The Trump Show is back. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

The Trump Show is back

Matthew Yglesias

13 - 16 minutes

On some level, I don’t think there’s a ton you can really say about the Donald Trump town hall that CNN staged last week.

Conducting high-profile interviews with major presidential candidates is clearly a legitimate undertaking for television networks. Stocking the room with GOP primary voters turned it into a WrestleMania-style affair that made Trump look good, but this is a pretty standard way to organize a town hall — CNN did plenty with Democrats in the 2020 cycle that had the same structure. Did Kaitlan Collins do a perfect job of moderating? No, but I don’t think putting someone else up there would have substantially changed the result. Could CNN have made liberals happier by providing more fact-check chyrons and other bells and whistles to clarify that Trump is a huge liar? Yes, I think so. But would that have made a meaningful difference to his presidential prospects? I doubt it. Everyone who is open to voting for Trump is aware that people in the mainstream media believe he is dishonest. In my experience, most Trump fans are even aware that he is, in fact, dishonest. But they believe that other politicians are also dishonest and that the media is too hard on Trump relative to other politicians.

Regardless of the details, the town hall event served him well for two reasons:

    Basically any candidate for president can benefit from doing this kind of CNN town hall. Pete Buttigieg went from being the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana to being a legit presidential contender because he put in a good performance at a CNN town hall.

    Donald Trump is a charismatic television personality. He was literally the star of a popular TV show for years before he ran for office. Putting a charismatic television personality on television is going to make him look good. 

So what is the takeaway? From a tactical political standpoint, I think Ron DeSantis is making a mistake by not engaging more with the mainstream press. This approach has served him well so far because he’s been running as a Republican against Democrats. But running as a Republican against Trump is a different, higher degree of difficulty scenario. DeSantis is not a charismatic television star and I think it is very likely that if he did a similar town hall, he would look less impressive than Trump. But that’s just me guessing — and when you’re the underdog, you have to put yourself out there.

If it were possible for a cartel of news organizations to punish Trump for January 6 by categorically refusing to air live Trump footage of any sort to help ensure the GOP nomination went to any other candidate, that would be good for America.

But that’s not going to happen. CNN is part of CNN Global, one of nine business units of Warner Bros. Discovery, which is a publicly traded corporation. I don’t think the people who work there are all soulless creatures who live and breathe only to maximize shareholder value. But it is true that the shareholders would like the company to make money, and so would the board of directors and the CEO and the heads of all nine business units, including Chris Light who runs CNN Global. They are not going to make a dramatic, controversial, and financially detrimental decision about coverage strategy just because it would be better for the world. And everyone involved knows that Trump winning the election would be good for business.

I think that during the first Trump era, a very dysfunctional triangular relationship developed between the mainstream press, highly engaged liberals, and Donald Trump’s administration.

Many people — including especially a lot of educated, relatively affluent people — were very clearly upset about Trump, and tapping into this level of upset and outrage was a good way to generate money. Democratic Party political candidates’ fundraising went through the roof in the 2018 and 2020 cycles. That helped Democrats win a lot of races. But it also led to lots of money getting pumped into obviously doomed campaigns. It’s a big problem for Democrats that Jon Tester is going to have a really hard time matching Amy McGrath’s fundraising performance, even though “incumbent moderate senator running for re-election in a red state” is exactly the kind of guy who could really help himself a lot with television ads. Media organizations also tapped into this financial opportunity. The New York Times and especially the Washington Post marketed newspaper subscriptions as a form of resistance. And more broadly, lots of people in print, on television, on Twitter, and elsewhere pushed the idea that morbidly obsessing over the latest Trump outrages was a kind of constructive political activity.

The second leg was the obsession with the idea that there was some particular mode of Trump coverage that would “disqualify” him in the eyes of the public. Like if The New York Times ran a headline that said “Donald Trump, Who Is A Racist, Calls for ‘Law & Order,’” his electoral appeal would vanish. Some people have tilted too far in the opposite direction and decided that media coverage doesn’t matter at all, when I think it actually matters a lot. But I think the particular idea that there was one weird trick that would make Trump go away is a big analytical error. Media figures have a large influence on the salience of different issues, and issue salience matters a lot for political outcomes. But you have to actually think through what’s politically helpful and what isn’t, not just assume that CNN anchors saying “Trump seems like a bad guy to me” would be devastating to his standing.

Finally, Trump really liked to position progressive media types as his primary political adversary.

You would never in a million years hear Trump talking about how the United Auto Workers was supporting his opponent. Or about how he stood up to the American Pediatric Association to keep neurotoxins in the drinking water. He liked to position himself against the press because famous media personalities — educated, affluent people who live in big cities and who have lifestyle preferences that are at odds with the median voter — are appealing enemies. This is just Politics 101. Joe Biden would like to define his political opponents as billionaire tax cheats and hardcore white supremacists rather than as middle-class people who care more about cheap gasoline than the future prospects of Nigeria.

What made this such an effective tactic for Trump is that media personalities have a lot of influence over media content, and do not have strong objective incentives to defeat Trump electorally. That’s different from Biden’s enemies.

