ft

Stop Calling Them "Bombshells" The Internet in the Trump era has become a pile of unexploded ordnance, with the Atlantic's "suckers" story being the latest example Matt Taibbi Sep 9 496 601 On September 3, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic published an article asserting that Donald Trump insulted veterans while on a trip to France in 2018. Goldberg cited anonymous sources who claimed Trump called off a trip to the Aisne-Marne cemetery outside Paris. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump reportedly said. The Atlantic noted Trump’s official reason for bailing on the trip: [Trump] blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Everyone in news agreed the story was a “bombshell,” even conservatives challenging its accuracy. “Anonymous sources in the Atlantic’s Donald Trump bombshell urged to go on the record,” was the early Fox take. NBC described Trump’s effort to return fire by rallying fans against the Atlantic his “latest effort to dispute the bombshell story,” while CNN ultimately invited Goldberg on to clear some things up in an interview headed, “Journalist behind bombshell report speaks out.” The bombshell-ness was dubious. Trump in 2015 made on-the-record, on-camera comments about John McCain’s military service that, to my mind, were at least as intense as what was alleged in the Atlantic report. “I like people that weren’t captured” and “I don’t like losers” are matters of record, and so is Trump’s mind-bending response to that controversy. In a debate in New Hampshire in 2016, Trump answered Jeb Bush — about the “loser” comment (emphasis mine): I never called John McCain a loser, as you know… I said he was a hero because he got caught, which is true, to a certain extent… I didn’t call him a loser, so he’s — you know, he’s lied when he made that up… I never made a comment about him, and I never said that about John McCain. Back then, nobody in media knew how to handle a politician who denied saying stuff he’d said on tape. Papers like the Times tried to emphasize the absurdity in the headline (“Donald Trump denies saying what he said”), while fact-checking outlets scrambled to point out other, written instances of Trump calling McCain a loser, for instance this humorously self-congratulating Trump retweet: In the end, none of it mattered. When Mitt Romney joined Sean Spicer, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry (who said Trump would be unfit to govern if he didn’t apologize), Bobby Jindal and many others in denouncing Trump’s initial remarks about McCain, Trump retorted: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Why would anybody listen to @MittRomney? He lost an election that should have easily been won against Obama. By the way,so did John McCain! July 18th 2015 2,019 Retweets3,446 Likes Suddenly, “Trump insults veterans” became “Trump refuses to genuflect before two Republicans who lost to Barack Obama.” The other spectacle, of Trump refusing to kneel before the forced-apology ritual campaign reporters had established for the likes of Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Howard Dean, also worked in his favor, as voters gave Trump a poll bounce for lying in the face of the hated press. As far back as 2015, then, three things were established. One, Trump has no problem saying disparaging things about veterans who suffered in the line of duty. Two, he has no issue lying about it. Three, his voters don’t care. Yet this Atlantic piece is exactly the same story, down to the last detail. There’s even a section in the Goldberg piece asserting that after McCain died, Trump said, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.” This led to yet another recent Trump denial in the exact same language as the one he employed in 2015 — “I never called John a loser” — followed by fact-checks correcting Trump in exactly the same way fact-checkers corrected him in 2015, pointing to the exact same tweets and tapes. It all feels like a hellish time-travel satire. Trump antagonists who still don’t understand why these stories bounce off him should peel their eyeballs off Aisne-Marne and look at a Washington Post story from Monday, “Biden’s Flexibility on Policy Could Mean Fierce Fights If He Wins.” The story opened: WILMINGTON, Del. — When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago, they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda. “They basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,’ ” said one investment banker… This is an age-old pattern: a candidate adopts a populist stance in public, only to have aides first reassure donors in private that the pledges are meaningless, then leak the same idea to newspapers, to make sure the real constituency hears the message. The leaks serve the additional purpose of making sure ordinary voters who might have been tempted to believe the original campaign trail promise — postal banking, drug reimportation, withdrawal from a war zone, whatever — are inoculated in advance from having real expectations. