The Oddfather: Don Donald, and the offer we as a nation MUST refuse

Donald Trump is a bully.

That's no secret. Nor is it a surprise that he has tried to bully the American media, calling them "the enemy of the people" and characteristically exploiting the understandable ire of folks who realize that journalists tend to come from similar backgrounds and live their lives in intellectually incestuous interaction with people with ideas and attitudes and values similar to their own, and as a result tend to share a kind of tunnel vision which forces their view of the world into a rather uniform and therefore distorted perspective.

Bullies like to pick on the weak. But the American media are not weak. They seem, however not to have much in the way of backbone, because they've let Donald Fredovich intimidate the living daylights out of them.

How did it happen that we have gotten to this point without Donald Trump's longstanding and widely-known record of personal corruption being common knowledge?  How can a president who lies so extravagantly and so often get away with it to the point that about forty percent of us take every word that falls from his sneering lips as gospel?

How can anybody listen to a speech by the guy and still be taken in? He meanders. He raves. Sometimes he borders on being incoherent. He utters obvious and blatant absurdities Take this presidential speech in Milwaukee, for example.

He raved about Federal water efficiency standards forcing us to flush the toilet too often and prevent dishwashers from getting our dishes clean without our having to put them through 10 or 15 cycles. 

Do you have to wash your dishes ten or fifteen times? He's just exaggerating, some might say. Ok. How many times do you usually have to run your dishes through the dishwater? How many times, on average, do you have to flush the toilet? And why is any of this relevant as a topic for a presidential address?

As someone with sensitive skin that really needs to get the soap rinsed off it if I'm not going to spend the day scratching myself like a hound dog with fleas, I sympathize with his impatience with the energy-saver showerheads which he complains stop him from thoroughly cleaning "this beautiful head of hair."

So I make it a point not to use them, and I certainly don't blame the Federal government.

 He complained about how new energy-saving lightbulbs not only cost too much but make him look orange.  He suggested that one of his predecessors, Lyndon B. Johnson, is in hell. His approval of war crimes (up to and including the pardoning of those who commit them) was already well documented, of course, before his endorsement of them in this particular speech. But it's still pretty chilling to those of us who care about such things.

Some people would see nothing wrong with any of this. Some people would even be charmed by his folksy informality or something. There are far more people who would go out of their way not to see anything disturbing about the leader of the free world raving disjointedly about the efficiency of American toilets in a campaign speech, or pausing in a digression praising a predecessor for his toughness to digress further to speculate about his possible perdition.  But is it OK for the most powerful man in the world to be so consistently incoherent and uninformed about even the absurdities about which he meanders wh he charms us with his common touch, or whatever?

During the 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush was widely taken to task for accidentally revealing during a campaign stop that he didn't know how much a gallon of milk cost at the grocery store. It was said to show that he was out of touch.  Is it not at least equally significant that the President of the United States is so uninformed not only about dishwaters but toilets? Surely he uses those.

And is it not newsworthy that this is the stuff Mr. Trump thinks he needs to talk to us about? Is it not significant that what he has to say about these weighty matters is so bizarre and disjointed?
The question is unavoidable: how many accounts of his speech in the media mentioned any of this? 

Before anybody even asks the question, of course, it's relevant that he said these things. Of course, it's newsworthy. It's just as newsworthy as the most solemn policy pronouncement that the President of the United States raves incoherently and often cluelessly about toilets and treats lightbulbs that make him look orange as a campaign issue. And it's certainly newsworthy when he says things that are demonstrably untrue as often as he does, or denies saying things that he's on film saying, or misrepresents things other people say.

But why do we have to go to sites like this one to find out that he's doing those things? And how many people visit such sites, anyway? When the President of the United States says something that is demonstrably untrue, slanders somebody, or just gives one of his normal, incoherent, rambling speeches that raise questions about his focus, his command of facts, and his mental state, is that not newsworthy?

