The Nation. October 30, 2017T
he fact that Donald Trump behaves
in a fashion so profoundly inap-
propriate for an adult male, much
less the most powerful person in
the world, presents a challenge for
the mainstream media. Every day the news gives
journalists a new wonderment. Trump’s own
secretary of state reportedly thinks that he’s a
“fucking moron.” The Republican chair of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations tweeted
that the White House was “an adult day care
center” for a president whose “reality-show”
behavior could lead to World War
III. Barely an hour goes by without
Trump saying or doing something
that would have been unthinkable for
any president before him. And those
rare moments of quiet from Trump
are filled with the malevolent actions
of a clown car full of his cabinet ap-
pointees, including Betsy DeVos, Jeff
Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry,
and Ben Carson, among others.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s and Senator
Bob Corker’s statements may be opening a door
to a more honest discussion. But up until now,
most press coverage of the Trump administra-
tion has been to enable, rather than expose, the
president. No matter how absurd his actions, he
has continued to benefit from a campaign of nor-
malization based on a combination of purposeful
blindness, wishful thinking, and a commitment to
outdated professional mores.
Examples of this phenomenon abound. There
is The New York Times’ Peter Baker, making the
nonsensical case that, although Trump was elect-
ed “as a Republican last year, [he] has shown in the
nearly eight months in office that he is, in many
ways, the first independent to hold the presidency
since the advent of the current two- party system
around the time of the Civil War.” But while it’s
true that Trump bickers with Republican leaders
and has enjoyed the occasional cordial meeting
with Democrats, Baker’s thesis largely ignores
Trump’s pursuit of extremist right-wing policies
on consumer regulation, tax policy, labor rights,
LGBTQ- related issues, defense spending... in-
deed, absolutely everything. Baker, like almost
every reporter in the White House press corps,
evinces little interest in policy. Personality is all,
and Trump’s trumps them all.The Times does deserve credit for its willing-
ness to employ the word “lie” in Trump’s case—
the first president ever to earn that honor. This is
not true of The Washington Post, however. Despite
the fact that the Post, like the Times, reports ag-
gressively on the carnival of White House mal-
feasance and misanthropy, editor Marty Baron
refuses to allow its reporters to provide this
crucial crumb of context. “I think you have to
actually have documentation, proof, that whoever
you’re saying lied actually knew that what he
or she was saying was in fact false,” he recently
explained. And yet Baron is also
unwilling to accept the only other
explanation for Trump’s behavior:
The president is nuts.
There’s no question that Trump
is a pathological liar. He lies all the
time, often for no discernible rea-
son. The Washington Post has tallied
1,318 “false and misleading claims”
in his first 263 days in office. You
may have missed the fact that, in
the space of a few days following the most re-
cent collapse of the Republican effort to repeal
Obamacare, Trump insisted on seven separate
occasions that the vote failed because “somebody
[was] in the hospital.”
But nobody was in the hospital. The alleged
somebody to whom
Trump was refer-
ring, Thad Cochran
(R-MS), tweeted this
himself, and his office
repeatedly corrected
the president. But
Trump didn’t notice
or care; he simply kept
on lying. When asked
about this bizarre be-
havior, the best that
any of his enablers or
aides could come up
with was that Trump
was “just, you know, doing his thing.” So which
is it, Mr. Baron: liar or lunatic? (I cast my vote
for both.)
The mainstream media have no language to
describe this situation. It’s hard to grasp just how
weird—and dangerous—it is that this maniac is
America’s president. Tony Schwartz got to knowLiar and Lunatic
The media must stop normalizing Trump’s bizarre and dangerous actions.
Eric Alterman
FOOD FIGHTS
Slime and
Punishment
E
arlier this summer,
the Walt Disney Com-
pany, which owns ABC
News, settled a lawsuit with
the meat-processing company
Beef Products Inc. over a 2012
news story on “pink slime”—or
“lean, finely textured beef,” if
you prefer the industry term.
Made from leftover trimmings,
the beef by-product is used as
filler in many restaurant and
supermarket meats. It looks like,
well, pink slime, but there’s no
evidence that it’s dangerous. The
lawsuit alleged that ABC News
had implied otherwise, causing
Beef Products Inc. incalculable
losses in sales and reputation.
According to The New York
Times, the Walt Disney Com-
pany “said in its latest quarterly
financial statement that it had
$177 million in costs related
to settling litigation,” without
specifying if those expenditures
were due in whole or in part to
the pink-slime lawsuit. But Beef
Products Inc.’s lawyer in the case
told the Times, not without some
satisfaction, that Disney’s insur-
ers had forked over even more.
Beef Products Inc. claims that
the outcry following the ABC
News report nearly put it out of
business, although by 2014 major
vendors had already started to
reincorporate pink slime into
their meats. While ABC has never
retracted the story, which didn’t
directly assert that pink slime is
unsafe, the settlement is among
the largest payouts ever recorded
in a defamation case. That sets
a disturbing precedent: a major
media company choosing to hand
over a huge sum of money to a
corporation rather than defend in
court what it says is an accurately
reported story. That might be OK
for companies owned by Disney,
but for smaller news outlets, it
could make any beef with a cor-
poration fatal. —Jake Bittle
There’s no
question that
Trump is a
pathological liar.
He lies all the
time, often for
no discernible
reason.TOP RIGHT: ANDY FRIEDMAN