Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Mainstream Reporters Fall (Again) For Trump's Transparent Impersonation Of Someone Who Gives A Shit

Amanda Marcotte writes about the drivel consistently pushed by the mainstream press that Donald Trump has suddenly changed his "tone" and is acting mature and presidential.

Trump's act is about as believable as a guilty five-year-old insisting he did not eat that cookie – he cannot mask his boredom and it's impossible for him to sound sincere when reading his notes because he's borderline illiterate – but the top journalists in the country fall for it every. single. time., like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football.
Donald Trump is not going to "pivot." Yes, on Tuesday he stood at a podium and, in stiff and sulky fashion, said words that, as written, were relatively serious and realistic. ...

These are all words that Trump said. But they don't mean anything. ... [W]hatever temporary behavior we see on display, he will always, always, always revert to being "who he is, and always has been," which is to say a rancid monster with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Unfortunately, much of the media coverage gave an entirely different impression, presenting Trump's performance at Tuesday's press briefing as if it represented a real shift, and seeding the absolutely false hope that Trump might actually start doing something to fight the coronavirus, instead of acting like the coronavirus's biggest champion.

"Trump, in a Shift, Endorses Masks and Says Virus Will Get Worse," reads the headline at the New York Times.

"Pandemic likely to 'get worse before it gets better,' Trump says in somber return to coronavirus briefing," the Washington Post headline read.

"Trump changes course as COVID-19 response faces critical tests," claims an ABC News analysis.

The Reuters tweet on the press conference declared, "President Trump, in a shift in rhetoric and tone, encouraged Americans to wear masks." ..

We've been down this road dozens of times before: Trump, facing bad press, sucks it up and, with the posture of a kid being dragged to the dentist, feigns being presidential for a few minutes. Then, with the predictability of a clock, he ... goes right back to his preferred mode: vitriol, incompetence and asserting that everything is "great" no matter how bad it gets. ...

In late March and early April, the press fell all over praising Trump for his "new tone" and for being "grave, sober, grim, realistic" in the face of the fast-rising caseload.

Trump's sober-mindedness was as brief as a mosquito's mating season, however, and by the middle of April, he was encouraging protests against coronavirus precautions ... [He] successfully pressured red-state governors to reopen prematurely and without much of a plan — which is the primary reason for our nationwide soaring coronavirus rates — and justified it with false claims that hydroxychloroquine was some kind of miracle cure, which it definitely is not.

Three weeks after Trump's former "new tone," he went on TV ... and suggested that injecting household disinfectants into people's lungs was a possible miracle cure ...  and that maybe actual medical researchers weren't smart enough to have thought of it yet, unlike his good-brained self. The result was widespread mockery and Trump, his ego bruised, ended the coronavirus briefings and dove ever deeper into conspiracy theories that the whole thing is a hoax invented by liberals to hurt his re-election chances. So that's how that "pivot" ended. ...

Despite his claims that there's a new "strategy" in development, the White House has actually been trying to defund the already-failing coronavirus testing system and force hospitals to report cases to a mysterious data collection service within the Department of Health and Human Services, instead of directly to the CDC. The purpose of all this, of course, is to hide the numbers and hope that tricks the public into thinking Trump has the coronavirus problem licked. (Or that it never existed in the first place. Whichever!)

It's no mystery what's going on here: Trump demoted campaign manager Brad Parscale last week and hired a new one ... As often happens with the revolving door in TrumpWorld, new hires try to rein Trump in a little, coaxing him to pretend to be a normal human being ... The act never lasts. Trump always lashes out shortly after one of these "pivots," often saying something especially odious, a man gleefully throwing off the shackles of having to pretend to have any pro-social impulses at all. [*]

This is, after all, the Donald Trump whose father used to tell reporters, "Donald is the smartest person I know" and that "everything he touches seems to turn to gold." Trump believed his dear old dad's hype, and has repeatedly asserted that he is the world's greatest living expert in every topic under the sun, and that, unlike other experts who know stuff because they learned it, he sprung into the world knowing everything about everything and has nothing to learn from anyone. ...

Remember, it was literally just last weekend that Trump ... told Chris Wallace of Fox News that the U.S. has "one of the lowest mortality rates in the world" (it's actually among the highest), that our death rate is going down (it's been climbing for several weeks and just reached 1,000 a day), and that he was right to claim ... the virus would just "disappear" one day (needless to say, that's not how this works). ...

Perhaps it's foolish to expect mainstream news outlets to get smarter about how they cover Trump, just as it's foolish of such journalists to expect Trump to get smarter, listen to his aides and start acting more presidential. But Trump is a deeply disturbed man who likely suffers from a personality disorder that makes growing, learning or changing impossible. Mainstream journalists, whose job is literally to learn things so they can boil down their knowledge for the general public, can and should do better. ... Stop falling for these stunts and focus on reporting the real news.
[*]: I prefer the more colloquial version of Marcotte's tweet:
It's not a mystery what happened: Trump's got a new campaign manager in his ear, begging him to act "presidential". It's also not mysterious what will happen next: Trump will decide that advice is stupid, as he always does, and act like a nuclear grade asshole.
Here are two statements from Trump, from the "OMG HE CHANGED TONE!" press conference:
The Media:
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