Tag: Trump

Our Imperial Presidency

Mark it down: April was when the wheels finally came off the Trump bandwagon.

After weeks of rambling, largely incoherent performances in the daily White House coronavirus briefings, punctuated by assaults on the media generally and individual reporters occasionally, President Donald Trump went into total meltdown on Thursday, April 23. That was when he mused, in spontaneous free-association, about the possible merits of ingesting disinfectants and projecting sunlight and ultraviolet light into the body to counteract the virus.

“I’m not a doctor,” he said, belaboring the obvious and tapping his temple, “but I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what.” Even for a “very stable genius,” as the President has described himself in the past, it was an extraordinary moment. Sitting off to one side, Deborah Birx, who is a doctor and the coronavirus response coordinator, was a study in self-restraint as she looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

In the momentary silence that followed, you could almost feel White House aides, Trump supporters and Republicans around the country cringing. This time, the President had strayed into clearly dangerous, life-threatening territory with no obvious escape route. This time, his Teflon coating had failed to protect him.

Even President Trump realized his blunder. The next day, he cut the White House briefing short and walked out without taking any questions; the next day he tweeted that he was too busy to attend the briefing. But by Monday, he was back in the limelight.

“You know, I can’t really explain it,” Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan said on one of the Sunday shows when asked about the President’s Thursday comments. Hogan, who has been careful and measured in his own statements on the virus, added: “It does send a wrong message…when you just say something that pops into your head.”

That is apparently what the President did. Aides reported later that he had attended part of a technical briefing just before the news conference on the impact of bleach and other disinfectants and sunlight on the virus. No one was suggesting this as a medical treatment for humans, but Trump took it there in his comments, urging the medical experts to test whether it could kill the virus in people.

You would not expect anyone to take this wacky idea seriously, but calls to state and local medical departments about it spiked in the immediate aftermath of the President’s off-the-cuff remarks.

The whole incident underscores a more fundamental question: why is this President — really, any President — briefing the nation on such a vital, highly complicated, public health issue as the Covid 19 pandemic? The answer in this case, of course, is that everything President Trump does is about President Trump. In this locked-down, socially-distant world, he is not able to hold the big, noisy political rallies that he enjoys so much. The daily briefings have been the substitute, an opportunity to lie, exaggerate and mislead, while making wildly-inflated claims about his Administration’s performance.

Instead, the nation should be briefed by medical and public health officials, who actually know what they are talking about, and who should be in a position to make the crucial decisions on testing and managing the pandemic that only the Federal government can make. Drs. Anthony Fauci and Birx have played that role, but only as supporting players to the President, who remains front and center.

Such is the consequence of our imperial presidency. As Congress has ceded more and more power to the executive in recent decades, we have created an impossibly demanding role for the President, any President. The man in the Oval Office — so far, all 45 have been men — is called upon to decide war and peace and, in the case of the corona virus, life and death.

No one, man or woman, can fulfill this limitless role. No one person can be the decider-in-chief on everything. Perhaps, in the wake of this virus, the nation can re-balance: Congress can reassert itself and the professional civil service can be given greater responsibility and authority in crises where expertise is crucial.

Perhaps.

