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The Real Reason Why Americans Approve of Trump’s Disastrous
Transition How is it possible that Americans are good with this
corrupt cavalcade of unqualified extremists Trump is nominating?
How can it be, you may
be wondering, that 55 percent of Americans tell
pollsters they approve of how Donald Trump is handling the transition? He has
nominated—almost but not quite literally across the board—unqualified
extremists. These are people who’ve never run large, complex organizations
and who, if they shouldn’t be ruled out on those grounds, should certainly be
ruled out on the basis of their way-outside-the-mainstream views and
announced goals to all but destroy the agencies they’re going to run; they’re
people whose only association with the word cabinet should be the ones they select when remodeling their
kitchens. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi
Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kash Patel are just the starting
rotation, as it were (and Matt Gaetz the lone casualty so far). Many, many
others are objectionable in some way. Trump’s would-be IRS guy is an auctioneer
(seriously) who, in a brief congressional stint, sponsored something called
the Tax Code Termination Act. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guy, another former congressman who runs a medical practice and
whom Trump proposes to head a 13,000-employee, $9 billion operation, is
arguably more anti-vax than RFK Jr. And so on, and so on. We could do this
with about two-thirds of them. And people support
this. Why? Here’s a conventional
explanation. Because Americans are ready to turn the page. Because Joe Biden
is so deeply unpopular that the country is restless to see him and his whole
crew go. Because people still think Trump the businessman can make things
better. There’s a little truth
in all that. But here’s another explanation. People don’t really know about these Cabinet picks because average Americans
just aren’t as read-in to the news as they once were. They watch the news on
their phones in 30-second snippets. If they read, it’s headlines and social
media posts, maybe. So they know, probably, that Trump nominated Dr. Oz to
something or other. But do they know that he has a roughly $30 million financial stake in companies that will be doing business with the very
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that he is probably going to lead?
I very much doubt it. Let me make two points
here. First, I don’t think there was some golden age when every citizen, or
even most citizens, read all they could about such matters. That’s
ridiculous. The concept of the informed citizenry on which democracy depends
has always been a challenge. Second, this is not a blame-the-idiot-people
column. People are busy. They have lives and kids and bills and passions and
hobbies, and they don’t make a lot of time for politics. That’s life. All this is
increasingly a by-product of life in a time of widening inequality too. If
you’re working longer hours to make ends meet, and it’s that much harder to
tend to the immediate obligations the real world throws at you, you’ve got
much less time to read news and reflect. Just one more reason why a more
broadly shared prosperity is so important. So no, I don’t blame
people. I blame the larger culture, which has been almost totally drained of
common concern about our civic health. First and foremost, I blame Rupert
Murdoch (and to a lesser extent his imitators), whose media properties have
injected so much poison and so many lies into our discourse since 1977 that
common civic agreement about basic morality in public life has become
impossible. We used to have
that—except about sex, which allowed JFK (among others) to survive
politically, and about which society was completely hypocritical. But on all
other matters, we had a basic understanding about what kinds of actions did
and did not reflect our best values, and this was why Richard Nixon had to
resign in disgrace for committing far fewer offenses than Trump already has.
Everyone, whatever their politics, agreed that Nixon had clearly crossed a
line. But that impulse is dead in the United States, and the right-wing media
killed it. I blame the mainstream
media also for failing too often to fight hard enough to maintain their
commitment to that common civic agreement about basic morality. Every
narrative and meme that the mainstream media uncritically picks up from the
right-wing ecosystem and runs with for the sake of clicks—and there have been
thousands of them over the years—has contributed its little share to our
civic collapse. Many mainstream media
outlets, starting with The New York Times, still do tons of important work, and we’d be far
poorer without their scoops and investigations. But those occasional scoops
have been, in my view, more than outweighed by an overall tenor of political
coverage that has watched one of our two parties descend into a particularly
un-American blend of authoritarianism and cartoonish radicalism without
nearly enough alarm bells getting raised. So much of the political media
hasn’t reckoned with what’s coming—at least not in a public-facing way with
their readers and viewers. Making matters worse is
that we seem to have good reason to worry that some outlets now want to make
peace with Trumpism. The owner of The Washington Post (and I think you know who he is), after nixing the
paper’s already-written Kamala Harris endorsement, is donating $1 million to Trump’s
inauguration. The owner of the Los Angeles Times is cooking up these new rules promising a more “fair
and balanced” approach to the news. ABC is paying Trump $15 million (plus a million to
cover legal fees) to settle a defamation claim that came after several ABC
and Disney executives made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to meet with transition
officials. It’s chilling. It’s
nonetheless true that the mainstream media in general have been pretty
aggressive in what they’ve been writing about Trump’s nominees. But that just
leaves us with the other problem: No one is reading. Only about 10 percent of
people read newspapers anymore, and their online engagement with newspaper
websites averages less than two minutes. So: Sure, your average
American is ready to bid Biden hasta la vista. But that isn’t why people are relatively sanguine about
the early days of a coming administration that has the makings of the most
corrupt presidential administration ever. They’re sanguine because they just
don’t know. They haven’t heard. Or if they’ve heard, they don’t believe it.
They still think the checks and balances they learned about in school will
sort things out and hold Trump at bay. They don’t realize that Trump &
Co. have formulated specific plans to evade or trample those checks and balances,
and if they’ve read that, they don’t believe it, either. I’ll bet you my
mortgage that among people who read news, whatever their political views,
concern runs much higher. But these days, that describes a rapidly dwindling
number of people. You know how pollsters ask respondents basic demographic
and attitudinal questions before they get to the substance? I propose that
all pollsters start including questions about people’s media habits so we can
see, repeatedly, week in, week out, the growing chasm between the informed
and the less informed (or, in the case of people who rely solely on
right-wing media, the anti-informed). In sum: The transition
approval is more proof that the right-wing media has won. Disinforming is the
new informing. And it’s spreading to more and more mainstream outlets. The
only question, which more and more of us are asking, is
when the liberal establishment in this country will wake up and tackle this
problem. |
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