His cringe-worthy press conferences during the corona crisis have underscored everything that’s wrong with the Trump presidency: His errors, his lies, his exaggerations, his unpreparedness, his unfocused, garbled, stream-of-consciousness meandering and his naked self-promotion.
As some wag remarked, “He sounds like a kid giving a book report who didn’t read the book.”
What makes it a spectacle is that while fumbling to make it look like he did read the book, Trump clearly doesn’t care that he didn’t. He’s not only sure he can bluff his way through, he apparently believes he’s doing a fabulous job at it.
To most of the rest of us, that’s unfathomably delusional. Trump is either the world’s worst con man or a high-functioning idiot or a combination of the two. If he approached you as a salesman in a used-car lot, you’d run for the hills.
The kicker with the corona issue is that now when Trump bumbles, Americans die.
But because Trump is president, our local public radio station and others are broadcasting his press conferences in their entirety, as if they are of grand importance.
I phoned the station concerned about its decision to run the Trump Show in full, saying there’s more truth in a two-minute country song than there is in an hour of Trump live.
Referring to the station’s federal funding, the staffer I spoke to said in so many words, “Yes, but he’s where our money comes from.”
As Chilkat Valley News founder Ray Menaker often noted, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” The promise of public media was that a medium dependent on elected leaders for its funding would be closer to the voice of the people than say, a newspaper dependent on advertisers.
As in so many things, the truth is murkier, and in this case hinges on the relative integrity of politicians versus advertisers. Either way, there’s nothing a bad leader likes more than weak or fawning news media, public or private.
KHNS could go a different direction with the Trump press conferences, one that likely would be agreeable even to Trump’s most ardent supporters: Instead of broadcasting Trump’s misleading and meandering performances live, just broadcast that day’s National Public Radio story about what items of importance the president said.
That would leave time and resources for KHNS to bring listeners more helpful and important news on corona. And it would limit the station’s role in the dissemination of misinformation.
Before corona, Trump hadn’t held a press conference for more than a year, and for good reason: He insists on speaking extemporaneously and he’s lousy at it. But Trump knows about appearances and poll numbers. He’s a circus master when it comes to television and he knows that appearing “strong” on TV during a crisis will fire up his base, even if he’s just blabbering at the podium. All that matters to him is being on TV and radio, acting tough.
The media, however, doesn’t owe Trump a microphone. The role of the media isn’t to report on the president. The role of the media is to report on what is important to people’s lives. Period. When the president says something important, report it. Otherwise, get on to what important things other people are doing and saying.
The media’s fawning over presidents – Republican and Democratic – didn’t start in earnest until the rise of modern media, when presidents learned they could use mass media as a tool. Roosevelt used radio. Kennedy used TV. The Age of Celebrity and the rise of the imperial presidency came at a great cost to the power of Congress – a body created to balance and blunt a despotic president – and to the relative power of state governors and legislators.
During Trump’s fumbling of corona, local and national media could spend less time on him and more time on the ideas coming from Congress, from state capitals, and from other places in the world. Learning that he does not own the television and radio networks would be a great lesson in humility for Trump and an important civics lesson for the nation, namely that our government wasn’t intended to operate under one man.
And the media might come to learn their role is to be something more than stenographers.