Election Contagion

Here’s what worries me in the wake of the recent Israeli elections and in anticipation of the U.S. 2020 Presidential election:
In a sentence, I worry that the American voter may arrive at the same sort of transactional decision that a plurality of Israeli voters apparently did, namely hold their collective noses and vote for Donald Trump for a second term.
Break it down with me: after 10 years of Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister, Israeli voters have no illusions about Bibi.
They know he is a narcissistic power addict who will do anything to keep himself in office. If he survives through July, he’ll become the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s 71-year history after the founding father, David Ben Gurion.
They also know that if the pending prosecutorial charges against him are true, he is personally corrupt. They know he has fallen in love with the good life of fancy cigars and pink champagne and has apparently enriched himself with investments in some of Israel’s arms suppliers.
And yet they voted for him in sufficient numbers to give him the opportunity to form what will be the most hard-right, religiously-conservative government in their nation’s history.
The vote was partly a referendum on Bibi, but it was more than that. It was a decision that, despite his many personal and political failings, Netanyahu has steered the country to a strong economy, relative security and a standoff with the Palestinians. He also has a close and profitable relationship with President Trump and his family, a cozy cooperation that has already borne fruit with the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and overt support for Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. Can U.S. support for Israeli annexation of key West Bank settlements be far behind? Is it already baked into the “deal of the century,” the U.S. peace proposal that is expected to be unveiled soon?
The bottom line, the Israeli voters seemed to be saying, is all that really counts.
Will the U.S. voter come to a similar conclusion in 2020?
If the U.S. economy is still strong, if unemployment is still low, if wages are up measurably, if Trump’s trade wars have not destroyed American agriculture, if U.S. troops are not committed to any new wars, will the American voter give the President another turn around the dance floor?
If no broadly-appealing Democrat emerges from the primary pack, will the voters settle for the devil-you-know?
After two-plus years in office, and especially after the damming documentation in the Mueller report of President Trump’s lies, the American voters can have no more illusions about their president’s character than the Israelis do about Bibi. Will they hold their collective noses as significant numbers of Israelis did?
The answer depends largely on the Democrats. It depends on how they frame the debates and whether the candidate who emerges from the primaries can appeal to the centrist voters in the industrial Midwest who defected to Trump in 2016.
Stay tuned.

No Winners in the Current Age of Cynicism

Have you noticed something?
We are living in an Age of Cynicism so deep and pervasive that it is distorting our politics, our laws and our society. It is the new normal. What was once clearly wrong now seems ok. Or, at least, “the way things are these days.”
The cynicism spreads across political parties, Congress, the courts, the gun lobby, the media, big business; you name it.
The cynic-in-chief, of course, is President Donald Trump. His lying, his Twitter storms, his crass character assassinations (“Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Little Rocket Man,” etc.) seemed funny at first, then cheap and crude, now, most destructive of all, routine. “That’s Trump,” we say among ourselves, and shrug, With every Trumpian rant, magnified by our cynical indifference, our political discourse descends into the toilet.
Fair question: who is more cynical? Trump, or those of us who voted for him knowing that he was a narcissistic fraud? Some, I suppose, didn’t pay enough attention during the campaign to realize that he was playing a joke on us and supported him in the hope that he really would do the preposterous things he said, like bring back coal and manufacturing jobs, make the economy grow by four or five per cent or magically curb illegal immigration by building a “beautiful wall.”
But what about the others who voted for him knowing he was wholly unequipped for the job? What about those who held their nose and voted for him in order to feather their own nests? Who, really, is the most cynical of us all?
The Republicans in Congress might deserve the title. The Mitch McConnells, the Paul Ryans and the others that indulge the President’s whims and outbursts in feigned pained silence and then vote to embrace policies they know are wrong in order to get their agenda signed into law. So what if the gun lobby makes a mockery of the deaths in school shootings by accepting meaningless “reforms” that do nothing serious to stop the carnage? So what?
Nor are the Democrats innocent. “Chuck and Nancy” may not be as consciously cynical as Mitch and Paul, but those in the minority rarely are. They stake out more progressive positions, call a press conference or two, then throw up their hands as the majority adopts its agenda. Meanwhile, the national Democratic Party tacks to the center to win special elections in Georgia and Pennsylvania as it readies a head-snapping move to the left for 2020. Or not, depending on what will win.
The Supreme Court defined cynicism with its Citizens United decision trashing the concept of campaign finance regulation, arguing that corporations have the same rights as individuals. Its justifications echo the corrupt politics behind Bush v, Gore in 2000 and the notion that the Second Amendment, despite what it says, guarantees the gun rights of individuals rather than “well-regulated militias.” Retired Justice John Paul Stevens finally said what must be said: repeal the Second Amendment, which was never meant by the founders to mean what the NRA says it means.
The media: what is more cynical than the excuses Fox News makes for Trump? Is it MSNBC, when the entire channel is devoted to tearing Trump down? Or talk radio? They are all competing for ratings, adopting the ideology they believe will attract more audience.
Cynicism is not new in Washington, of course, nor unique to the Trump era. LBJ was deeply cynical when he lied to the country about Vietnam because he didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war; George W. was cynical when he lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to take out Saddam. Lying is not a new presidential activity.
And, even in an Age of Cynicism, there are striking exceptions among us: the young people demonstrating against gun violence in the schools, volunteers who commit time and money to make things better, charitable groups here and abroad. There are bright spots, to be sure.
But the most cynical act of all is to take cynicism for granted. Then we all lose.

