TRUMP AND THE PRESS: THERE HE GOES AGAIN

Donald Trump began fighting with the news media as a 2016 candidate. At rallies, he leveled the charge “fake news” at

mainstream media organizations and reporters who challenged his actions or statements. That has continued since he took office. Now, in addition to attacking the press generally, Trump seems to have saved his most vitriolic and disturbing attacks for women reporters and minority women reporters.

Trump’s behavior threatens American democracy, demeans his office, and brings

closer the fears of encroaching fascism former State Secretary Madeleine Albright cautioned us about in her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning. The president’s treatment of the press underscores the need for removing him from office five months from now. 

Special Disdain for Women

Though Trump does berate male reporters from time to time, recently he’s saved special invective for female journalists.

During news conferences and coronavirus task force briefings, Trump has said very unpleasant things to women attending and working at those meetings.  They include:

·    Calling one female CBS correspondent “fake” and “disgraceful.”

·    Telling CNN’s Abby Phillips, “You ask a lot of stupid questions.”

·    Saying to another female CNN reporter that, “You’ve had enough” when the woman tried asking a question.

·    Once telling ABC’s Cecilia Vega, “I know you’re not thinking. You never do.”

Such insults produced former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson’s description of

Trump as a “misogynistic jerk.” She added that he treats women reporters differently than men and in a way that’s “horrible.”

Saving Real Vitriol for Minority Women

Soon after becoming president, Trump began insulting female reporters of color. He had

an early run-in with April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, asking her if she could arrange a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. She wrote a book, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House, in which she accused him of discriminating against minority journalists.

Trump later started a feud with Yamiche Alcindor, a black woman who once worked as

a reporter for The New York Times but now appears on the PBS News Hour and serves as an MSNBC contributor. Trump has asked her to be “nice” and not “threatening.” On several occasions he wouldn’t answer questions from her that seemed no more hostile than questions white male reporters ask.

Trump berating reporter Yamiche Alcindor 

Most recently, Trump seemingly profiled a CBS reporter of Asian heritage, Weijia Jiang, telling her she should “ask China” a question about his early downplaying of the corona-

virus. She called him on that, asking why he directed such a statement at her. He later said she should “keep her voice down.”

The Ryan, Alcindor, and Jiang incidents suggest Trump believes he can bully minority

women reporters at will. Trump’s attacks on women journalists, including minority women, no doubt helped encourage a recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists that described Trump’s war on the press as “dangerously under[mining] truth and consensus in a deeply divided country.”

Trump goes after reporters of all stripes who don’t work for Fox News. He calls them names, insults their intelligence, and denigrates the  organizations for which they

work. Recently, for example, he took on The Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Phillip Rucker, co-author of A Very Stable Genius, a book highly critical of Trump’s actions as president.

Secretary Albright wrote “The advantage of a free press is diminished when anyone can claim to be an objective journalist, then disseminate narratives conjured out of thin air to make others believe rubbish.” (p. 114).  We would add that destroying the credibility of the free press represents the first step in that process. Clearly, Trump wishes to bestow credibility on the part of the press that supports his conduct and attack the part that dares criticize him. 

Time for Another Warning

Earlier this year, in a post titled From Russia With Love 2.0: American Democracy, Autocracy, Plutocracy, or Fascism? we cited Secretary Albright’s warnings about the fascist threat in light of new reports concerning Russian plans for interfering in this year’s presidential election. Trump’s

attacks on the press, particularly by targeting women and minority journalists, require that we turn to Secretary Albright once more. On the press issue, she asked, “If the president of the United States says the press always lies, how can Vladimir Putin be faulted for making the same claim?” (p.5).  Later, she noted how “contagious” anti-press behavior becomes. Not long after Trump excluded prominent reporters from his news conferences, other governments began taking actions against reporters who wrote stories those governments didn’t like and called them “fake news.” (pp. 212-13)

We can’t stress enough how strongly we believe Trump’s attacks on the press threaten American democracy as much or more than other actions he’s taken. The fact he picks on and insults women, especially women of color, just makes it worse. We can’t let our outrage wane though his persistent, destructive behavior continues unabated. A “new “normal” is too dangerous.

We’re reminded of the wisdom in Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 observation that, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

We’ve often pointed out the many reasons the American people must remove Trump and preserve the democracy we’ve painstakingly built over almost 250 years. Trump’s press interaction, especially with women reporters, ranks right at the top.       

