Tipping point for the Bully Pulpit?

When Theodore Roosevelt coined the expression “Bully pulpit” about the role of the presidency at the turn of the 20^th century, he used it to describe an unassailable platform for advancing concepts and ideas intended for the collective good, and a means of bringing his audience along with him. After all, this was back when people would say “Bully for you!” to describe something they generally agreed with or approved of.

If the name of the 26^th president ever crosses the mind of the White House’s current incumbent, it’s probably in the context of the aircraft carrier that quickly became a Covid-carrier, then just as quickly a powerful metaphor for his administration’s mismanagement of the Coronavirus outbreak that will forever define the presidency of Donald Trump.

This president, if he was even aware of the etymology, has certainly brought his own, more common, meaning to the phrase, using his position to manifest his individual power not for the general good, but rather almost purely for self-interest.

His term in office has been littered with examples of him bullying political opponents, foreign governments, CEOs, even sports figures; but most of all, he seems to enjoy bullying reporters; and nowhere more than in his nightly Coronavirus press conferences.

Intended to convey important information to a fearful American public at a worrying time, these shows have become little more than theatrical opportunities for the president – the president – to confront members of the media, particularly women, with impunity on national television. What’s worse, he frequently appears energized by the lack of restraint, often feeding off that vindictive energy into the early hours of the next morning, where it resurfaces through his tweets; poisoning a whole new news cycle and making it still harder for ordinary people to know what is true and what is not or, crucially at this moment, what is important and what is not.

The briefings have also been characterized by the president’s inability to mourn or show empathy for his now 56,000 dead fellow citizens – leaving any mention of the death toll to subservient VP Mike Pence, who does so with all the solemnity of reading a sports score, usually before going on to list a lot of apparently impressive other numbers in praise of the questionable activities of the shadowy “Project Airbridge”.

Susan Glasser wrote in the New Yorker that Trump “is trying his hardest to ignore the covid-19 deaths.”

“To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him. Earlier this deadly spring, Trump was briefly scared into a more sombre public presentation by projections that showed hundreds of thousands or even millions of US deaths if no preventative actions were taken. Now he cites the absence of those worst-case scenarios as proof of his own brilliant handling of the crisis.”

And through it all, he obsesses over the TV ratings for his nightly performance, connecting them directly to the only real metric he appears to care about, his approval numbers and the prospects for his re-election.

As the circus escalated last week, culminating in the incomprehensible chaos of “bleachgate” – also imaginatively described as “imbleachment” – and the subsequent fallout from it, we inevitably arrived at a point where the nightly gatherings had become obviously counter-productive, drowning out or obfuscating any useful information about the current health emergency. It must have been painfully clear to his allies that a line had been overstepped and something needed to be reset.

As a result, on Friday, the president walked out of a truncated press conference without a Q&A, while it was reported that he was going to be “cutting back” on his appearances. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin called it “the perfect punishment for a narcissist.”

No surprise that Trump is planning to scale back briefing appearances. The more people watch them, the more they view him negatively – even 16% of Rs say so. A quarter of Rs want him to leave it to the experts. Politically, it’s bewildering it’s taken him so long to realize this. pic.twitter.com/9sq5vyqPdQ
— Ian Sams (@IanSams) April 24, 2020

But on Monday there were signs that the nightly production would resume after what was surely a frustrating break over the weekend – which prompted a petulant tweet that the briefings “weren’t worth the effort” and served only to exacerbate the intensity of his Twitter output – before the scheduled broadcast was abruptly cancelled, then just as abruptly reinstated.

The man clearly can’t resist the spotlight, and Monday’s session was a chance for the Trump campaign to stock up with B-roll for the campaign, with a parade of CEOs praising his “leadership.” It also saw the “Blame China” narrative start to take hold in earnest, with softball questions about suing for damages and other potential retaliation.

Trump’s spokesperson said the briefings for the rest of this week would have “a new look and a new focus” as he pivots towards the economy and his push to “reopen” the country; or at least parts of it, a strategy that has reminded some of a line from the great George Carlin: “like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.”

Trump can claim the media has “misrepresented” him as much as he likes, and to an extent he knows he can rely on a White House press corps that depends on access and can be easily brushed off. Nightly Trump chronicler Aaron Rupar writes at Vox that “There’s just one problem — there’s video proving he’s lying. It demonstrates the lengths to which he’s willing to go to shift blame instead of simply admitting he misspoke.”

But we’ve probably reached a point now where, for the first time, ordinary people aren’t just letting it slide, simply because too much is at stake.

