Just Shut Him Off

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The dirty little secret of our now-fading national nightmare is that our media made Donald Trump. First they made him a celebrity with his “reality” show “The Apprentice.” Then they made him president.

They’ve made him the obsessive focus of our collective attention for over five years now, ever since he rode that escalator down to throw his hat in the ring. They’ve reported his every falsehood, boast, profanity, bigotry, idiocy and Tweet as if it were the Word of God. They did this throughout his campaign and his presidency. Many media outlets, but recently not PBS, are still doing this today.

Trump is now 74 years old. He cut his teeth on “celebrity” before the word “clickbait” existed. But the vast majority of what he has said and done during his campaign and his presidency is clickbait. It’s words thrown out into the mediasphere to shock, dismay, mock, startle, insult, disgust and outrage people. It’s words and (on video) grotesque grimaces and shouts for the sole purpose of gaining attention, demeaning a rival or getting the cameras to turn Trump’s way. Trump has been our very first clickbait president.

It doesn’t matter whether the words make sense or bear the slightest resemblance to reality. Their purpose is to attract attention, distract and confuse. That they have done effectively and relentlessly, with virtually all our media providing a megaphone and an echo chamber.

Our media magnified Trump’s clickbait willingly and often enthusiastically. Social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were the worst offenders. They fine-tuned their algorithms to elevate and magnify clickbait. The more eyeballs a Tweet or post attracts, the more “likes” it accretes. Then the higher it climbs in an algorithm’s lifeless esteem. The sooner it appears in the list of links that fill your screen.

Just so Trump has used not just social media, but TV and the print media, too. He’s used them the same way a child uses a loud voice at a pool party to impose on his parents and all who can see or hear him. “Mom and Dad, everybody, look at meeee!”

These bad media habits betrayed decency, good order, rational government and simple common sense. They relied on a grossly immoral and undemocratic syllogism: sensationalism sells “news,” sales make profit, and profit is good. There was also a big dose of herd mentality. How can we stop if everyone is doing it? That’s the way democracies die and tyrannies creep up unnoticed.

Trump’s meteoric rise to the White House and the media’s complicity in his grotesque misrule were pretty much that simple. They damn near lost us our Republic, as Franklin had warned, not to mention our souls. They’ve maimed real patriotism, brutalized our standard of living, and lost 230,000 lives and counting.

Of course there are plausible excuses. Trump was, after all, a candidate for president and then the president himself. Isn’t everything a presidential candidate and president says ipso facto important?

Not really. Our media never really exercised much judgment on this point. The more startling, false, outrageous or hostile was what Trump said, the higher up on the page and the clickbait list it went. Truth and perspective got left behind in the mad rush for ears and eyeballs in an industry with a business model under electronic siege.

Trump is not stupid. He’s always had a keen, base cunning about all the things that drive bad souls. He used this cunning to make the front page and evening news almost every day. He “won” especially on otherwise “slow news days,” instinctively keeping us all off balance and in a state of constant apprehension, confusion and anxiety. The only thing Trump has been superbly effective at doing is transferring his personal psychosis to a nation of 330 million people.

Only media researchers in their ivory towers know how many hits, reads and “likes” he got this way. He did it all with words alone—rarely deeds—regardless of whether or not they contained any truth or real information or had any practical effect. Long-term thinking died and got buried deep under a daily barrage of Tweets, magnified and repeated endlessly in our media’s print and electronic echo chambers. Our media gave Trump’s Big Lies an ideal habitat in which to thrive.

Take Trump’s “big, beautiful Wall” along our border with Mexico, for example. It has a goal of reaching 450 miles by year end. Only nine miles of it are brand new; the rest is repairs of decayed and destroyed wall. On a border that’s 1,954 miles long in all, that’s a promise 0.4% fulfilled. Not a single centimeter has Mexico paid for.

Trump won power, misused it, and left our ship of state dead in the water by treating attention as if it were votes or achievements. It’s not. Eventually, that mistake lost Trump this election, albeit by a slim margin. Now, as we all awaken from Trump’s spell, we find we’ve been drifting aimlessly for nearly four years, while fighting phantoms and each other.

