It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”
Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.
Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.
We warned you, but you didn’t listen.
Believe it or not, the media owe Trump a debt of gratitude
The culprit, of course, is our handling of the unconventional candidate who became president. Among our sins: failure to take him seriously enough early enough; relying too heavily on flawed polling; spending more time covering personality than policy, providing him untold hours of free advertising on certain cable news networks, and not even requiring him to show up in person to collect it.
Perhaps most critically, we embraced a false equivalence. We behaved as if Hillary Clinton’s shifting explanations for the use of a private email server — troubling though they were — were somehow as ominous and potentially consequential as Donald Trump’s mendacity, crudeness, incompetence, and overall unfitness.
In our defense, though, we had never seen anything like him and had no idea how to cover him.
Going on three months into his presidency, we are still figuring it out. But there is reason to be encouraged.
Prove it every day. You have a lot to atone for. But we do have some examples below:
Tom Nichols/Daily Beast with an excerpt from his book:
America's Cult of Ignorance—And the Death of Expertise
In the early ’90s, a small group of “AIDS denialists,” including a University of California professor named Peter Duesberg, argued against virtually the entire medical establishment’s consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science thrives on such counterintuitive challenges, but there was no evidence for Duesberg’s beliefs, which turned out to be baseless. Once researchers found HIV, doctors and public health officials were able to save countless lives through measures aimed at preventing its transmission.
The Duesberg business might have ended as just another quirky theory defeated by research. The history of science is littered with such dead ends. In this case, however, a discredited idea nonetheless managed to capture the attention of a national leader, with deadly results. Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, seized on the idea that AIDS was caused not by a virus but by other factors, such as malnourishment and poor health, and so he rejected offers of drugs and other forms of assistance to combat HIV infection in South Africa. By the mid-2000s, his government relented, but not before Mbeki’s fixation on AIDS denialism ended up costing, by the estimates of doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health, well over three hundred thousand lives and the births of some thirty-five thousand HIV-positive children whose infections could have been avoided. Mbeki, to this day, thinks he was on to something.
Many Americans might scoff at this kind of ignorance, but they shouldn’t be too confident in their own abilities.
AP:
AP-NORC Poll: Majority of Americans favor Russia probe
Slim majorities of Americans favor independent investigations into President Donald Trump's relationship with the Russian government and possible attempts by Russia to influence last year's election. ...
The results are sharply partisan. More than three-quarters of Democrats favor an independent investigation while only one-quarter of Republicans do.
Overall, 52 percent of Americans favor the probe, while 23 percent are opposed
Seattle Times:
UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it
It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange.
Too strange for a university professor to take seriously.
It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange.
Too strange for a university professor to take seriously.
Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by “crisis actors” for political purposes.
“After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity,” Starbird says. “It was so fringe we kind of laughed at it.
“That was a terrible mistake. We should have been studying it.”
Starbird is in the field of “crisis informatics,” or how information flows after a disaster. She got into it to see how social media might be used for the public good, such as to aid emergency responders.
Instead she’s gone down a dark rabbit hole, one that wends through the back warrens of the web and all the way up to the White House.
McKay Coppins/Atlantic:
But virtually everyone who wrote to me shared a common complaint: The traditional “Left ↔ Right” spectrum used to describe and categorize Republicans has become obsolete in the age of Trump. The question now is what to replace it with.
To provoke interesting answers, I asked people who wrote to me to imagine the Republican voter who is furthest from themselves—be it ideologically, philosophically, or attitudinally—and then to answer the question: What is the most meaningful difference between you and that person?
The proposed spectrums that emerged from their responses—some of which I’ve included below—are not meant to be peer-reviewed by political scientists. But they offer new, and potentially more useful, ways to map the emerging fault lines that now divide the American right.
Russell Berman/Atlantic:
The Republican Majority in Congress Is an Illusion
The recriminations following the GOP’s health-care failure obscure a simple reality: The party doesn’t have as much power as its leaders thought it did.
On Thursday morning, as Ryan was scoffing at the notion of bipartisanship, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia was casting his first vote in six weeks across the Capitol. Battling Parkinson’s disease and recovering from two back surgeries, he appeared on the Senate floor with the help of a walker and gave Republicans their 50th vote for a measure that would kill an Obama administration rule prohibiting states from blocking federal grants from going to Planned Parenthood. Two GOP senators supportive of Planned Parenthood, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, had already voted no on the bill, and Vice President Mike Pence was waiting for Isakson so he could cast a tie-breaking vote in favor of the resolution.
It was an unfortunate picture of the Republican congressional majority at the moment—slim and halting, and much shakier than it once seemed.
David Frum/Atlantic:
Trump retains his grip on the Republican caucus in Congress and the all-important conservative media complex. He isn’t winning many legislative battles—but neither is he losing the battles that count most for him. His tax returns remain secret, and so for the most part do the details of his campaign’s Russian connections. As embarrassing as it is that the health bill collapsed, it would have been far worse for him politically had it passed.
It remains always possible for a president to regain the initiative. In Trump’s case, that initiative is found in battles over trade and immigration: the issues that won him the Republican nomination and that his base inside the party cares about most. He doesn’t even need to win. He just needs to be seen to fight.
John Cassidy/The NewYorker:
But the larger story here goes beyond Nunes and his nocturnal wanderings.
It concerns the White House’s competence—or lack thereof. Ten weeks ago, when Trump stormed into office attacking the media and promising a blitzkrieg of new policies and initiatives during his first hundred days, the dominant emotion among people who hadn’t voted for him was fear. Many commentators, myself included, warned about the dangers of democratic erosion, and sales of George Orwell’s “1984” soared.
Today, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned about Trump and his illiberalism. The White House’s recent decision to dismantle President Obama’s clean-air regulations offers fresh testament to the malevolence of the Trump Administration’s agenda, and next week’s meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s President, will be a reminder of the enormous responsibilities that rest on a President’s shoulders. But, even among ardent Trumpophobes, fear and foreboding have been supplemented by wonderment at the White House’s string of gaffes. These days, instead of Big Brother, it often looks like the Keystone Kops are in charge.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
The Republican Party is now split into three factions—pragmatists, Trumpian populists, and hard-right maximalists unwilling to make the compromises necessary to govern effectively. As president, Trump could have been the glue holding the party’s warring groups together, by embracing elements of conservative orthodoxy while forcing concessions on other issues important to him. But Trump has little interest in the art of governing; he craves personally-fulfilling political victories. Perhaps if the president had focused more on selling health care reform or better understood the details of the legislation, the conservative members would have felt more pressure to play team ball. Instead, they now hold outsized leverage after scuttling a long-standing party priority.
What’s surprising is that Trump publicly turned on his onetime allies on Twitter. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them… in 2018,” he wrote. Even as many of his supporters were inclined to lay blame for the bill’s failure on Ryan, Trump picked a fight with his base—and he’s losing. His threat to negotiate with Democrats also fell on deaf ears. Several Caucus Group members responded by using his campaign rhetoric against him, arguing the president is sinking in the very swamp he vowed to drain. New national polls show Trump losing a little support from the GOP base, which is a problem given his rock-bottom ratings with persuadable voters. Trump now needs the Freedom Caucus more than it needs him.
This is what happens when a president faces sagging approval ratings, low staff morale, and the shadow of scandal only two months into his administration. When a president can’t even pressure his core supporters, it’s a clear sign that his presidency is shrinking in the public’s eyes.