BACK TO THE DOLLARWAY SYNDROME: A WORK IN PROGRESS

In 2019, Rob began previewing the book he’s writing about what he calls “The Dollarway Syndrome” – the proclivity white Americans have for treating individual black Americans with kindness, civility, and compassion while, at the same time, supporting and espousing political and social policies that retard black progress. In this post, he relates more about how The Dollarway Syndrome works.

I’ve organized the book into three parts. The first three chapters comprise a memoir in which I relate basic facts about me and report incidents and stories that describe the Dollarway  Syndrome. These incidents and

stories mostly occurred during my time at Dollarway, the small, Pine Bluff, Arkansas high school from which I graduated in 1969. Part two explores the connection between geography and race in America and some basic human behavior concepts. It serves as a bridge between the memoir section and part three, the portion of the book in which I offer explanations for the Dollarway Syndrome, what it means in our broader racial context, and how we might minimize its negative effects. Part three connects the Dollarway Syndrome with ideas about race discrimination offered by scholars, journalists, and others who focus on racial issues.

Today, I relate part of a story from the memoir chapters that harkens back to a political campaign in which Henry, Woodson, and I all took great interest – the 1966 Arkansas governor’s race between moderate

Republican Winthrop Rockefeller and the Democratic nominee, arch segregationist state supreme court Justice Jim Johnson. Rockefeller, who won and for whom Henry later worked, vigorously courted black voters

while Johnson reportedly regularly tossed round the n-word.  The encounter I describe with one of my white classmates left a lasting impression because it shook me and represented my first experience with the duality of the Dollarway Syndrome.

Reading Partners

I arrived at Dollarway as a sophomore in 1966, attending under a freedom-of-choice desegregation plan that lets students pick their school. Only a handful of blacks (three in my class) elected Dollarway. Most remained at all-black Townsend Park High.

One of my white classmates noticed I carried around paperback books that weren’t on our English class reading list. He shared with me that he was also an avid reader and fan of the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason  novels

he’d noticed me reading (the popular television series starring Raymond Burr had just ended). For several weeks, this student and I cultivated a friendship based on our mutual affinity for those novels, whispering back and forth and passing notes in study hall about the latest one we’d started reading.

I felt this student and I developed a genuine friendship based on mutual respect and trust.

Unlike other white Dollarway students, he never used racial slurs. We interacted in a way that made me feel his equal. For a few weeks, I thought of him as the best friend I had at Dollarway, white or black. That’s why I felt betrayed by what happened a little later.

A Locker Room Conversation

Besides English class, this student and I took physical education together. One day in October, with the hot gubernatorial election nearing its climax, as we dressed after gym class, he asked me, “Hey, Wiley, you think ol’ Rockefeller’s gonna win the election?”

I hesitated. Should I make known my

intensely pro-  Rockefeller views? I wondered how being honest with him would affect our friendship, since I knew many white Dollarway students favored Johnson.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know who’ll win. I know who I hope wins.”

I hung back, acknowledging the first part of his statement, but ignoring the second part. “I can’t say now who’ll win. It’s close, real close from what I hear.”

“I don’t like Rockefeller.”

My heart sank a little with his words, but I only nodded and waited for his reason. I lifted my eyebrows but remained silent in the moment.

“Johnson will be stronger,” he continued. “You know, tougher. Rockefeller seems weak to me.”

“I don’t know,” I said, buttoning my shirt,

picking up my gym bag, and moving toward the door. “I guess we’ll just have to see how it turns out.” I left before he could say more. Later, I reflected on his last words. They nagged at me.

After thinking about it a long time, really until after things white people said during the 1968 elections two years later, I realized what my reading partner probably meant. He meant ‘stronger’ and ‘tougher’ on blacks. I’ve always believed he preferred not saying that to me, given the time we’d spent together and the decency he’d shown toward me. I assume he knew talking in overt racial terms would jeopardize the friendship. For his own reasons, I imagined he didn’t want that.

Far worse instances of white people engaging in racially insensitive behavior after befriending me occurred during my Dollarway years. This one stung so much because it was the first.

This student and I remained friends for most of the rest of that school year. We drifted apart over the remaining two years of high school. The relationship was never the same after what happened in the fall of ’66. As I saw it, being for Jim Johnson and recognizing racial equality wasn’t possible. By being friends with me and supporting Johnson, was he saying it was? I’d never considered such an idea and I’m still troubled by people who’d suggest that. One thing was clear after that locker room conversation. I’d seen something I never had before. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  

 

PICKING A VICE PRESIDENT: START WITH WHAT, NOT WHO.

PERHAPS JOE BIDEN’S MOST IMPORTANT DECISION

Former Vice President and presumed

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has named his vice presidential selection steering committee. The group will help Biden with vetting potential running mates. Biden has already said he will choose a woman.

