Donald Trump has been given a great gift in that his gaffes are seen by most Americans in the context of an obsessed and unhinged Democratic-media nexus. He is pitted against a new fusion party of media elites and aging political functionaries, who all believe that America should operate on their norms, the norms of Washington, New York, Hollywood, and Malibu — all places that symbolize, to most Americans, exactly how the country has gone wrong.
Yet outside Hollywood, New York, and Washington, the issues facing voters are not income redistribution, transgendered bathrooms, the division of Americans by race, or the radical alteration of the economy to supposedly address recent climate change induced by carbon emissions. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in late 2016, the media earned only a 19 percent favorable rating, which raises the question of whether the fusion between Democrats and the media is the old party’s salvation or suicide.
Is there a Democratic-party alternative to President Trump’s tax plan?
Is there a Democratic congressional
proposal to stop the hemorrhaging and impending implosion of Obamacare?
Do Democrats have some sort of
comprehensive package to help the economy grow or to deal with the recent
doubling of the national debt?
What is the Democratic alternative to
Trump’s apparent foreign policy of pragmatic realism or his neglect of
entitlement reform?
The answers are all no, because for all
practical purposes there is no Democratic party as we have traditionally known
it.
It is no longer a liberal (a word now
replaced by progressive) political alternative to conservatism as much as a
cultural movement fueled by coastal elites, academics, celebrities — and the
media. Its interests are not so much political as cultural. True to its new
media identity, the Democratic party is against anything Trump rather than
being for something. It seeks to shock and
entertain in the fashion of a red-carpet celebrity or MSNBC talking head rather
than to legislate or formulate policy as a political party.
Most Democratic leaders are dynastic and
geriatric: Bernie Sanders (75), Hillary Clinton (69), Elizabeth Warren (67),
Diane Feinstein (83), Nancy Pelosi (77), Steny Hoyer (77), or Jerry Brown (79).
They are hardly spry enough to dance to the party’s new “Pajama Boy” and “Hands
Up, Don't Shoot” music.
Yet those not past their mid-sixties
appear unstable, such as the potty-mouth DNC head Tom Perez and his assistant,
the volatile congressman Keith Ellison. Or they still believe it is 2008 and
they can rally yet again around “hope and change” and Vero
possumus. That politicos are talking about an amateurish Chelsea
Clinton as a serious future candidate reflects the impoverishment of Democratic
political talent.
In such a void, a traditionally
progressive media, including the entertainment industry, stepped in and fused
with what is left of the Democratic party to form the new opposition to the
Republican party and in particular to Donald Trump. The aim now is to alter
culture through the courts and pressure groups rather than to make laws.
Trump’s strategy is understandable. A
recent study released by the Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center on
Media, Politics, and Public Policy reported that in Trump’s first 100 days, 80 percent
of major-media news coverage was negative (double the figure during President
Obama’s first three months). More important, anti-Trump news constituted 41
percent of all media news coverage, a percentage three times greater than
coverage accorded prior presidents. In clinical terms, we might call that an
obsession.
If it were not for Fox News’s much
caricatured “fair and balanced” coverage (52 percent of its Trump coverage was
negative, Harvard reported) to average in with other major print and television
media, the anti-Trump bias would have been far greater — given that CNN and NBC
ran almost no media coverage that portrayed Trump in a positive light (their coverage
was 93 percent negative).
The symptoms of the Media-Democratic
party fusion range from the trivial to the profound. The merger is emblematized
by the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, which has now fully morphed
from a self-congratulatory night for Washington media insiders to a
star-studded Petronian banquet of progressive celebrities.
Operationally, the celebrity world and
the media have institutionalized political obscenity and street theater. On
Inauguration Day, Madonna dreamed out loud of blowing up the White House;
Ashley Judd went on a crude, incoherent rant about Trump. Since then, media
fixtures such as Steven Colbert and Bill Maher have melted down, the one
suggesting on the air that Trump had committed a sex act on Vladimir Putin, the
other that he commits incest with his daughter. Yet both were simply amplifying
the prior gross slur from Politico reporter
Julia Joffe: “Either Trump is f***ing his daughter, or he’s shirking nepotism
laws. Which is worse?”
Democrats in Congress and party
functionaries have parroted the media’s obscenity and its pettiness.
Sixty-seven representatives boycotted the inauguration. A new Democratic-party
T-shirt reads “Democrats Give a S*** About People.” The head of the DNC, Tom
Perez, routinely uses “s***” as if he were a stand-up on late-night TV. John
Burton finished chairing the California Democratic convention with group chants
of “f*** Trump,” with collective outstretched middle fingers.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., NY)
cried out that if the Democrats could not offer an antidote to Trump, then “we
should go the f*** home.” California senator Kampala Harris, supposed icon of
the future of the party, rushed in with her own four-letter obscenities.
Celebrity ex-felon Martha Stewart thinks
it’s hip to flip the bird to a photo of Donald Trump while simultaneously
flipping the V-sign to an image of rapper Snoop Dogg, the violent ex-felon and
former pimp who was most recently in the news for shooting an effigy of Donald
Trump. Obscenity has become the media tail wagging the Democratic-party dog,
even though such vulgarity might shock television audiences rather than win voters.
Instead of formulating policy, the
fusion party targets its opponents in Whac-A-Mole fashion. After moving on from
the smear of First Lady Melania Trump as an illegal alien and call girl, we
went to Steve Bannon, the Charles Lindbergh–style fascist; then Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, the duplicitous Russian patsy; on to daughter Ivanka
Trump, the incestuous peddler of trinkets; then to National Security Council
member Sebastian Gorka, the Hungarian Nazi sympathizer; and now presidential
adviser Jared Kushner, the Russian collaborator. Each “scandal” got its 15
minutes of cable-news outrage and unhinged tweets from celebrities, before the
wolf cries howled on to the next target.
The media brag that they now more or
less run the Democratic agenda. Univisions Jorge Ramos (whose daughter worked
for the Hillary Clinton campaign) recently thundered:
Our position, I think, has to be much
more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is
our job. If we don't question the president, if we don't question his lies, if we
don't do it, who is going to do it? It’s an uncomfortable position.
In other words, Ramos confessed that the
Democratic party apparently has neither new ideas nor a political agenda that
would win over the public, and thus self-appointed journalistic grandees like
him would have to step forward and lead the anti-Trump opposition as they shape
the news.
Fellow panelist and CNN’s media
correspondent Brian Stelter answered Ramos, “You're almost saying we're a
Stand-in for the Democrats.” Thereby, Stelter inadvertently confirmed Trump
White House adviser Steve Bannon’s widely criticized but prescient assertion
that the media are in fact “the opposition party” — and should be treated as
such.
During the 2016 campaign, James Rottener
of the New York Times reminded journalists
that they should feel no need to treat the exceptional Trump candidacy by
“normal standards,” a de facto admission that journalistic crusaders would take
the political lead in opposing Trump. Christian Minor said nearly the same
thing in reference to Trump’s stance on global warming: Journalists are now to
be advocates, not disinterested reporters of the news.
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