But why doesn't the media tell us? The answer is simple: they're intimidated. They've been bullied into silence by a president who has quite deliberately made anyone capable of seeing to it that he's held accountable for what he says or does into "an enemy of the people" in the minds of his often ill-informed supporters.

WWERMS? What Would Edward R. Murrow Say?

No previous president would have been allowed to get away with this stuff. It's no wonder that very reasonable suspicions about the man's competence and even mental health are dismissed by so many people out of hand when they aren't being confronted by manifest evidence that is right there in plain sight but being concealed from them by the cowardice of the thoroughly intimidated media?

But if the media did nothing more than accurately report the substance of the man's speeches, they would be accused of being prejudiced against him and trying to bring him down. Somehow he's gotten away with getting us to even to take the word of the FSB over that of the CIA- yes, and of the FBI, whose misconduct in obtaining FISA warrants has been blown out of proportion into an indictment of the overall objectivity and reliability of what is, after all, another institution capable of committing the cardinal sin in today's America: holding Donald Trump accountable for anything.

Those in the conservative media who have misrepresented the implications of the FISA story as proving deep institutional bias against Mr. Trump sufficient to justify disbelieving the FBI on principle are obvious accomplices in this president's determined effort to safeguard himself from accountability. But then, so is the ordinary, every-day working journalist who operates as an employee of Pravda would have during the Cold War and reports not what happens or what is said, but what those in power are willing to let you know or think happens and is said.

But there's more. We somehow heard, after all, about Mr. Trump's history lecture on how the Continental Army retook the airports from the Redcoats during the Revolutionary War.  But a new book authored by Washington Post writers Phillip Rucker and Carol Lee Leonnig provides us not with new information- while I haven't read the book, I can see no fundamental realities it reveals about Mr. Trump and his administration that we haven't known all along- as further documentation for what we've known all along from many diverse sources.

Here we have a president who, before his departure for a tour of the memorial above the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor, has to ask his Chief of Staff what the memorial is all about.  “Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle," Rucker and Leonnig write, "but he did not seem to know much else.” Later, they quote a former senior aide of the president as saying, “He was at times dangerously uninformed.”

Let's pause here a moment for two observations- observations any supporter of the president reading this will already have made. The first is that the authors of this book are employed by the Washington Post, a notoriously liberal publication editorially hostile to the president. As I've observed many times in this blog, the phenomenon of leftist bias in the media is very real. But it isn't some kind of malign conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of America. Rather it's a phenomenon which has a parallel in science and in every other area of academic and professional life: a body of practitioners educated at the same institutions, interacting with the same people, going to the same parties, often with the same friends and associates, developing similar values, beliefs, and outlooks on life, and rarely if ever encountering people in relevant contexts who differ from them enough to bring home the point that what they see as reality is in fact only a perspective on reality, and one in most respects very similar to the perspective of their colleagues. 

Science values peer review, accountability to one's colleagues when publishing one's findings whereby biases, errors, and fallacies can be exposed and purged from the scientific consensus. Yet there often seems to be little awareness among scientists that the quality of peer review often depends on the diversity of the peers doing the reviewing. When their values and existential beliefs and assumptions resemble those of a paper's author, any distortions arising from subjective similarities between the thought world of the author and that of the reviewers are simply not going to be recognized, much less confronted.

The same is true of journalism. Any solution would require the active recruitment of large numbers of people from diverse backgrounds- especially social, religious, and political conservatives- by America's journalism schools and media outlets. That is unlikely. In the meantime, the rest of us, as consumers of the news, have a responsibility to compensate for the problem by reading as many diverse sources of news as we can.

But very few of us do that. The problem is just as bad on the right as on the left. Our polarization is to no small degree the result of our having taken up residence in two mutually-exclusive echo chambers in which we replicate the very problem that afflicts the liberal media and distorts its work. We listen to and discuss the affairs of the day only with those we agree with. We get our information from sources that confirm the biases we already have and distrust and even dismiss sources whose subjective biases conflict with ours. The problem has become so serious that we rarely can even communicate meaningfully with those in the opposite echo chamber, whose views we caricature to a point where they often bear little resemblance in our minds to what they really are.  We have lost the ability to even discuss our disagreements, and I can think of very few things more threatening to either our national unity or our capacity for governing ourselves as a nation.

