Avec Moi le Déluge: The Systemic Subterfuge of Trump’s News Firehose
With journalism, politics, and democracy all under siege, the Trump administration’s relentless output of reality-show gibberish seems designed to prove the totalitarian tenet that no news is good news.
By Lisa Van Dusen
April 12, 2018
In the days when the news cycle was still a cycle and not a vortex, the cliché among critics and many alumni was that the White House press corps was constrained by spoon-feeding. They were tethered by proximity, competition, and the obligations of access to the administration’s political agenda, from daily thematic policy roll-outs to the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning.
Since Donald Trump became president of the United States, the spoon-feeding that had already been recalibrated by the internet and perpetual deadlines has become force-feeding by firehose, a gavage of reality-show conflict, in-fighting, and shock headlines. The contempt for the truth displayed by Trump’s constant trolling of the media and his representatives’ hostility toward reporters is echoed in the sheer volume of often ludicrous content emanating from the administration on an hourly basis. Never was so much leaked by so many, so many times a week, to such destabilizing and detrimental effect to all parties involved.
In a recent Friday edition of his daily The Point brief, CNN’s Chris Cillizza counted 29 major stories during the March 19-23 workweek. Like an exhausted First World War conscript scrawling diary notes between incoming shells in a sludgy foxhole, Cillizza prefaced his list with a sense of the ambient madness. “Monday feels like a decade ago,” he wrote. “Time in Trumpworld seems to slow as huge news story after huge news story forms, crests, crashes, and recedes—only to be followed by an even bigger one right on its heels.”
In an April 6 Washington Post piece headlined “Can democracy survive information overload?,” author Brian Klaas pointed out that the relentless Trumpian news flow is remarkable not just for its quantity but for its lack of quality.
After listing a selection of the boasting, bullying, bloviating, shocking, outrageous content generated in March by a president and an administration seemingly bent on filling a daily quota of unforced errors and self-inflicted political wounds, Klaas writes, “That’s just a small selection of news from March 2018: one crazy month of one crazy presidency.”
The connection between the viability of democracy and the transformation of the White House press corps from hostages of daily political agendas designed to make the president, the U.S., and democracy look good to what is—based on all available evidence—a daily agenda designed to make the president, the U.S., and democracy look corrupt, dangerous, and crazy is an important one.
“The deluge of bizarre and jarring stories is overwhelming,” Klaas wrote last week. “Few citizens can keep up. For those who do, it’s an exhausting full-time job.
“Which is, apparently, fine with the president. Trump not only revels in chaos; he exploits it as a political strategy.”
In this age of smartphones, when the human attention span is being digitally shrunken to that of a goldfish, the combination of distraction and distaste is a potent—and perilous—recipe for political disengagement.
Above all, the question of whether Trump’s presidency is undermining democracy has now been overtaken by the overwhelmingly obvious questions: Why is Donald Trump actively undermining democracy? And, amid a concurrent global effort by China, Russia, and other actors to do the same, whose interests is he serving?
If, 50 years from now, historians are still a thing, they may write that the first two decades of the 21st century were characterized by, among so many more positive developments, the industrialized manipulation of collective perception by corrupt interests exploiting new technology to transform public trust from a strength of democracy into a potentially fatal weakness. In that context, Trump isn’t just an agent of chaos, he’s a revolutionary in clown’s clothing.
Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, a writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.