Tag Archives: Jake Tapper

Will ABC, Muir and Davis Stop the “Sane-Washing” of Donald Trump?

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In the last debate, barely 10 weeks ago, Joe Biden’s performance was so bad it was the only talking point in the smoking aftermath. But … had he performed less badly there would have been a larger, more vigorous conversation about the performance of CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

Amid the Biden wreckage Tapper and Bash were generally credited for running a smooth, straight forward, professional ship. They successfully deflected (muted) complaints that they did nothing to fact check Trump’s usual blizzard of lies and absurd exaggerations. “Not our job,” was basically their response.

Leading up to this evening’s Harris-Trump face-off, the issue of where smoothly professional, above the fray, just-asking-the-questions-here, let-the-viewers-decide journalism separates from acknowledging the reality everyone fully understands is a hotter, more salient topic than it was 10 weeks ago. Trump has gotten that much more incoherent and vulgar. Namely, to re-state the obvious, we aren’t tuning in to Dwight Eisenhower going face-to-face with Adlai Stevenson. (They never debated FWIW.)

One of the candidates this evening has built an astonishing cult of personality by violating every tradition and protocol of normal politics. This obvious fact (again) powerfully suggests that the smooth, Big J journalism embodied tonight by ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis needs to adjust to a significantly, substantially different fact of life. A reality that bears little resemblance to the polite and orderly decorum of their grandparents, much as they and we might wish otherwise.

Within the (likely shrinking) circles of people who care about sustaining a vibrant press there has been a flurry of debate recently over mainstream journalism’s “sane-washing” of Donald Trump. The complaint ties directly to the unambiguous fact that after a decade of wrestling with the man’s act professional fact gatherers still have not figured out a way to respond to someone leading a revolution of 60-70 million people despite and/or because he has no respect for the truth … as well as unabashed contempt for the profession asking him questions.

Examples of the current debate can be found in: Margaret Sullivan’s post on “sane-washing.” A Michael Tomasky column in The New Republic. Greg Sargent, also in The New Republic. And a substack piece by James Fallows that is generally credited for reigniting this controversy. (HT to Jim Boyd for that one.)

The gist of it all is that professional journalists are — for a variety of reasons — reluctant (or is it “trepidatious”?) to describe what they hear Trump say and see him doing. Reluctantly certainly to report in the kind of specific language and vernacular understandable to general reader/viewership. To call a lie a :”lie”, or to describe a comment as “incoherent” or, god forbid, “utter nonsense”, contradicts their training and fundamental ethos.

They have been taught — and hired for their current jobs — with the virtues of propriety and “fairness” firmly in mind … even when “fairness” means distorting the obvious reality to make it appear more proper.

If not outright fear, journalists like Tapper, Bash, Muir and reporters at regional outlets like the Star Tribune and local TV have credible reasons for trepidation. Reporting and fact-checking daily on Trump’s ludicrous lies, blithering incoherence and constant vulgarity risks instantaneous and irrational blowback from Trump’s public. Blowback from his base frequently comes disturbing threats of violence and — more significantly — puts the reporter and paper/TV station in the position of devoting dozens of hours and human resources defending itself from attacks. Attacks on their reputation that increase the likelihood of financial consequences in terms of lowered ratings, fewer subscriptions and impact on shareholder value.

The fact Trump understands the mainstream media’s self-imposed restraints on its coverage of him hardly makes the situation better. He knows they’ve tied themselves in knots in order to preserve their status of “fairness” and “balance.”

What I’ll be looking for from Muir and Davis tonight are questions to Trump (in particular) that focus on his most consequential lies and bar stool bombast.

For example:

Will they ask him, first if not early in the evening, what basis he has for still claiming the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen”? And will they respond by noting that 63 courts and his own election guru said otherwise?

Will they ask him if he will accept the results of this election … even if he loses?

Will they ask him how exactly he intends to deport 10-12 million immigrants and what he means when he regularly refers to the process as being “bloody?”

Will they ask him to explain how tariffs, essentially a sales tax paid by American consumers, will improve the financial well-being of middle-class Americans?

Will they ask him why he re-posted an on-line “joke” that Kamala Harris provided sexual favors to advance her career?

And of course, with a nod to journalistic fairness, they should put the same questions to Harris … .

However it goes tonight, the question of how professional journalists, some famous and very well paid, continue to cover a rogue operator like Trump will remain vital to the health of not just their profession, but this “democratic experiment”, as the wonks like to call it.

I fail to see how maintaining the attitude that, “We’re not going to ask the most pertinent and obvious quesation out fear of being criticized”, reinvigorates a floundering profession.

