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Mainstream Media's Wimpy Coverage of Inaugural Address Was No Surprise
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/mainstream_medias_wimpy_inaugural_addres
s_coverage_was_no_surprise_20170124/
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Posted on Jan 24, 2017
By Bill Blum
Donald Trump at the end of his inauguration speech Friday. (Andrew Harnik
/ AP
(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Trump-Inauguration/43fd238058cc49bbb
5fa2a44d36c805c/20/0) )
We live in a nation of sound bites and short attention spans. So it's not
surprising that reporters and pundits parsing the 1,443-word inaugural
address (http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/)
of Donald Trump have tried to distill the essence of the new president's
message as one of simple and straightforward populism.
This interpretation has been offered by commentators across the mainstream
media's political spectrum
(http://mediamatters.org/research/2017/01/20/what-pundits-trumps-inauguratio
n-called-populism-bigotry-misogyny-and-love-big-money/215074) -from Charles
Krauthammer and Tucker Carlson on Fox to Jake Tapper on CNN and Chuck Todd
on NBC. Speaking during CNN's live Inauguration Day coverage, David Axelrod,
Barack Obama's former chief strategist, summed up the consensus when he
termed Trump's remarks a "full-throated . populist manifesto," citing the
speech's attacks on the "Washington . establishment" and Trump's pledge to
bring back and protect American jobs.
READ: President Donald Trump Is Ushered In With Pomp and Protest
(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/inauguration_day_live_blog_tension_cel
ebration_the_nations_capital_20170119)
Even some notable supporters of Bernie Sanders, such as Jill Yordy, director
of his 2016 presidential campaign in Alaska, seemingly agreed. In a blog
post published by The Hill
(http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/315396-sanders-del
egate-how-trumps-inaugural-aims-at-bernies) on Friday, Yordy wrote, "I
couldn't help feeling that many of [Trump's] lines would have been in
Bernie's speech had he won the presidency."
To such various and sundry voices, I have a one-word response: Really?
Please don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't see a populist strain in
Trump's speech, especially with respect to jobs. It's there. The question,
however-and the one everyone should be asking-is: What kind of populism is
Trump pushing?
Unfortunately, that's an inquiry that can't be answered in a sound bite.
It's an inquiry that demands context and a sense of history-analytical tools
all too rarely deployed today.
In the generic sense, populism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism) is
a political movement or style aimed at promoting the interests of ordinary
people, as contrasted with the privileges of social, economic and political
elites. But populism isn't, and never has been, a phenomenon of one size
fits all.
There have been populist movements of the right and of the left, both
demagogic and democratic. There have been movements that looked to restore
the imaginary glories of an idealized nationalistic past, and those that
have been inspired by the possibilities of an unrealized future.
Sometimes, at least at the outset, it's difficult to discern where the
populism of any given era falls along the political continuum. Not so for
Trump. His populism is a classically authoritarian type, constructed on the
cult of his wealth and celebrity, imbued with rhetoric and imagery that
fuses the fate and fortunes of the nation with his personal rise to power,
delegitimizes all agencies of opposition, relentlessly scapegoats the
country's alleged enemies, and propagates lies and "alternative facts,"
large and small.
Invoking the old and dangerous slogan popularized by World War II-vintage
isolationists and Nazi sympathizers such as Charles Lindbergh, Trump proudly
declared in his inaugural address:
From this day forward, it's going to be only America first.
Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will
be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect
our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products,
stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to
great prosperity and strength.
Like other right-wing demagogues who have come before him-including, yes,
both Mussolini and Hitler, whose populism transmuted into outright
fascism-Trump offered a catalog of destiny-altering promises. Among them
were an end to what he called the "American carnage," characterized by
"mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out
factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an
education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful
students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have
stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized
potential."
He promised "to make America safe again" and to rid not just the country,
but the entire earth, of "radical Islamic terrorism." He vowed to do so by
halting "the very sad depletion of our military."