Suppose you’re a wealthy business owner who likes money and is upset that Biden has made it harder for you to cheat on your taxes. You’ve been invited on CNBC to discuss the issue. You don’t need to be a political savant to know that “look, as a rich guy who’s also greedy and dishonest, my big concern here is that it’s going to be harder for me to cheat on my taxes” is a bad message. Instead, you talk about suffering small business owners and how spending is out of control. The key thing, though, is that you genuinely want Biden to lose the election because you know a GOP trifecta will defund the tax police. If you work at CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times or the Washington Post or Politico or wherever else, things are different. You may want to express your personal outrage at Trump, but it’s not your job to strategically message against him and it’s not in your financial self-interest to do so either. So if Trump really wants to raise the salience of immigration by saying a lot of wild stuff about a wall, you don’t go back to your lab and say, “it turns out that raising the salience of immigration is good for Trump so we should mostly let this wall stuff slide,” you say “WOW LOOK AT ALL THIS WILD STUFF HE’S SAYING ABOUT THE WALL, ISN’T THAT WILD?”

Last week’s mailbag featured a question about the endless wrangling over “pocketbook issues” vs. “wokeness,” which I think is a common misframing of the issue.

A more relevant dichotomy, I think, is The Trump Show vs. Normal Politics, in which The Trump Show is good for mainstream media businesses and for Donald Trump, and Normal Politics is good for America and for Trump’s political opponents. It’s true that one aspect of this tension is whether it’s better to yell about how Trump is racist or to talk about health care, but it doesn’t perfectly track along a social-versus-cultural-issues divide. Trump did a lot better than Romney with non-churchgoing non-college white people, in large part because Trump is, personally, a secular guy and not a scoldy church type. But a lot of those people believe abortion should be legal, and talking about how electing Trump will lead to anti-choice judges and anti-Trump regulators who’ll do everything possible to ban as many abortions as possible is helpful.

The fact that Trump counts on abortion banners’ support and appoints them to key roles is not some outlandish personal attribute of his or an unprecedented violation of American norms. It’s a very normal public policy dispute in which his side of the argument happens to be wrong. Similarly, Trump’s view that keeping taxes low on rich people should be an overwhelming priority of economic policy is really banal. It just happens to be true and important, and pointing that out (without a ton of editorializing) would have the biggest impact.

I think a lot about Paul Ryan, a guy who really did get a lot of softball coverage from the media. Why did the press love him so much?

Well, he’s a smart, put-together guy who seems thoughtful and earnest. He knows a lot more about public policy than your average House member. And he’s very respectable — he’s a family man, he’s never been involved in any scandals. And there was a sense among media figures who liked giving Ryan softball coverage that any day now he’d say “enough is enough” and break with Trump. But he’s a thoughtful and earnest guy who knows a lot more about public policy than your average House member and who’s really deeply invested in Normal Politics. And Normal Politics to Paul Ryan means trying to ban abortion and enacting regressive tax cuts and doing whatever he can to roll back the welfare state. Did he like Trump? Was he glad Trump was the nominee? Of course not. But Normal Politics meant voting for Trump, meant covering up for Trump, and meant doing everything possible to empower Trump.

And that’s the swing constituency in America today — people who may think the progressive critique of Trump-the-man is somewhat overstated but who acknowledge its basic validity. Some of them voted for Trump anyway. But Democrats need to try to persuade them by elevating issues where the Democratic position is more popular and (especially with Biden as the incumbent) by trying to do a good job on the quintessential Normal Politics issue of raising living standards.

The media, meanwhile, is going to try to make money.

Given that the media’s priority is making money and not producing effective political messaging, it’s worth recalling that the biggest trap of the whole Trump era is people conning Trump haters into believing that consuming more and more anti-Trump media content is a form of political resistance.

This is just not true.

If your mind is made up about Trump, you do not need to consume additional news stories on the theme “Trump is bad,” nor do you need to consume news stories that you think fail to make this point and then get angry about that. Instead, read a story about the city council where you live and you may learn something that changes your mind about an issue. That’s not to say that following national political news is bad. I’m going to go see “Fast X” later this week and that’s not effective political resistance to Trump either. But I’m going with no illusions that this activity is anything other than fun. If you enjoy doomscrolling or doomviewing, then knock yourself out.

But if you’re worried and want to do something constructive, then try to do something constructive.

    Talk to a persuadable voter you know and actually try to persuade them.

    Look at the messages Joe Biden is putting on TV (not the ones he puts on Twitter for fundraising purposes) and say similar stuff on your social media.

    Start working part-time at a local fast-food restaurant to fight inflation. Give Jon Tester the money.

    Take seriously the fact that suggestion (3) seemed crazy to you because you don’t actually care that much and log off.

    Put up some yard signs for candidates; they do actually work. 

The point is, CNN really wants you to be in a headspace where you believe some form of engaging with CNN — watching CNN, getting mad at CNN, posting about CNN — is an important thing to do in the world. They can’t plausibly claim that CNN is the most fun show on television or that it’s an exemplar of high art. For it to be worthwhile, it has to be civic-minded to engage with. But is it? Now if you want to send CNN journalists some polite messages saying you’re interested in seeing more coverage of the stakes in 2024 for health care, that would probably be constructive. More TV news coverage of the health care issue in 2024 would be good, and you can probably nudge people in that direction.

But mostly CNN is gonna try to air material that is accurate and that people watch, and they’re not going to worry much about what’s good for American society.

I’d be an irresponsible businessman myself if I didn’t close this with the suggestion that you might want to consider supporting media organizations that have a different approach!