The Lid Is On

It's not the best time to be president of the United States and, in fairness to Donald Trump, he's also doing a terrible job. Maybe I used "in fairness..." incorrectly there.

I've never had the ambition to run for anything. I'm also not entirely of the mind that anyone who does suffers from some kind of megalomaniacal sociopathy as a prerequisite for qualification. I think the numbers there are just skewed by the fact that running for office is a perfect fit for that personality type, so the draw outpaces the demographic percentages at which you'd expect to find those specific fucking boring lunatics in any population subgroup. As a non-politician, you get to experience the reflex revulsion tempered with grotesque curiosity in experiencing just one utterly inauthentic dipshit of a personality simulacrum like Markwayne Mullin, but the surprise isn't that one of him exists, it's that the entire Senate isn't just made up of 100 of them. That's why it's so jarring when you hear one--your Pete Buttigieges, your Zohran Mamdanis, your (god help us, a billionaire) JB Pritzkers--saying things that resemble other things that actually matter to you; people freak the fuck out. They go viral these days in a way that a cat playing a piano used to.

In that context, amongst a hoard of unsocializable weirdos, with all of the input of the outside world drowned out by the roaring rush of their own inexhaustible spring of self-regard, rendering them context-proof and completely immunized against anything as prosaic as a consequence, the current president is an absolute all-timer. The freakness of his freakitude is so dense and massive, it has a warping gravitational effect on everything around it like "democratic norms" and "basic human decency." Does that draw impel people like himself toward him or does it mangle and misshape them into a thing more like himself once they are drawn into his inevitably retrograde and annihilating orbit? To that question, the only answer I can give is "who gives a shit, fuck all these trolls." I don't feel a super strong impulse to "nature vs nurture" the authoritarian dismantling of basically every once-functioning normalizing institution that touches government in any way. I prefer to save those questions for when they're relevant or can at least do somebody some good, like when one or all of them are eventually on trial.

The press is included in this disfigurement, of course, as they're cursed with proximity to the Singularity of Bronzer. So yeah, as I started this off, it's not a great time to be president what with the level of scrutiny available via the (haha) democratizing (haha) of information with the promulgation of the internet. It's not just up to a dedicated press corps to potentially ruin your life if they ask the right/wrong question to the right/wrong person at the right/wrong time, any self-proclaimed "citizen journalist" could fuck with your bag if they pick the correct sequence of words to post at a time when you may or may not be vulnerable to a certain type of flesh-melting spotlight.

Honestly, I'd fully lost hope. The mainstream press has become so cowed and heeled by two full generations of Republican working the umpires about "left-wing bias" and the dismantling of newspapers as a profit-independent outsider voice, the full capture is evident in literally every press availability. I don't think any president has ever had as many as Trump does (the weakness of the self-obsessed), but given all that is swirling, not once have I heard a journalist just shout at him "Have you ever had sexual relations with a minor while you were an adult?"

That's how we used to do it. Hard questions, pin them down, make them lie if they are so inclined, then hang it around their neck like a burning tire and forge your Pulitzer out of the flames. But it's just an accident that that's the press I grew up around. I was born with just a few months left in the Nixon administration, before a dogged and fearless press chased a whole-ass president out of office and back to Orange County. There's a joke to be made as to whether San Clemente counts as purgatory, but I'm headed to South OC later tonight, so I'm going to leave it there.

In the post Woodward-Bernstein world, the idea of a hero journalist was alive, the great culmination of the climb that had started with Murrow vs. McCarthy and Cronkite going to Vietnam. But in there too, before Nixon, there was an agreed-upon quiet silence on some topics that would have killed a politician in my lifetime. You could have an "open secret" like JFK's roster of strange and still get on with the rest of the business of being president. That's not a great example since, as consequences go, he took a pretty tough one, but that's more fuzzy karma maybe than a direct Catholic A-to-B on sin and punishment. I don't think even the wildest conspiracies conjecture he was shot by, like, Marilyn Monroe.

After Reagan now and the fact that Clinton wasn't brought down by the media screaming about the same scandal for like two years nonstop, the press is back to a knowing and known deference by omission and a sort of whipped-dog comportment that doesn't do anyone (including themselves) any good. Presidents get to have "open secrets" known about them that the press can just compile and re-report whenever public interest seems to call for it, to no real consequence, as you'd expect from this kind of ass-backward demand-and-supply arrangement.

So that sounds easy and ideal, but it's hard to be president because even if you've got the press boxed neatly up, there's no containing the information anymore. It can come from anywhere and everywhere all at once and fuck up your whole day(s). Like JFK, but thankfully* only figuratively in the form of tweets and blogs, but just as difficult (apparently) to swat away.

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*It's longstanding policy that we don't wish harm on anyone or anything here. Everyone gets to live a healthy long life in the tepid pond-water aftermath of their own choices.