Above all, he promised jobs for "the forgotten men and women of our
country," and to reverse the "disrepair and decay of America's
infrastructure."
The media's fecklessness in the face of Trump's inaugural speech isn't the
least bit shocking. Corporate giants in their own rights, the big networks
live by the credo that "to go along, you have to get along." We may never
hear a genuine on-air debate about whether our 45th chief executive is the
American coming of Mussolini or Hitler.
Mussolini, like Trump, based his mass appeal to a significant degree on the
belief that he was a job creator. In a speech
(http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1932/03/24/page/8/article/mussolini-hand
s-italy-promise-of-more-jobs) delivered on March 24, 1932, from a balcony
overlooking Rome's storied Palazzo Venezia, Il Duce not only promised more
work for his countrymen, but added a very Trump-like admonition, no doubt
with his jaw jutted forward, telling his supporters, "The watchword for
every one of us must be resistance and ever more resistance."
A story about Benito Mussolini in the March 24, 1932, edition of the
Chicago Tribune. (Chicago Tribune
(http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1932/03/24/page/8/article/mussolini-hand
s-italy-promise-of-more-jobs) )
Similarly, eerie echoes of Trump's metaphor about "American carnage" can be
heard in Hitler's very first radio address
(http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3940) as
Reich chancellor on Feb. 1, 1933, in which the soon-to-be fuhrer spoke of
the "appalling inheritance" that the German people were left with after
1918. "Filled with the deepest distress, millions of the best German men and
women from all walks of life see the unity of the nation disintegrating in a
welter of egoistical political opinions, economic interests, and ideological
conflicts," Hitler told an anxious nation.
"The misery of our people is terrible," he continued. "The starving
industrial proletariat have become unemployed in their millions, while the
whole middle and artisan class have been made paupers. If the German farmer
also is involved in this collapse, we shall be faced with a catastrophe of
vast proportions. Starting with the family, and including all notions of
honor and loyalty, nation and fatherland, culture and economy, even the
eternal foundations of our morals and our faith-nothing is spared."
Days later, on Feb. 10, 1933, Hitler repeated much the same message before a
packed and impassioned crowd at Berlin's Sportspalast.
The concepts of loyalty and allegiance to the nation were central to
Hitler's mission to rebuild the fatherland by rooting out and destroying all
vestiges of pluralism and dissent. So, too, with Trump?
Perhaps the media's single biggest blind spot in their inaugural reporting
was their collective failure to notice, highlight and dissect Trump's
comments on this very subject, delivered at roughly the two-thirds mark of
his speech, when he declared: "At the bedrock of our politics will be a
total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to
our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open
your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells
us, 'How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity.'
"
As limp as the mainstream media may be, they have also become one of the new
president's favorite targets. Trump began his campaign with a warning that,
if elected, he would work to "open up" our libel laws
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trumps_war_on_the_first_amendmen
t_20160314) to make it easier for public figures to silence their critics.
Since then, he has routinely maligned reporters as "dishonest," and in an
appearance at CIA headquarters
(http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/21/media/donald-trump-war-with-the-media/)
over the weekend openly acknowledged that he is "at war" with the press.
Of course, we have a First Amendment in this country that Germany of the
1930s lacked. Nonetheless, our history-there's that concept again, which
can't be reduced to sound bites-demonstrates that freedom of speech comes
neither easily nor automatically. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798
to the Red scares of the early and mid-20th century, the COINTELPRO
operations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO) of the 1970s, and the
more recent upsurge in whistleblower prosecutions, those deemed disloyal are
often left without constitutional protections.
It was one thing when Trump's invective was just the stuff of late-night
tweets tapped out by a private citizen on a smartphone. But Trump has become
the most powerful public official in world, and his tweets now have the
potential to become the stuff of official policy. The inaugural address was
just the beginning.
So let's get beyond tepid references to populism and find the courage to ask
whether a new age of McCarthyism-or worse, an American brand of fascism-is
dawning. It shouldn't take Trump donning a mustache and armband for the
media, and the rest of us, to demand an answer.
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