?
I get the distinct feeling that they have no idea how to deal with Trump. There are certain standards they incorporate, like not calling POTUS a liar (this was noted during the Bush administration when his lies were never called lies). I guess you’re also not supposed to call POTUS crazy, either. But Trump violates all the norms of the office, all the norms of politics, all the norms of human decency, and they can’t accept it’s for real. It must be an act, because they’ve never seen anything like him before. So they try to fit what he is saying and doing into what they expect POTUS to say and do.
For those of us who grew up with Trumps as our family and the people who surrounded us, we know the words. To others who can see Trump for what he is, they know the words. You know the words. But the press is not of our world, they are in a different world, an elite world, a moneyed world, a world where everyone scratches everyone’s back until the time that one collapses, then they scratch their eyes out.
I also wonder if there maybe isn’t an element of not wanting to believe the voters could elect such a palpably incompetent man. It brings the entire democratic experiment into the light, where the flaws in the system can be seen. And to call Trump what he is might be to admit something else – their own role in getting him elected by their non-stop coverage of a man who boosted ratings, while they also played a role in the image of Hillary that everyone took to the polls with them, thereby generating distaste for this highly qualified, competent, yet female, human being. Yeah, she was far from perfect, and the press should call her out on that, but there are proper ways to do that, and improper ways to do that. And they simply cannot resist the misogynistic stereotypes, because they are easy (the lazy excuse) and they sell papers (the money excuse). Meanwhile, Trump’s bellicosity fits the stereotype of macho, so again, the easy, ratings-enhancing solution.
Maybe because there is a constant right wing media machine and think tanks that normalized Trump’s ideas before he even ran for the presidency.
It’s not just a “right wing media machine”. It’s all the media. The media you call liberal. The media you call right wing.
It’s not about that, it’s about power and money. It’s NOT just the right wing, damn it.
“The impulse to defend the predictability of life is a fundamental and universal principle of human psychology.” Human beings possess “a deep-rooted and insistent need for continuity” Peter Marris.
(^ From the article “Belief perseverance” in Wikipedia.)