A fall in trust in the administration’s handling of the virus response tells us there are a lot of scared Americans out there right now, and a paucity of guidance and leadership being shown from the White House. At the same time, trust has grown in medical expert Dr Anthony Fauci – which probably explains his absence from Monday’s briefing, or maybe that was just as simple as Fauci having been portrayed by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live at the weekend.

The Trump show may be getting old, but not for his base

We shouldn’t be surprised that someone whose livelihood before politics lay in creating something as ephemeral and transient as disposable television would know how exactly to manipulate it to serve his ends – it has been that way since the day he ran for president. Now though, at a time of genuine crisis, seeing it as a PR problem rather than a health problem is starting to work to his political disadvantage and helping focus attention on his shortcomings.

However, where previously political debate was a battle of reality versus ‘alternate facts’; now it’s largely reality versus apathy – not only does roughly 40 per cent of the country apparently not seem to care that they’re being lied to, they embrace it, in part because the hardest thing to do in politics is to admit you were wrong. So while Americans generally are not impressed with the president’s handling of the crisis, among Trump’s base, support for him continues to hold relatively steady, regardless of such handling.

new Gallup poll on how Americans rate Trump’s performance as president

whites w/out college degrees:
61% approve
37% disapprove

everyone else:
31% approve
64% disapprove
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) April 17, 2020

For some observers, though, focusing on a base he has done little to expand could complicate Trump’s path to re-election. His strategy, tied up in the swift rebounding of a far-from-certain economy, will always encompass a populist appeal that depends at its heart on division and antagonism. As David Smith writes in The Guardian, the “fallback” position is usually xenophobia, and, once again, the symbolism of “cracking down” on immigration.

For Trump to have a chance to succeed, the debate always – always – has to be framed in terms of ‘Us versus Them’.

In this strange and unprecedented political year, there is, as if we could forget, an election looming, and one of the things America will have to decide is not just who to vote for, but how to actually vote.

The recent election in Wisconsin showed the risks of in-person voting during a pandemic and prompted moves towards voting by mail at precisely the moment there is heightened political uncertainty swirling around the future of the US Postal Service.

Jill Karofsky, who famously won a seat on the Wisconsin supreme court in that notorious, ill-tempered election, wrote that her victory was “bittersweet” following a subsequent uptick in Covid-19 cases in the state’s urban areas.

“It was unacceptable to hold an election under circumstances in which people were forced to choose between their safety and voting,” she wrote. “It disenfranchised countless people and raised serious concerns for the future of our democracy. It can never happen again. Now, more than ever, we need to instill confidence in our institutions. I hope I’ll be judged on following the law, not the party line.”

As debates rage – in the context of the bigger picture of course – over the manner of voting and how best to ensure the fairness of November’s polling day, Donald Trump is fundraising off claims that the election is already rigged against him.

Meanwhile, the Senate is set to return on May 4^th (the House was originally planning to return on the same day, but reversed the decision because of the Coronavirus) with Senate Leader Mitch McConnell promising no let-up in the Republican strategy to pack the federal courts with Trump-designated judges. (And as if anyone is really surprised, McConnell has also apparently completely forgotten about Merrick Garland.)

On the Democratic side, presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden is moving forward this week in the process of choosing his running mate, as polls continue to show him leading the president by roughly six points nationally.

There is still, as if it still needs to be said, six months to go.

‘Cavernous stupidity’

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley recently said there has been “nothing like the cavernous stupidity” of Donald Trump in American political history, an ignorance on full display since the beginning of the Coronavirus emergency.

And in the absence of intelligence, everything becomes symbolism; from the desperate grasping at the notion of some “miracle cure” or the country’s tiptoeing towards reopening; to something as culturally populist as encouraging an early return for sports, or to Air Force flyovers to boost morale.

And now controversy looms over another potentially huge symbolic issue, Trump’s insistence on delivering the commencement address at the West Point military academy in upstate New York, requiring the roughly 1,000 graduating cadets to reassemble just to hear him.

Everything Trump does now is focused around the notion – seemingly unattainable for the next weeks and months – that he can somehow deliver a return to normality. If normality doesn’t want to play ball, the plan seems to be to press on regardless.

So finally, with a desperate, vain hope for any signs of national unity, we end as we began; with Trump having invoked a twisted memory of another Roosevelt – a great, genuine wartime leader, FDR – by talking about possibly doing his daily briefings as a radio show, but then deciding that he didn’t want to compete against conservative icon Rush Limbaugh.

There may be no fireside chat, then, but this president can always find a way to self-immolate.