TINA BROWN

 

Tina Brown: How Trump Broke Our Moral Compass

Donald Trump greets the crowd at Huntington Place Convention Center in Detroit on August 26, 2024. (Emily Elconin via Getty Images)

There’s been no shortage of outrages from the Trump administration. The problem for liberals is that these outrages don’t seem to overly bother the American public.

By Tina Brown

12.10.25 —U.S. Politics

 

President Donald Trump’s greatest gift to America this year was to liberate people to be their worst selves. It’s okay to relish extrajudicial killings. Hey, it’s just some stranded Venezuelan drug mule clinging to the side of a bombed-out boat. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”) Trump has made it unexceptional to see a terrified Guatemalan housepainter (or as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it in March, one of the “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country”) being bundled by masked agents into a car that will speed him to a supermax in oblivion. After a possibly PTSD-addled Afghan was charged with shooting two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., and with killing one of them, Trump halted naturalization ceremonies for immigrants, who were poised to become U.S. citizens after years of waiting, from “high-risk” countries. This year has been a master class in the exercise of casual inhumanity.

Let’s go on. Trump has normalized foul misogyny toward women reporters, calling them “piggy,” “stupid,” “incapable,” and “ugly, both inside and out.” He has blinded us to the grift, the grossness, the “bigger, bigger, bigger” $300 million ballroom, and the vomitous fairground gold daubed all over the moldings and fireplace in the once-sober Oval Office, now labeled from the outside in gilt cursive script like a high roller’s Las Vegas hotel suite. Here, he holds forth, the all-powerful potentate in Doritos bronzer, the most aureate of mighty assholes, entertaining a confederacy of smiling despots: Nayib Bukele, Viktor Orbán, Mohammed bin Salman.

Jot and Tittle

The problem for liberals is that the multiplicity of Trump outrages are not outrages that seem to overly bother the American public. In a report last week featuring six Republican voters, four of them had no real qualms about the boat strike policy. Cf. some dude named Brian in Orlando, Florida: “I’m not losing any sleep over the two people clinging to the boat.” Cf. Naomi, the hard-ass from Dallas: “If you’re caught up in something that’s very detrimental to society, I think that you should die. . . . Sometimes we get caught up in trying to have every jot and tittle covered from the Constitution but the reality is that we need to be realistic.”

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America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s Graft

 

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Trump’s two first-term impeachment hearings consumed the “jot and tittle” crowd, but sent everyone else to sleep. The danger with issues like the Venezuelan boat strikes is that Congressional Democrats’ righteous and necessary battles to highlight constitutional malfeasance drown out the bread-and-butter issues, like the current beef over the cost of beef.

Democrats, as a political class, seem to have forgotten how to wield power, even when they possess it. I read with mounting fury Sunday’s New York Times report about how the Joe Biden team so irretrievably messed up its response to the immigration crisis it created and, in doing so, lost the election. 2023 saw more than six million unauthorized immigrants waiting for their cases to be resolved, almost double the number since 2020. The Biden response, according to this report, was a combination of dithering base-pandering, dropped balls, and political Bubble Wrap. It took the diabolical cleverness of Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who loaded up buses with bemused immigrants and pointed them in the direction of such liberally oblivious destinations as NYC, D.C., and—gotta hand it to them—Martha’s Vineyard, to test their fiscal budgets and sanctuary sympathies. Only then did the Biden White House realize that, shit, it had to do something. Trump? On the day he took office, he slammed the border shut.

Trump has proved again and again the old Bill Clinton adage that Americans prefer wrong and strong to weak and right. But Trump’s version of strong—brute power winning out over decency and respect—isn’t the only version in the human repertoire. It’s still possible to be strong without being morally wrong. Think of American heroes like Admiral William McRaven, a man as gracious and human as he is quietly lethal, whose résumé includes commanding the Navy Seal team that took out Osama bin Laden and the special ops mission that captured Saddam Hussein. McRaven is a real soldier, not a puffed-up toy one, like the cavorting flag-draped pip-squeak currently flailing around as Secretary of War.

Trump’s version of strong—brute power winning out over decency and respect—isn’t the only version in the human repertoire. It’s still possible to be strong without being morally wrong.

With Trump now tanking in the polls over affordability, a word he’s doing his best to turn into a sneer, or more strangely—and hopelessly—into a “hoax,” harbingers of the post-Trump future are already swirling within a restive MAGA. The reason Trump has focused so relentlessly in his second term on filling his own coffers is he knows, whatever he pretends, that there will be no season 3 of his fraying presidential show. His achievement has been to create a debased rule book for whoever succeeds him. We can learn from Trump without lionizing him:

1.     Entertainment always wins. Incoming NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani imbibed that lesson. Make fighting fascism fun. Don’t be too lofty for social media gimmicks like Mamdani’s polar bear swim off Coney Island to dramatize his rent-freeze policies.

2.     Exploit leverage. Trump sees a crack in the door and drives a truck through it. When Israel overreached and fired missiles on Hamas leaders meeting in Qatar, a valued American ally, he seized on the misstep to strong-arm Benjamin Netanyahu into a Gaza peace agreement.

3.     Blow through the bureaucrats. You don’t have to be a DOGE wrecking ball to know that meetings about meetings are the enemies of action.

4.     Keep changing the subject. Except for the eternal stickiness of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump understood our national inattention span better than anyone before or since. He’s always deduced the news cycle’s craving for a fresh angle and made sure to provide it.

 

But irrelevance comes for all of us. When Trump is a clapped-out political Liberace honoring himself at benefits in his Mar-a-Lago ballroom, the legacy of his traumatic presidency will be a rotting pile of red caps—and the way the game is played.

HIS OLD TRICKS

 

MODERN CAPITALISM

 

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST INC. MAGAZINE ARTICLE

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

KILL 'EM ALL

 

EPSTEIN EPSTEIN

TRUMP HAS FAILED AMERICA

 

 

HEATHER - 12-9

 

December 9, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson Dec 10

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.

When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.

Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”

“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.

Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”

This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”

Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”

Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.

Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.

Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”

As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.

The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.

David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.

The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”

During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.

Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.

“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”

“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”

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HAS TRUMP TOTALLY LOST IT?