Have you heard anything from Donald J. Trump today? Trump had kicked out MS Now, CNN, and Politico from the press room, and in an uncharacteristic show of camaraderie, all the major networks, including Fox, stayed away. While the YouTube video of the White House press conference offers some much-needed levity, this moment should also prompt useful reflection on how we ended up here.
The video was extraordinary in its accidental honesty. Trump, in his red tie, stands with people in hard hats and safety vests. The presidential helicopter is positioned on the new granite helipad in the background. Trump’s mouth is moving, but he cannot be heard. He also seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize his remarks aren't being recorded. But then again, maybe his flunkies think his movements alone are enough to portray the awesome power of his position. The video was posted to the White House YouTube with just the roar of machines audible. Idiocracy didn’t even come close to the awful truth of a national epidemic of stupid.
Trump came to power partly because our news networks moved away from journalism and into entertainment. Fox News lost a major case for lying publicly. It is now often billed as entertainment. The difference between journalism and entertainment should be clear, but let’s put it on paper. Journalism is the practice of sharing contemporary events as unbiasedly as possible to ensure the public has access to an outside record of events.
In English, the press is sometimes called the fourth estate. This term comes from the French social structure, in which society could be broken down into three groups (estates). The press served as a fourth group outside that social structure, ensuring the system was visible to everyone within it. Employing a sports metaphor, the press is like a referee for sports events. Even someone like me, who does not follow sports, knows how referees’ inherent human flaws can affect the sport. Any sports fan will tell you about a game that went the other way because the referee was either blind or crooked.
In the American press, part of our challenge comes from decisions our government has made. Our news ecosystem has de-evolved in the last few decades. Reagan made balanced news unnecessary. Clinton transformed telecom, which set the stage for the Internet. Bush put in place No Child Left Behind, which decimated literacy. Taken together, the news need not be honest or balanced, and it can be served up anywhere and everywhere to a population largely incapable of seeing the flaws in any source. The government set up a perfect storm of stupidity.
In addition, technology has exacerbated our national emotional dysregulation. Studies indicate that the bigwigs at technology companies understood how to make their applications less addictive, yet they chose financial gain over the public good. Why did they do this? As I’ve discussed before, many members of the techno-feudalist class came out of computer engineering programs or dropped out before finishing their degree. They missed out on a lot of the humanities education that helps people make sense of the true complexity of the human experience. Engineering often sets people up to understand systems broadly. Humanities set people up to see the complexity that belies the system.
Finally, entertainment got us here, too. Trump is a fool, as I have discussed time after time. But the greatest challenge for the American populace is that a huge percentage of people understand the world only through television shows. They cannot tell the difference between real life and the ecosystem's constructs. Reality TV is a cheaper version of scripted television. Narratives are constructed from the shot video, but those narratives are not meant to depict what happened honestly. Instead, the producer creates a fictionalized version from the words real people say. The truth is obfuscated in order to create a persona. In Trump's case, his television persona could not be more different from his real self. Trump lived through the tax benefits of the Reagan era, having inherited companies, properties, and wealth, only to go bankrupt in 1991. He was a punchline before the apprentice.
But there is nothing worse than a stupid man who was never told about his ignorance. Actually, there is something worse: our national obsession with ignorance. We have systematically put the wealthy over the general population, bankrupting the people, both fiscally and intellectually.
Trump is now making overtures to create state media and not let the press back in because he does not handle honesty well. Dictators need skewed news because they cannot handle the truth. Adolph Hilter, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco were pro-censorship of the media. Today, countries with largely state-run or censored media include North Korea, Cuba, and Iran.
So this moment, where we have the joy of a few peaceful moments without Trump’s lies, is an ideal point to take stock of what it takes to counter the problems underlying Trump’s presidency.
Trump and his cronies use the word freedom like a treat for their rabid constituency. They let them believe they have the freedom to be racist, while curbing freedoms of the press and movement. They use the word while carefully avoiding explaining its meaning. This rhetorical device is ideal for a group celebrating hate instead of reading up on history. Many political leaders have used similar methods to win voters. But Trump also made promises, over and over. Now that his voters have felt the squeeze from his policies, they’re unhappy. Certainly not honest enough to admit their failures, but after more than 40 years of largely Republican systems, they’re not being trained to play with a full deck.
It’s a moment where the sanest of us need to sit up and work towards the future. As a society, we have to value knowledge over profits. Our journalist have to focus more thoroughly on their ethics. Our news systems need to move away from the profitability of entertainment and set their standards lower, but for a more fulfilling, social good. And our government has to invest in reeducating our populace and raising the level of discourse in this country. While Trump's silence is humorous, the level of stupid noise that got us here is heartbreaking. We have to be the intellectual solution for our own society.