Debate on the issues of the day is no longer possible. Name-calling has largely taken its place. And we instinctively dismiss sources of information with whose perspective we disagree.

And sometimes we should. There are "news" sources on both ends of the political spectrum so extreme or distorted that they ought to be distrusted. But increasingly the loss of objectivity resulting from our insulation from the opposite viewpoint stops us from critical analysis of news sources on our own side of the fence and aggravates our distrust of those on the other. We used to be able to distinguish between reputable sources with whose perspective we differ and disreputable sources on either the other extreme or even on the extreme of our own ideological perspective. We are less and less able to do this. There have never been enough people able to listen in a discriminating way to, say, CBS News, if only because of a lack of available alternative perspectives. CBS, NBC, and ABC all have a pronounced (if unintentional) leftward bias. But there is a difference between the way NBC and MSNBC report the news, and the ability to notice that difference is becoming increasingly rare among conservatives.

Fox News and CNN each need to be taken with a grain of salt, though I would argue that the bias of Fox News is more open and conscious even though that of CNN is no less real. The New York Times and Mother Jones are both on the left, but a story reported by the NYT  deserves to be taken with a smaller grain of salt than that reported by Mother Jones. In the same way, while Fox News is obviously and openly biased, it's a great deal more credible than Breitbart. But fewer and fewer of us these days are inclined to make such distinctions. We distrust news sources on "the other side," while we tend to believe those on our own. And few of us make a conscious effort to do the sensible thing and try to get our information from a combination of center-right and center-left sources.

Donald Trump knows this- and he exploits it. It's not Mother Jones or the Huffington Post which he stigmatizes as "enemies of the people." It's the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Even the status of Fox News is in doubt these days because it's occasionally mildly critical of Mr. Trump, who demands absolute loyalty. So in Trumpworld, the only credible sources of news are those which are consistently favorable to Donald Trump.

Similarly, Trumpworld makes little distinction between Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on one hand and Joe Biden or Barack Obama on the other. You are either for the president or you are against him. And to report even things which Mr. Trump himself says and does but which put him in an unfavorable light with complete objectivity and accuracy is, in his eyes, to be his enemy. He will attack you. He will belittle you. And he will portray you to his followers not merely as opponents, but as enemies- and as enemies not only of the president or his party but of America itself.

To criticize the president is to be labeled by the President of the United States as an "enemy of the people." It's to more or less automatically incur the distrust and even the animosity of something like 40% of the American people.  And Mr. Trump plays that 40% like a fiddle. The conservative media (with notable, honorable exceptions like George Will and Mona Charon and Charley Sykes and Bill Kristol and a few others) willingly provides the accompaniment.

And the rest of the media are cowed. They are intimidated. And they behave. Even if they are editorially hostile to Mr. Trump, they have to watch their step. In a world in which a president can regularly lie but in which to call him on the lie is to be perceived by nearly half the nation as themselves being the liar, and in which to accurately and comprehensively report on bizarre or irrational behavior public behavior by that president is to be dismissed as dishonest and "out to get him," there are consequences to "telling it like it is" that give even objective and reputable journalists pause.

A narcissist in the White House has included nearly half the nation in the pathology of his own narcissism. It's just that bad. Simply telling the truth is to automatically be not only disbelieved but to be discredited in the eyes of half the nation if that truth puts Donald Trump in a bad light.

Nobody should believe anything just because two Washington Post reporters write it. And yes, sometimes things reporters write turn out not to be true. But basic journalistic ethics require that sources be verified by other sources and their veracity scrutinized. You can't believe everything you read in the newspapers; you're not supposed to. The journalist's job is not to tell you what to think, but to provide you with information which can serve as a starting point for your thinking.

