ALLOW ME TO BE contrary for a moment.
That rambling, semi-coherent, solipsistic rant (half campaign speech; half cry for attention) Trump delivered at the CIA fills me with hope and reassurance, not despair.
Only the most recalcitrant die-hards, whom reasonable and intelligent discourse will never persuade anyway, can continue falling in line after this. Imagine if that exact speech, in the exact same context, was translated into another language (say, North Korean): for a movie it would serve as mediocre and ham-fisted satire; as a real life event, if uttered by someone in a different country?—?use your imagination?—?it’s the very type of propagandistic boilerplate that typically makes “serious” Americans (including, if not especially conservatives and certain media types) solemnly shake their heads and thank their (white, Capitalist) God that this type of farce could never occur in America. You know, where paid staffers are brought in to applaud like teenagers at a boy band concert. If, say, we heard someone call out aerial photographs and say “the crowds were much bigger…because I say so”, we’d pity the country that had to put up with such a deluded and sick cult of personality.
However, it’s America, and it’s happening, here.
Doubling down, because that’s what con men always do (they have no choice; when the con’s exposed, so are they, and there’s no coming back from that), they sent the oleaginous Sean Spicer out to parrot the party line, and take questions. Just kidding! You know it’s amateur hour when the press secretary refuses to take questions during the first press conference.
This, from the linked Politico article above, is worth quoting in full:
Spicer: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration?—?period?—?both in person and around the globe.”
While the new administration disputes the count, the visual evidence from overhead photography is overwhelming: Far more people stood on the Mall and witnessed Obama’s inauguration in 2009 than Trump’s inauguration on Friday.
The global viewing audience is nearly impossible to calculate, but at least four previous presidents drew bigger domestic TV audiences than Trump. According to Nielsen ratings, 30.6 million viewers tuned in across 12 networks to watch Trump’s inauguration. That falls well short of the 41.8 million viewers who watched Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration, the 37.7 million who watched Obama’s 2009 inauguration, the 34.1 million who watched Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inauguration and the 33 million who watched Richard Nixon’s 1973 inauguration.
Millions of viewers also tuned in for livestreams of Trump’s inauguration, and CNN says that there were 16.9 million livestreams on its site and apps across the day. But Obama’s 2009 inauguration drew then-record online audiences, with CNN reporting more than 25 million livestreams across the day?—?and so much demand during Obama’s speech that many viewers were shunted to online waiting rooms.
But it won’t last and this won’t work. The ostensible incongruity of seeing so many people (of all ages and races) taking to the streets alongside Trump’s surreal outburst du jour?—?albeit his first one as President?—?is oddly refreshing. Yesterday proves there’s simply way too many people who know, and can’t be unconvinced, the sky is blue, 2+2=4, and that Truth, however painful it is at times, takes precedence over sloganeering and facile bromides (what type of person is comforted by impotent assertions like “we’ll win again”? Who doesn’t feel America has been “winning”, whatever that implies anyway? I guess some of it is timing, because I certainly didn’t hear a lot about America “losing” between 2001–2008, at least until the losses became difficult to count and the G.O.P. united to blame it on the next guy. I wonder, incidentally, how Republicans would react if any Democrat ever implied that we haven’t “won” anything since before Vietnam. A military veteran hearing this shit, from a born-rich draft dodger, and the irony doesn’t make his gray matter boil? Tell me again about how Trump’s victory was due to liberal elitism and not racism or willful ignorance mixed with cognitive dissonance…).
Getting back to Trump’s favorite foe, the media: it was called out, entirely, by Trump’s (and Spicer’s even more strident, yet easily disprovable) assertion that his crowds were bigger and, yes, that all American media is engaged in a synchronous scam to embarrass him. First, he embarrasses himself just fine (did you listen to that “speech”?), and secondly, it’s one thing to bully individual reporters or networks?—?itself unprecedented and disgraceful?—?but to in effect call out the entire media (reality) and claim what we all saw and heard is false because he says so, draws a line in the sand. It’s a curious blessing. Because Trump & Co. can’t help themselves, the stakes are already thus: the media will have little choice but push back, their only agenda being…truth, reality. And, fortunately for them, and us, it’s not only imperative but pretty painless to let the truth speak for itself.
Demonstrators protest during the Women’s March along Pennsylvania Avenue January 21, 2017 in Washington, DC.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters spearheaded by women’s rights groups demonstrated across the US to send a defiant message to US President Donald Trump. / AFP / Joshua LOTT (Photo credit should read JOSHUA LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)
And that’s why the amazing marches yesterday are so important. At the same time Trump is still stage-crafting psychotic appeals for legitimacy, millions of people are marching, unified by their disdain for the poison and falsehood that’s fueled his short-lived rise. (And proving what’s been lost in the post-election agonizing: the demographic shift of subsequent generations is extremely tolerant and, well, progressive. That’s the future, and it’s beautiful.) The media, no collective profile in courage at any time, has effectively been dared, by Trump & Co., to fall in line or do what they’re already paid to do: report. Refreshingly, they’ve seen these crowds?—?around America; around the world?—?and will feel obligated (more so than they already should, a whole other topic) to report the truth. Seeing Trump’s popularity plummet and hearing his maniacal insistence on bending reality to his will removes the gray area and equivocation that typically carries the day in today’s media environment. Again, this is a blessing. We won’t require reporters to editorialize or embellish, just point the cameras and microphones and allow the accumulating weight of Trump’s duplicity to bury him.
Finally, we should desist from drawing any comparisons to Hitler (aside from the fact that it’s lazy and, at this juncture, historically inaccurate; Trump’s more your average tin-pot dictator wannabe): that cretin was able to convince (or intimidate) enough people to commit the atrocities he oversaw; yesterday proves, undeniably, that Trump will never have anything close to a mandate. Going forward, every subsequent utterance or scripted scene will alienate more folks…and that’s before his (that is, the GOP’s) policies begin actively harming and disenfranchising people who voted for him. We’re seeing how unpopular (and unqualified) he is today, and he’ll never be this popular, again. It’s a slow (or maybe not-so-slow) burn, effective immediately.
*This piece originally appeared in The Weeklings on 1/22/17.