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, the Hillary Clinton campaign did the same thing in 2016, bashing hedge-funders on the trail only to turn around and whisper to the banking sector that this was “just politics.” Clinton’s positions on Wall Street reform, like her takes on the Iraq War, or Barack Obama’s promises to close Gitmo, or George H.W. Bush’s “kindler, gentler nation,” were meant even in the moment to be understood as just things politicians say to get elected. More recently, Kamala Harris could barely keep from exploding in laughter in an interview with Steven Colbert, when it was suggested anyone should take seriously her summer 2019 debate assault on Joe Biden’s stance on busing, which at the time she described, seeming near tears, as “personal” and “hurtful”: This is real dishonesty, too. It’s a type of lie probably more destructive even than the “I never called John a loser” variety, as it strikes directly at public faith in the system. The public grew to hate this phenomenon before Trump, and in the years leading up to 2016, flirted more and more with politicians deemed eccentric by traditional establishment metrics, but more likely to actually believe what they were saying. Ron Paul, Herman Cain and Bernie Sanders were examples of politicians buoyed by this phenomenon. With Trump the calculus was different. He was every bit the liar the other politicians were, but lacked the pretense of truth-telling. People felt Trump was at least saying what he actually thought, even if he was being vile. After all, who would contrive to shriek about Carly Fiorina’s face, “Would anyone vote for that?” Trump’s campaign was like one of those transparent man models, except you were looking into Trump’s id instead of his intestines. This was the obvious explanation why voters down the stretch of the 2016 race told pollsters they considered Trump more “honest” than Hillary Clinton, yet pundits refused to see it. Every time someone like Chris Cillizza said Trump's edge over Clinton on the honesty question was “a classic example of perception mattering more than reality in our modern politics” and “there's simply no other explanation that makes any sense,” it just added to the effect — any rational person could see that people were just weighing one brand of corporate-style dishonesty versus the personal variety. From the start of this administration, “bombshells” were presented as having supreme importance, because nothing mattered more than the Trump story du jour. This was true to the point where people actually got mad if a politician tried to talk about a real-world issue over something like the pee tape: Cindy D. Perkins @CindyDPishere With the bombshell reports about Trump/Russia all around, & vital confirmation hearings, Sanders chooses to ignore all that & tweet abt this Bernie Sanders @SenSanders 35 million Americans – one in five — can’t afford their prescriptions. That should outrage every member of Congress. January 11th 2017 3 Retweets4 Likes Dozens of “bombshells” unraveled, from CNN’s infamous report by Manu Raju indicating Trump had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps (a story “confirmed” by CBS and other outlets), to “Repeated contacts with Russian intelligence”, to “Trump hides in darkened White House” (it was an old stock photo), to “Trump removes bust of MLK,” to “entire State Department senior management team resigns,” to “Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie,” to the Alfa Server and the pee tape and the walls closing in and the “kids in cages” photo that wasn’t and countless others. Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton Elections matter. Vote.org June 1st 2020 37,699 Retweets178,277 Likes The pattern of rushing up the maximalist version of a story, only to have it fall away bit by bit, like the fish caught by Hemingway’s old man, turned bombshells into anti-bombshells. We’re already in the skeletonizing fish stage of the Atlantic story. Goldberg at first insisted it was not weather or helicopter issues that caused Trump’s cemetery visit in 2018 to be canceled, saying in the lede, “neither story was true.” Within a few days, Goldberg was saying, “I’m sure all of those things are true,” when presented with an on-the-record account from John Bolton, who insisted weather was in fact the reason the trip was canceled. Of course both could be right: the weather might have been the reason for the canceled trip, and Trump really did say 1,800 Marines killed in Bellou Woods in France were “suckers” for getting killed (and ask about World War I, “Who were the good guys?”). That sounds like Trump! But these stories have been handled so badly over the years that he has automatic room to spin them. Trump can fight to a draw when he has nothing to work with but facts against him: if you hand him fuck-ups and presumptions, he rhapsodizes. He’s already somehow flipped this “suckers” story into a tale about his embrace of the line soldier over embittered Pentagon leaders, who “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.” If this is a bomb going off, it’s not much of one. The first job of the press is to act like the Emergency Broadcast System, sounding the alarm when we really need to pay attention. That function has been smashed in the bombshell era, and it’s hard to see how we’ll ever get it back, Trump or no Trump.