Ever since the Trump dystopia descended upon us, journalists have been asking themselves the same question: What’s the best way to cover people who lie with impunity?
For instance, do you put them on your TV shows and give them a platform to amplify their demagoguery, even as you try to fact-check them in real time? Or do you simply keep them off the air? The latter doesn’t seem plausible, because, after all, these people are top government officials and the public needs to know who they are and hear what they have to say.
On CNN yesterday, Jack Tapper arguably struck the right balance. He hosted Peter Navarro, the Trump Mini-Me who ostensibly runs the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy but who has muscled his way into the regime’s catastrophic Covid response policy. Tapper gave the guy a platform. He indulged Navarro’s hostile propaganda for as long as he could bear it – until he kicked him off the air.
An imperfect solution, perhaps, but is there a better one?
It was clear at the start that this rendezvous with a Trumper would not go well. Tapper asked Navarro to discuss Trump’s demonstrably laggard response to the killer wildfires on the West Coast…and instead Navarro says: “One of the things I’d like to do before we get started, though, is, I would really like to congratulate President Trump on being nominated for the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Yeah, whatever. Trump was nominated by a right-wing Norwegian hack who has explained his reasoning this way: “Other politicians don’t pick up the phone to talk. (Trump) has the ability to be down-to-earth and talk to people at all levels.” In truth, Trump’s prospects for actually winning the Nobel Peace Prize are a tad dim. Roughly on a par with Trump’s 194,000 Covid victims being resurrected.
After Navarro got the Nobel thing out of his system, Tapper briefly steered the conversation back to the unprecedented wildfires and pointed out that Navarro co-wrote a paper 20 years ago calling climate change “one of the most important environmental problems.” Navarro didn’t like that at all: “Look, I’m not – that’s not my expertise. And, really, I came here to talk about a lot of things…That was the last on my list.”
Navarro’s solution was to change the subject and bring up “the Woodward seriousness issue ” – a clumsy reference to Bob Woodward’s bombshell book, which has Trump on tape admitting that he knew Covid was airborne and deadly way back in February when he was doing nothing about it and indeed staging indoor rallies that spread it.
Wait, this is what Navarro wanted to talk about? Bring it on.
Tapper duly played the Woodward tape from Feb. 7, when Trump told him: “You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed. It’s also more deadly than your – your – even your strenuous flus. This is more deadly.” Then Tapper showed a video clip of Trump two weeks later, telling CNN’s chief medical correspondent precisely the opposite, claiming/lying that in terms of Covid’s mortality rate, “the flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that.”
So Tapper, after airing Trump’s own words, asked Navarro a simple question: “He was misleading the American people. Why?”
Navarro launched into a long fractured soliliquy about how the virus was plotted by “the Chinese communist party,” about how Trump supposedly stopped it by banning flights from China (Navarro didn’t mention the exemptions that still allowed 40,000 people to enter from China; Navarro didn’t mention that the virus arrived in the U.S. from Europe), and about how Joe Biden had to apologize for calling Trump a xenophobe for banning those China flights (Biden never apologized for something he didn’t say), and about how he, Navarro, had written an anti-Covid memo on Feb. 9…until finally Tapper felt compelled to remind his guest:
“You’re not answering my question, Peter.”
Navarro: “This is not fair, Jake.”
Tapper: “You’re not answering – “
Navarro: “You’re constantly interrupting me, and you’re not letting me talk.”
Tapper: “You’re not answering my question. Why was he misleading the public?”
Navarro: “I am answering it. You just don’t like the answer, Jake.”
Tapper kept trying: “Why wasn’t the president straightforward with the American people? Why – “
Navarro: “He was straightforward.”
Tapper: “No, he wasn’t…On February 7, he knew that it was in the air, that it was five times deadlier than the flu.”
Navarro: “You’re beating this – you’re beating this thing – no.”
Tapper: “Five times deadlier. That’s on the tape…Two weeks later, he’s saying that the flu is deadlier than the coronavirus. Why wasn’t he honest?”
Navarro: “Jake, you just – you just don’t want to listen, Jake. You just don’t want to listen.”
Tapper: “I want you to answer the question…He was not honest with the American people. You’re not answering the question.”
Navarro (retreating to the Trumpers’ last refuge): “You guys – that – that – you’re wrong. You’re not honest with the American people. CNN is not honest with the American people…”
Tapper: “I said, you’re not answering the question.”
Navarro: “I have answered your question. I have answered your question.”
Tapper: “Thank you, Peter Navarro.”
So there you have it. Perhaps the best solution to the Trump coverage quandary – Tapper’s solution, in the spirit of seeking accountability – is to give those Orwellians a public opportunity to come clean, then yank them if they refuse.
On the other hand, I do remember what Thomas Paine reputedly warned: “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead.”