In due course, we’ll weigh in on prospective candidates. Pundits are floating about a dozen names. With the pick not

expected until late next month at the earliest, we’ll have time to comment on the pros and cons of possible choices. For now, we focus on what Biden should look for, not who. 

The unique circumstances in 2020 make this selection that much more important.  If

elected,  Biden would take office at age 78, older than any person ever upon first inauguration. He has hinted he wouldn’t seek a second term, putting his vice president in prime position to succeed him. Since the Second World War, six vice presidents have gone on to become president. In that same period, no major party has denied the presidential nomination to a vice president or former vice president who sought it. 

So, what qualities should Biden seek? We each made lists and factored them together, arriving at a four-part test we now present in no particular order. Each of us may assign more importance to one or another of these traits, but we really want someone with all of them.

Electability: You can’t Save Souls in an Empty Church

All three of us recognize the vice presidential candidate must help Biden

The Nightmare - The Art of Mark Bryan

win the election and end the Donald Trump nightmare. Woodson goes so far as to list the states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan – he thinks the vice presidential candidate must help Biden carry. Ideally, the person could help turn out core Democratic voters – blacks, browns, millennials, suburban women – perhaps putting in play states like Texas and Georgia.

The research on how much a vice presidential candidate can help presents

a mixed bag. A few studies say the second banana can make up to a three-percentage point difference. Others say it’s less, if any.

There’s disagreement about whether a vice presidential candidate can help carry a particular state, especially the candidate’s home state. John Kennedy – and most analysts of the 1960 election – believed Lyndon Johnson secured Texas for the Democrats that year. Some think Tim Kaine helped Hillary Clinton carry Virginia in 2016. On the other hand, Lloyd Bentsen couldn’t help Michal Dukakis win Texas in 1988. John Edwards didn’t claim North Carolina for John Kerry in 2004.

The Ready-to-Play Test: Can She Be President?

Henry states this as a matter of “experience in governance.”  For Rob, it’s “gravitas” – can we envision the vice president as commander-in-chief, confronting a foreign crisis (or a national pandemic)?  In the event of Biden’s death or incapacity, could the new or acting president rally the nation to a cause? 

John McCain paid a huge price for picking someone unprepared for national office in Sarah Palin. Though she gave McCain an initial boost in the polls, the more exposure Palin got, the worse the choice looked.   

Some of the women being suggested as possible running mates for Biden don’t offer the kind of resumes vice presidential candidates historically present.  They’ve only served as state legislators, been mayors, or briefly held

congressional seats. Only one or two have foreign policy experience. We know the paper resume doesn’t mean everything, but it has some importance.

Compatibility:  Are They on Same Page?

We had different ways of putting this point, but the more we thought about it, the easier reconciling our views became. All three of us think the president and vice president must  unify on policy, with the vice president strongly advocating the president’s agenda, even if she disagrees internally. Biden has said, based on his experience in flying right seat for Barack Obama for eight years, he wants someone who will dissent within the councils of the White House, but will go out and push for whatever final decision he makes. 

This presents more of a problem than might appear at first glance. Lyndon Johnson was miserable as vice president because of the way the Kennedys cut him out of a meaningful policymaking role. He was never an effective spokesman for the New Frontier. Former president Bill Clinton and James Patterson, in their bestselling novel The President is

Missing,  present a vice president with resentments and a separate agenda that, for a time, appeared to threaten the nation. Biden should pick a team player and treat her as such. 

Restorative Capacity: Putting the Country Back Together

Even if the coronavirus hadn’t ravaged the nation’s health and its economy, any Democrat elected in 2020 would face a monumental job in restoring the country's moral authority. Diminished respect for the

rule of law, broken foreign alliances, mistrust based on ethnicity and hyper partisanship represent just some of the intangibles a new administration will face. The pandemic won’t have gone away by January 2021. A new vice president may have a big role in helping with the remaining economic and public health consequences.

Woodson says he wants a vice presidential candidate who can “relate to a broad coalition of people.” The vice president will need that capacity in helping Biden restore America’s place

and standing in the world. She must help the president bring together a cross-section of America in support of the reclamation project the next administration must undertake.

Our criteria ask a lot of potential vice presidents, but we don’t think we ask too much. Biden, if he wins, will have a big job. The woman on his wing will have a lot to do. 

