Donald Trump’s daily shticks, nicknamed “The Five O’Clock Follies,” grew tiresome weeks ago. Granted, there’s a huge cult audience for his toxic stew of serial lies, quack advice, and needy self-love, but his ratings are also boosted by millions of sane Americans who tune in to watch him melt down, much the way drivers rubber-neck at highway crashes.
What’s arguably the worst feature is how he uses the White House press corps as props for his abuse – and how, all too often, the press corps sits there and takes it. Margaret Sullivan, the in-house press critic at The Washington Post, says it well: “We remain mesmerized, providing far too much attention to the daily circus he provides. We normalize far too much, offering deference to the office he occupies and a benefit of the doubt that is a vestige of the dignified norms of presidencies past. And day after day, we allow him to beat us up. And then we come back for more.”
But every once in a while, a journalist in that captive audience asks a question that hits home like a laser slashing through butter. Trump’s cultists freak out – that’s the sick world we’re fated to live in – but hey, for any journalist worth his or her salt, that’s just the cost of doing business.
It happened on Monday. New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi did the honors:
“If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died over the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?”
Yes! That is how you seek to hold a president accountable for his actions – or, in the case of the coronavirus, for his inaction. The civilian death toll on American soil, in a matter of weeks, has now surpassed the U.S. military death toll for the entire Vietnam war.
Does a president with that kind of track record deserve to be ratified by the voters? That is a perfectly legitimate question – particularly given the fact that this president, throughout January and February, ignored more than dozen pandemic warnings that were highlighted in his classified intelligence reports, either because he didn’t want to believe the intelligence or simply because he doesn’t read the reports.
Nuzzi asked a valid question in light of Trump’s serial failures to prepare. David Frum, the veteran conservative commentator and ex-George W. Bush speechwriter, recently summarized those failures: “The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the pre-crisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault…Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again.” (I’ll add one more item: The 2018 firing of the entire White House pandemic preparedness team is Trump’s fault.)
But to Trump’s credit, he didn’t lash out at Nuzzi. He merely dodged the thrust of her question: “We’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were, 2.2 million, we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It’s far too many. One person is too many for this. I think we’ve made a lot of really good decisions.” Kudos to Trump for not losing his cool. (Hey, it’s a low bar.)
No, it was dear leader’s devotees who lost their cool. They’re apparently so brainwashed that they get more upset about a challenging question than about the horror of 59,000 civilian dead.
Nuzzi was besieged by tweets that reduced her to a female body part, that tagged her with a word that rhymes with witch, and that (of course) suggested that she got her job via non-professional behavior (“U obviously are at WH briefings because you earned it on your knees”). Some people demanded that the “shithead’s” press credentials be revoked ASAP, because “pushing blame on Trump is NOT reporting.” One MAGA tweeter said Nuzzi should’ve framed her question in a more worshipful manner: “If a president mitigated the projected casualties from a war by 97 percent – 2.2 million down to 60,000 – is there any way he can lose next election?”
In a tweet of her own yesterday, Nuzzi drily noted: “I’ve been so bored during quarantine that it’s been nice to have so much human interaction over the last 24 hours even if it’s primarily people telling me to kill myself.”
Nuzzi was also assailed by former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who denounced her for asking “a clown question.” What we need to remember, of course, is that Fleischer aided and abetted the Bush push for the Iraq war. If a smart journalist back in the day had ever asked Fleischer whether Bush deserved re-election in ’04 for taking America to war based on phony WMD evidence, Fleischer would have considered that a clown question.
What Trump’s snowflakes need to understand (but never will, because, among things, they don’t know history) is that presidents running for re-election tend to be vulnerable to defeat when things are going badly in America. Jimmy Carter had a bad economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. The senior George Bush had a bad economy. Harry Truman in 1952 opted not to run for re-election at all because he had a bad economy and a Korean war stalemate. That’s how politics works.
And given the phrasing of Nuzzi’s question, what happened in 1968 is especially relevant. Lyndon Johnson intended to run for re-election, but abruptly quit the race because the mounting death toll in Vietnam made it politically impossible for him to survive. And that body count, at the time of LBJ’s March 31 withdrawal, was 25,000 less than what we already have now in America’s morgues, trucks, and burial grounds.
So if Trump is indeed determined to keep staging these press briefings – and of course he is, because he’s not truly alive unless he’s on camera – we need more questions like Nuzzi’s. Put Trump on the hot seat and so what if his cultists get pissed. As one of my fellow columnists quipped a few years ago, “If I wanted to be popular, I’d drive an ice cream truck.”
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By the way, Trump said this yesterday: “We’re doing a job the likes of which nobody’s ever done.” He got that right.