The job of reporting “without fear or favor” comes with risks. It comes with having to tell people things they don’t want to hear, and being called names (and worse) for it. It’s not a business you get in to because you really, really want to be liked.

The High(est) Anxiety Debate Ever.

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Debate questions they'll never ask Biden, Trump | Will Bunch Newsletter

Quite frankly, it is unsettling when someone like David Plouffe says he’s never felt a higher level of personal anxiety for a presidential debate than the one tonight. Plouffe, if you follow the news, is the man who led Barack Obama’s two campaigns and has been through more debate prep and spin than he cares to remember.

Plouffe was talking with his fellow Obama team colleague David Axelrod and long time Republican campaign operator turned ardent Never Trumper, Mike Murphy on their “Hacks on Tap” podcast yesterday.

To summarize his key points of concern/anxiety and strategy for Biden:

1: Biden has to be not just “ok” or “passable” in the eyes of the general, largely disinterested public. He has to be surprisingly good. While expectations for him are low, despite Team Trump lately trying to re-imagine sleepy and senile a veteran, polished debater jacked up on coke or Mountain Dew, the TV audience — a much larger audience than has paid attention to this race until now — has to leave the night nigh-on-to-startled by the Joe Biden they’ve just seen. Anything less and the balance of the race remains static or, given a Biden flop, collapses to a point of no return.

2: Biden has to attack early and often on the abortion/reproductive rights issue and the threat of more like that to come given that Trump will likely have two more Supreme Court seats to fill next term. (He also believes CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have to press that issue.)

3: On the economy, Biden has to have a deft pivot on Trump’s assertions that inflation and the world in general is out of control and things were much cheaper and calmer when he was in office.

4: If Trump comes out of the debate perceived as the victor, largely as a result of Biden fitting the perception that he is too old and feeble, Plouffe expects Trump to pass on the second debate in late September. He’ll have made his point and see no reason to risk a re-match. Likewise, Plouffe thinks Biden should consider something similar if he far exceeds expectations. In other words, this could be the one and only face-to-face we see … in a race where the country is unequivocally exchanging competence for chaos and personal retribution.

5: There has never been a debate remotely comparable to this one. No debate ever with so stark a contrast between the two candidates. Biden has to make that contrast indelible in the minds of viewers. And he has to do it while maintaining the image and tenor of the adult in the room.

Good luck, Joe.

“Stand by … This isn’t going to end well.”

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Well, among all the other things that have withered and died under Trump’s touch we can now add presidential debates. Team Biden will understand that they can’t refuse two more cage matches with Trump. They can’t “quit.” But the real question is who will want to watch? Last night settled any question still left hanging in the air that we’re dealing with something truly foul and reckless.

To quote Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, no one, especially women, wants to spend more time with, “a big fat asshole”.

Before the debate’s first “segment” was half through the verdict was pretty well in, “This is a disaster.” By dawn today some of the early quotes are already legendary.

Jake Tapper at CNN: “That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen, in fact it wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace.”

His colleague Dana Bash (a nice blonde lady): “”I’m going to say it like it is. That was a shit show. We’re on cable. We can say it. Apologies for being crude. But that is really the phrase I’m getting from people on both sides of the aisle on text and the only phrase I can think of to describe it.”

Frank Bruni in the New York Times: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that Trump was breathtaking, and I may even be paying him something of a compliment, because it takes a peerless combination of audacity and mendacity to pull off some of what he pulled off.”

And on and on. Trump’s behavior was so ugly and boorish, so untethered from any kind of reality and dignity I couldn’t help but imagine mothers and fathers with impressionable children who had gathered to view an important historical event shuttling the kids off to an early bedtime to protect them from the snarls and hissing of America’s Elected Role Model-in-Chief.

It was so ugly it was obscene.

The ball is now in the court of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Since both campaigns have to agree to rule changes I don’t see how they get Team Trump to agree to a “kill switch” for microphones. Trump interrupted Biden something like 78 times. The switch would only be coming for him.

The Commission is also savvy enough to understand that Trump’s feral desperation is only going to get worse. He’s losing in national polling. He’s losing in battleground state polling. He’s getting obliterated in fund-raising. He doesn’t have enough cash on hand to be a TV presence in places like Minnesota, where he’s blustered he’s going to tip us red. (So … he has to fly in today and give another super spreader rally in an airplane hanger.)

The consensus is overwhelming that his brawling, drunk uncle routine last night is only going to make all those key metrics worse. (Biden pulled in an unprecedented $4 million in the first hour after the debate.) It’s a scenario that bodes for more of the same and worse for mild-mannered Steve Scully, of C-SPAN, moderator of the next debate.

If Chris Wallace couldn’t exert any control over Trump, Scully should bomb-proof the underside of his desk.

