The Siloing of Trump’s Failures as President
Me, Robert Reich and others have preached to the choir for months on the election. Have we made a difference? Not unless our readers have taken the facts & context we offer to those still unpersuaded
1Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, today listed “The 101 worst things about Trump’s shambolic presidency” that he says no one should ever forget.
But we have, and many of them never seem to be brought up. I’m a fan of Reich’s writing simply because he has a good handle on the economics of our country, and his commentaries are based on fact. He, like me, believes the millionaires and billionaires of this country need to be bettered leashed.
The problem for Reich, the terrific historian Heather Cox Richardson and perhaps hundreds of other American writers in newspapers on Substack, Facebook, and other social media is that what we write – no matter how factually based -- is ignored by half of America. We are, essentially, preaching to the choir, hoping the facts and perspective we offer will somehow make their way to the folks still unpersuaded, or cause those simply fed up with politics to vote in this important election.
The siloing of American news and opinion is, perhaps, the greatest problem facing democracy in America right now, and there’s no indication it will end anytime soon.
According to a Gallup poll published in October, just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the news industry’s ability to report “fully, accurately and fairly.” Democrats have no faith in Fox News and the New York Post, and certainly not the far-right bloggers on social media who know no ethical bounds. The MAGA crowd, in contrast, believes everything written in the mainstream media — or online by folks like Robert Reich and me — is somehow bent against them.
And you know who’s taking credit for it? Yeah, Trump.
“When I first started running, their approval rating—the very, very beginning, before, maybe, I even started—it was like 92% favorable rating. You know what it is now? Twelve percent,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania last month. “I drove it down! I drove it down, numbers. I’m very proud of it. I’ve exposed them as being fake.”
Like with everything Trump says, the numbers he cites aren’t real (See my previous commentary on “Trump’s Empty Numbers Syndrome” on Substack). The rating was never at 95%, and it isn’t at 12% now. While his numbers may be nowhere close to correct, as is usually the case, Trump’s sentiment is, at least partially, correct.
The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson agrees, outlining this view in a story on Wednesday. “America’s trust in the media disintegrated in 2016 during his first run for the White House, when Trump routinely platformed the notion that then–Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was receiving more positive media coverage than he was.”
Trump, Ferguson writes, “also leveraged attacks on the media to undermine the industry’s coverage of his myriad scandals, including his criminal trials.”
Trump and Ferguson are correct, but only to a point. It was the dark triad of Trump, tRupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox Network, and Roger Ailes, a Nixon consultant who became Fox’s CEO under Murdoch, that built Trump into a political force in America. In case, you didn’t catch my phrasing: “The dark triad” is a psychological theory that describes three personality traits that are considered socially aversive: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
If not for Murdoch and Ailes, seen behind Trump in the illustration above, Trump would have been a marginal politician who quickly, and rightly, disappeared.
With Trump constantly upbraiding the mainstream media – which leaned progressive -- as producing “fake news,” Murdoch’s Fox News gave Republican conservatives an alternative that had no compulsion against presenting Trump’s lies as truth. And now, even though Trump is no longer a conservative, these folks have fallen into the habit of only watching Fox News, which preys on their fear of an ethnically diverse America in which women are increasingly becoming leaders in the business world.
The irony here is that Trump is now more populist than conservative. This year, he’s been promising to give tax breaks to virtually anyone who might help him get in office. He boosted the nation’s debt by $7 trillion while in office, and has outlined in 2024 economic plans that will raise it higher, higher than even the plans put forth by Kamala Harris, according to most economists.
Does that sound like a conservative to you? And frankly, given his record of not being able to follow through on his promises, along with his serial lying, how can he be believed? Remember his promise to pass an infrastructure bill to help rebuild our roads and bridges. Nope, didn’t happen. And he didn’t build much border wall, or get Mexico to pay for what he did build.
I recommend you read Robert Reich’s “101 worst things about Trump’s shambolic presidency” today to bring you back to those days, as well as today’s commentary by the historian Heather Cox Richardson. And please pass on their thoughts to anybody, friend, family or neighbor who may be wavering or even persuadable before the Nov. 5 election.
Reich’s commentary tends to conflate some things, probably so he could reach that magic 100 number. For instance, numbers 10-12 all have to do with issues concerning the Supreme Court, and Reich lists seven items covering Trump’s mishandling of the Covid pandemic, in my view the most egregious failure of Trump’s presidency. And all of the items listed by Reich have been addressed individually in stories over the last couple of years.
But by listing the failures in this manner, Reich offers a bigger view of just how chaotic and unsuccessful Trump’s time in the White House was, and why he shouldn’t be returned there. He says that these are items we should not forget. But Trump’s craziness over the last year has caused too many to forget the totality of Trump’s failure as president.
If you have the time to read Reich’s commentary, which won’t take you more than a few minutes and is readily available on Substack, please do so. And then think about who you might send it to. It’s an important action that may be one of the most important things you can do for American democracy beyond, well… voting. Let’s keep Trump out of the White House.