What gives us hope is our media’s recent, surprisingly quick transformation. Ever since they began to see that Trump was losing, their fall toward reason and professionalism has become an avalanche. Practically overnight, social media started stamping Trump’s lies as false, suspicious or unverified. Even TV started dubbing them as “not true,” “false” or even “lies.”

In other words, only after it was clear that Trump was losing did our media begin to consider truth and practical significance in deciding what to report. Before that, they all quailed to ignore his most outrageously false or self-evidently trivial blather.

This is courage? This is journalism?

Might Trump’s misrule have been shorter and less horrific if the media had been more professional and more devoted to reporting only what’s important and not demonstrably false? We’ll never know. You don’t get to rerun history.

But one thing is now clear. Joe Biden’s election as president has produced a near-universal sigh of relief. It’s not fun, reassuring or uplifting to spend each day hearing and watching our leaders hurl new and unfamiliar accusations against each other, call each other names, and fight like children on a playground. It’s demeaning and exhausting to view almost everything that happens—no matter how trivial or consequence-free—with alarm and foreboding.

People can take only so much disgust, revulsion, alarm and outrage. Their minds can process only so many conspiracy theories. They can follow only so many convoluted charges and countercharges. Even the most disciplined minds can handle only so many distractions and irrelevancies before they lose focus.

Our media supercharged the national sickness spawned by a diseased and utterly self-focused mind. They made little visible effort to sift the wheat from the chaff. They left us feeling exhausted and confused, not just in general, but incrementally more every single day.

That, I think, is where we are as a nation today. Despite all the angst and hand-wringing, no coup is really likely. There may have been 71 million votes for Trump, but there will be no insurrection, let alone a new civil war.

Trump’s followers may be tired and dispirited. Some of them may be angry and prone to violence. But the vast majority of us all just seems emotionally exhausted. Deep down, if only semi-consciously, we want the steady diet of trivia, baseless suspicion, constant quibbling and discord to end.

Whatever side voters may be on, what they feel most now is neither triumph nor resentment, but fatigue and relief. We all want our government to become helpful, effective, competent and mostly silent again. We want to get on with our lives (and fight the pandemic) with some confidence that the people who lead us are working and thinking, not just blathering, and trying to do right.

This collective state of mind offers chances both for the Biden Transition Team to gain popular confidence and for our media to redeem themselves.

For the Transition Team, the path is straight and clear. Besides soothing words of peace, reconciliation and willingness to listen, it ought to say nothing at all for at least two weeks. Let the public know that “working for you” means actually thinking, planning and working, not mouthing off. Stop relying on words alone, whose value has plummeted like the price of oil in the pandemic. When the time comes, take only action, and then only action that soothes and reassures.

To this end the Biden/Harris team should announce a Cabinet of universally respected and highly experienced public servants, including some moderate Republicans. (Trump sycophants and lackeys of course should not apply.)

If they want to help save our country, our media’s best course is to turn Trump’s volume down. In 72 days, he will be a private citizen. His bizarre claims and ideas will have no legal force. They will influence only his party and his true believers, who are leaving his side like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

Why continue to spread and magnify the influence of false, even bizarre, charges from a man who has used his mouth and Tweets to bring a great nation to its knees? If nothing else, the media can reduce the mental bandwidth that this crazy would-be tyrant monopolizes. They can report what he says only when it has legal force or, through direct influence on others, short-term practical effect. As nearly four dismal years have shown, that doesn’t happen very often.

I know, I know. All this requires judgment and discretion. Our media are not just private profit machines, although many of them act that way. They are our precious Fourth Estate. Without them, democracy withers and dies. So each journalist has a profound duty far beyond his or her career path and paycheck. Better do one’s duty too late than not at all.

In 72 days, Trump’s words and acts will have no direct national effect whatsoever. Their indirect effect—both now and then—would best be tallied by reporting how other people known for honesty and common sense react. That’s what the media suddenly started doing with Trump’s frivolous challenges to the election. Their abrupt change of course was a breath of cool, fresh air.

So let’s rid ourselves of this perfervid generator of lies, hate and discord by a simple but powerful stratagem. Let’s ignore him. Let his fevered excuse for a brain invent a thousand conspiracies that no one joins, and to which no one pays any attention. Let’s just shut him off.

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