The negotiated agreement that the moderator would not provide fact-checking won’t be revisited. And it would do no good if it were. It would simply become a one-on-two debate with Trump raging against both the moderator and Biden.

As for Joe, I have to say he benefited from Trump’s belligerence. Biden had a half dozen golden opportunities handed to him to deliver a “Reaganesque” one-liner. When Trump muttered, “To be honest … ,’ Biden’s play was to wait a beat and reply, “Well, this’ll be a first for you. We’re all ears.”

Likewise, if at any point in one of Trump’s rabid rants Biden had just straightened up, looked at him in the eye and said, “Good god man! Get a grip! If you keep ranting like this you’ll have a stroke!” 61% of the viewing audience would have nodded and said, “No shit.”

Old School polite and diplomatic Joe Biden is/was no match for the New School Fox-and-Twitter bred histrionics and fact-free torrents of Trump. But Trump so wildly and crudely overplayed that hand no sane adult faulted Biden for failing to be glib and theatrical.

The reaction line Biden needed most was at the end, when Trump — the President of the United States — was asked to directly and unambiguously tell his most radical white supremacist supporters to stay calm and respect the outcome of the election, and his response was to tell the armed-to-the-teeth neo-Nazi Proud Boys to, “stand back and stand by.”

I mean, I bolted upright in my chair and shrieked, ” ‘Stand by!!!!’? What the [bleep] are you talking about you, appalling thug?”

Maybe the key issue facing the Commission is whether another debate as ugly and potentially inciteful as last night serves to enable Trump to spray more gasoline on possible insurrection.

I mean, Trump, who is incapable of hiding his darkest impulses did say/promise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

The Commission may need to believe what he says.

It’s Time. Fauci and Birx Need to Resign.

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What’s happening to Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx is not a pleasant thing to watch. Though unknown to most of us before the pandemic, they built long and impressive careers, both by being competent in their profession and by carefully nurturing their reputations. Now though they’ve both becomes creatures of Trump culture, part of his supporting cast. A cast mostly of grotesques.

I know I’ve referred to this many times before, but it continues to apply over and over and over again. Everything Trump Touches Dies. (TM: Rick Wilson.) From the $400 million (in 2020 dollars) shoveled to him by his Klansman father, which he proceeded to squander, to his mis-managed airline, his bogus university, his fraudulent foundation, all his ex-wives, his porn star hookups, bankrupt casinos and mistreatment of lackeys like Chris Christie, Reince Preibus, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Lev and Igor, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Ryan and on and on, Trump has either sullied or compounded the self-sullying of everyone he’s drawn into his wobbling orbit.

And now it’s Fauci and Birx’ turn.

Fauci has been noticeably absent from Trump’s most recent afternoon press rallies, including last Thursday’s where it was up to a stricken-looking Deborah Birx to tap-dance and prevaricate around Trump’s brain-seizing riffs on injecting disinfectants and sticking UV lights up our where-evers. Then Sunday, Birx was the one pushed out on “Meet the Press” and Jake Tapper to explain away some more and deflect attention from what the rest of the entire planet of intelligent humans regarded, unmistakably, as lethal misinformation wrapped around unconscionable ignorance.

I take no pleasure in saying Birx has torched her credibility, but her feet are on fire. She has in effect become a Trump enabler. Which is to say her role, publicly, has become less that of an advisor and more that of an apologist. She’s become the loyal assistant to an ill-informed, anti-science demagogue, which is precisely the opposite of the virtues she built her reputation on over forty years in her chosen profession. To stay any longer, she is risking historic culpability in what will be regarded as the most catastrophic failure of presidential leadership in American history. (And yes, I know I’ve said that before, too. But it bears repeating, like a mantra.)

People like Fauci and Birx, at the top of their bureaucratic food chains, have talents beyond “mere” scientific knowledge. Fauci in particular is regarded as a remarkably skillful player at the game of massaging, finessing and herding serious, high-brow egos toward a common goal. But in Trump, a narcissistic sociopath who can’t tell the difference between the Hippocratic Oath and Fantasia’s dancing hippos, there is no foundation in knowledge or professional empathy to work with.

In Fauci and Birx we are … again … looking at career company players who can not break free of the rules and protocols that brought them stature and prominence. Like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Chief of Staff and Marine General John Kelly, ex-oil company CEO Tillerson, whoever wrote “Anonymous”, former Goldman, Sachs President Gary Cohn and even Robert Mueller, Fauci and Birx to this point have not been able to say what must be said. Namely, that Donald Trump not only has no clue what he’s talking about, but has no capacity whatsoever to deal with the biggest crisis the country has faced since WWII.