But in this case, the evidence supports what sources within the administration have been reporting about the Trump White House all along, and what has been clear about Mr. Trump from his public behavior not only throughout his political career but through his entire adult life. He knows very little but thinks he knows better than the experts. He has an opinion of is own knowledge and judgment and abilities which far exceeds the reality. And in a President of the United States, that is a supremely dangerous thing.

Which brings us to the second objection the denizens of Trumpworld will raise to the story. Mr. Trump sees whistleblowers as traitors. He seems to honestly believe that those who work in his administration owe their primary loyalty, not to the nation, but to him personally.

He is obsessed with "leaks," seeing "leakers" as inherently dishonorable and treacherous. And he says over and over that the media should not use- even going so far, First Amendment or not, to say that they should not be allowed to use- anonymous sources. His campaign to "out" the whistleblower who revealed his significantly less than "perfect" telephone conversation with Ukraine's President Zelensky is a case in point.

But there is a reason why there are laws that protect whistleblowers- laws that at least one Republican member of Congress appears to have broken on the president's behalf. An informant or "whistleblower" whose identity is known is an informant or "whistleblower" not only without a job but who is subject to any sort of retaliation the person or people whose misdeeds have been revealed may be inclined to dish out. The Ukraine whistleblower merely did what the law required, reporting questionable behavior to an official whose position was established by law precisely to receive such reports. That can't be emphasized enough. The whistleblower was legally required to blow the whistle, and to do it in precisely how it was done. Nevertheless, the president wants that person to be subjected to retaliation simply for obeying the law.

If whistleblowers were not protected by law, there wouldn't be any whistleblowers. If journalists were not allowed to use anonymous sources, we would never find out about misbehavior of any kind by those in power. A source who is named is a source who is fired- or worse- even if the information provided is absolutely true and even if the welfare of the nation absolutely demands that it be revealed.

But the president's hostility to "leakers" and whistleblowers and unnamed sources is of a piece with his demonization of any news source that reports anything negative about him. It's of a piece with his refusal to release his income tax returns, with the opposition of his supporters to the calling of witnesses at his impeachment trial, and with his demonization of Robert Mueller rather than cooperating with the investigation and clearing his name.

Donald Trump absolutely and unequivocally refuses to be accountable. More than that, he sees no reason why he should be accountable.

Authoritarians never do.

How did it come to pass that we have a president who routinely lies and slanders so much without many of us even noticing; who knows so little about so many critical subjects yet thinks he knows better than even the experts he has chosen to advise him; who makes bizarre and rambling speeches so often on absurd topics (usually getting his facts wrong); who has his finger on the nuclear button even while exhibiting the emotional maturity of an eighth-grader and who has every secret America has despite having absolutely no filters without arousing the indignation and concern of the entire nation? It's simple: this president has managed to short-circuit the very institutions which keep us free, which make our public officials accountable to us, which protect us from corruption and even treason by those in power, and which enable us to distinguish between wise policies and unwise ones.

This president has successfully intimidated the American media and convinced nearly half of us that
he ought to be allowed to govern as an authoritarian, just like Putin and Kim and Duterte and all the foreign leaders he most admires, and that anyone who holds him accountable deserves whatever they get.

And that's the real reason why this president is so dangerous. That's the real reason why he must be defeated in November since a partisan Senate will not do its duty and remove him from office. It's not simply that he's utterly unfit to be president. It's not that he's corrupt and dishonest, as well as incompetent. It's not just that he's unable to distinguish between loyalty to himself personally and loyalty to America. It's not merely that he's intimidated the media so completely and so radically undermined the very institutions a free people most require to remain free.

It's that so many hitherto patriotic and honorable Americans have been seduced into becoming his accomplices. It's that he's done it so completely that so many of us not only don't notice but support him in doing it.

It's that he's succeeded so completely for so long in intimidating the people we must depend on to keep us informed, and so many of us haven't even noticed.