 

     

 

TRUMP AND ‘DISINFECTANTS’: CASTING BLAME ON TRUMP VOTERS

President Trump’s recent suggestion that Americans might inject themselves with

disinfectants as a way of treating Covid-19 sparked an intense debate among the three of us about who’s to blame for the presence in office of such a president. Rob throws everyone who voted for him under the bus, arguing that “respectable” people who voted for Trump in 2016 now

bear responsibility for his dangerous conduct. Henry and Woodson take a more restrained position, concluding that not everyone who voted for Trump foresaw the extremes to which he has gone. They say those who sat out the 2016 election bear responsibility too. Below, we hash out the disagreement.

DO ONLY TRUMP VOTERS OWN THIS?

After Trump made his outrageous suggestion that injections of disinfectants like bleach or

isopropyl alcohol inside the human body

might combat the virus, many in the medical and scientific community and manufacturers of disinfectant products reacted with horror. They had good reasons. Americans desiring Covid-19 cures flooded health hotlines and emergency management agencies countrywide with calls about such treatments. The product manufacturers warned of organ damage that could result from injecting or ingesting disinfectants. Doctors were aghast and shouted to whoever would listen, “No, don’t do it!”

As industry leaders, doctors, and public health officials scrambled to warn people against the president’s advice, Rob thinks it significant that some of them must have voted for him. He observes, “Surely, some of the doctors, nurses, public health officials, and industry executives who loudly condemned Trump for his potentially disastrous suggestion, voted for him.” Neither Henry nor Woodson find that particularly revelatory.

What Did Voters Know and When Did They Know it?

The three of us agree it’s now widely understood Trump doesn’t care much for science. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, has published a 100 item list of Trump administration attacks on science. That’s bad enough, but we did receive advance warning. Before the 2016 election, we got at least the following indications of Trump’s scientific illiteracy or hypocrisy and his affinity for off-the-wall theories:

1.  Windmills cause cancer and kill birds.

Trump started pushing this falsehood before the election in making clear he wouldn’t promote wind power as a fossil fuels alternative; 

 

2.  Climate change is a hoax. Despite the scientific community consensus that human activity causes

global warming, Trump insisted before the election, and still does, his political enemies made up the climate crisis and the science isn’t real;

3.  In a rating by Scientific American magazine of the general election candidates, including third party entrants, Trump came in last on his understanding of scientific endeavors.

These facts have significant consequences.

They demonstrate a dangerous proclivity for buying into conspiracy theories that float through the culture, particularly on the internet, without scientific basis and that could hurt individuals or nations.

Even these facts, Henry and Woodson argue, didn’t necessarily predict Trump would suggest a wild idea like injecting disinfectants. Rob says, “That sounds like a degree v. kind argument. Nobody would have thought Trump would take his craziness to the degree he has. I prefer thinking anyone capable of believing the kinds of things Trump said before the election, if given an exigent situation and a big enough microphone, might say anything.”

                                                 

Woodson and Henry note that Trump never held public office before, so he had no policy record voters could easily examine.

Unlike the three of us, the average American doesn’t spend hours each week considering the nuances of candidate records and public policy. They believe Rob holds the electorate to too high a standard.

         

How Does a Country Get Such a Leader?

As Rob thought about the dangers inherent in Trump’s injection suggestion, he decided condemning him alone isn’t enough. “True,

the electorate put him in the White House, fair and square. But, don’t the people who voted for him bear some of the responsibility for having someone like him in office, given what we knew beforehand?  Now that his conduct directly threatens lives, can we excuse those votes, especially by people who should know better – people like those in health care now crying out that Americans shouldn’t follow his reckless ramblings?”

Rob continues, “I don’t have survey data, but the reasons doctors and other medical people might have voted for Trump aren’t hard to fathom - probably the same reasons others did - tax cuts, limits on immigration,

fears of disfavored ethnic groups, appointment of anti-choice judges, reigning in the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal regulatory bodies, unrestrained Hillary Clinton phobia. I assume there are others. Were any of those reasons worth this?

“I understand the harshness of the view I’ve expressed. I have thrown otherwise good

people under the bus before. Elections have consequences. I can’t give Trump voters a pass, especially not after this latest demonstration of insanity.”

While Henry and Woodson share Rob’s view that Trump has demonstrated his unfitness for office, they won’t say everyone who voted for him could have foreseen this. Who could have known the election would produce a president seemingly committed only to his own selfish political quest, devoid

 

of logic, humanitarian consideration, or enlightened principles? Nor are they willing to single out doctors and other medical professionals for special condemnation. They believe many who stayed home or voted for Trump in 2016 will vote for Joe Biden in 2020 because Joe Biden is no Hillary Clinton. Many former Trump voters will no longer have reason for seeing Trump as the answer to the country’s problems.