Like the other estimable reputations mentioned above, Fauci and Birx have so far refused to accept that the rules that brought them to this point of their careers have no weight or value in proximity to Trump. He regards their credibility and sense of duty to the standards of their profession as exploitable weaknesses to be bent to the service … of his reputation, which is to say the fantasy he creates for it.

The irony is that were they to announce their resignations — with unequivocal criticism of the stark, on-going failures of Trump — their standing as the foremost go-to truth-tellers on the pandemic would only increase. Trump would no doubt do everything he could to vilify and demote both. But since each would remain deep in the loop in terms of the science and logistics of pandemic response, they would remain vital, much sought after sources of critical information.

Given a choice between a daily unfettered Fauci & Birx pandemic update or one from their Trump-appointed replacements, (Jared? Pence?), which would you watch? Which would you believe?

More to the point, out from under the reputation-poisoning weight of Trump enabling they could speak freely and like intelligent adults to an adult public.

Gen. Flynn and the Dam About to Burst

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3If you’ve been worrying about the big Oroville dam in California bursting open, this Gen. Flynn thing could bring a much bigger flood. After 24 days, three and half weeks, the regime of Our Orange Leader is already up to its spray tanned jowls in a scandal bigger than Watergate.

That’s hyperbole!, you say? Well, no one ever accused Richard Nixon of regularly communicating with the Russians while they were doing their nefarious best to screw with an American presidential election. And G. Gordon Liddy was not the President’s key and, according to reports, sole advisor on foreign affairs. Baby, oh baby.  Even I thought it’d be mid-summer before Trump got himself into something so outrageously, cartoonishly foul that the usual “Let’s move on, nothing to see here, folks” Republican “leaders” would be on TV demanding to know what exactly there is … to see here.

But that’s where we are … three and a half weeks into this fiasco. Clearly, some Republicans have already decided Trump is too ludicrous an embarrassment to protect with sealed-off, behind closed doors committee investigations. Moreover, if reports are true that U.S. intelligence agencies are withholding intelligence from Trump and his team of Russian-compromised know-nothings, the sooner the swap-out of Mike Pence for Trump happens, the better.

The schadenfreude-rich beauty of the Flynn debacle is how it whips the spotlight back around, away from the sideshow of fools and scoundrels joining Trump’s cabinet, and zeros it back in on what kind of business Trump has been doing with the Russians for the past 30 years. We have a pretty good idea, but to date none of the circumstantial (and better) assertions have grabbed the full attention, simultaneously, of our brave Congressional leaders and the national media herd.

The cynical assumption is that this Flynn business, which as we now know has been going on for months, not just between Flynn and various Russian officials, but other members of Trump’s campaign/administration, will be stifled and prevaricated over by Republican-led committees. They’ll muddle it and obscure it until the “failing” The New York Times and Jake Tapper lose interest or are distracted by the next farcical scandal or, god forbid, bona fide international crisis.

But I don’t see that happening, and I lived through Watergate. Why? Because this Flynn episode is hair’s breadth from the rich, juicy essence of Donald Trump — namely, the high likelihood he was bailed out of chronic bankruptcy by Russian money and has engaged in colossal tax fraud for decades. Being first to expose what so many, in and out government and media believe to be a monumental con game comes with guarantee of heroic historical standing of the eternal, name-in-schoolbooks variety.

My pal, Joe Loveland, correctly assessed the Republicans’ predicament over disposing Trump for Mike Pence. Basically, they’re prepared to do it, preferably before the 2018 mid-term elections, as long as they don’t have to take any responsibility for it. Most Republicans, batshit craven and otherwise, live in fear of Trump’s low-to-no information base. But if Trump brings the… house of cards … down on himself with a ceaseless bombardment of revelations about scheming with … the f****ing Russians for chrissakes (every old school Republican’s ultimate boogeyman) … they can stand back like mere horrified observers, while doing everything they can to polish up the medieval dunce Mike Pence as the only acceptable replacement.

The wild and terrifying card in this drama is of course the “Reichstag fire” scenario, where Team Trump plots to distract public/Congressional/media attention by either inventing, grossly exaggerating or ineptly bungling some serious international crisis. In normal times you, dear reader, would be excused for rolling your eyes at the wild-eyed lunacy of such a scenario. I mean, stuff like that doesn’t happen in The United States.

Unfortunately, like the dossier with stories of the Rooskies storing video of Donald and hookers, um, “micturating” on Obama’s hotel bed in Moscow, there’s a level of plausibility to almost every obscene, outrageous thing you can imagine about Trump that we’ve never dealt with before. Not even with Dick Nixon.

Man, am I tired of winning so much.