The Trump Effect?

What is the message behind Gavin Buckley’s stunning, lopsided victory over Mayor Mike Pantelides in the Annapolis city elections this past week? What does it say about how Annapolitans feel about their city, about politics today and about President Donald Trump one year after his upset victory?
“Trump and turnout,” Pantelides immediately volunteered to me as he stepped down from the microphone after his concession speech Tuesday night when I asked him what explained Buckley’s remarkable win.
“Annapolis wanted a change,” he conceded, and indeed, despite a rainy, chilly election day, nearly a thousand more voters turned out Tuesday than during the hard-fought, incredibly close mayoral election four years ago. Clearly the voters of Annapolis had something to say and wanted to be heard.
“The national factor played a big part,” the Mayor continued. “Trump has ruined the Republican label.”
Pantelides may have been making excuses for his own poor showing, but his bitter feelings about the President were echoed among his supporters gathered in the second floor ballroom of the Annapolis Waterfront hotel. All the trappings for a blowout victory party were there: tables laden with hors d’ourves, music, a free-flowing, cash bar. But the Republicans in the room, almost all of them white and prosperous-looking in coats and ties and dresses, were angry with their national standard-bearer.
“I’m heartbroken,” said a blonde-haired woman standing with her grown daughter. “I’m a conservative and a lifelong Republican, but Trump has destroyed the party right down to the local level. “ “It is pretty scary,” her daughter agreed, “The Trump effect is real.”
Pantelides confessed that he had known he was in trouble two weeks before, when he got the results of a private poll conducted by his campaign. “It showed Gavin ahead 46-to-43 per cent, ” he said. That was when his supporters began flooding the city mailboxes with attack fliers mocking Buckley’s Australian accent, questioning his business record and accusing him of planning to raise taxes.
“The fliers hurt,” I know that.,” Pantelides conceded ruefully Tuesday night.
If the mood in the Republican gathering was sour and flat, the scene at the Metropolitan Kitchen and Lounge celebrating Buckley’s success was joyful and raucous. Hundreds of supporters, black, white and Asian, young and old, packed the three floors of the restaurant, laughing and cheering over the pulse of a disco beat. They applauded their hero’s acceptance speech, traded high fives and hooted approval when a reel of “Gavin’s Bloopers” — stumbling outtakes of Buckley’s video ads — flickered across the screen.
Buckley himself was exuberant. When a television reporter asked him on camera what his first act would be after the swearing-in on December 4, Buckley said: “Signing a peace treaty with Eastport!”
When Steve Schuh, the Republican County Executive shook his hand and promised that they would work together, Buckley said: “Great. Can I buy you a drink?” and led Schuh through the crowd to the bar.
The contrast between the two election-night parties mirrored the candidates themselves: Pantelides, the earnest, methodical plodder who trumpeted his first four years and promised more of the same; Buckley, the rakish, adventurous outsider who promised change, new ideas and excitement.
How big was the Trump factor? While the results here reflected the same-day Democratic sweep in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City and clearly represented a wider Republican setback, the Annapolis outcome was mostly local, mostly about the sharply contrasting candidates and the voters’ frustration with the glacial pace of improvements in their venerable city.
Annapolitans seemed to be looking at the endless squabbles over the Market House, the empty storefronts on Main Street, the frequently clogged traffic, the non-stop development, the shabby public housing, the increased crime, the repeated “nuisance flooding” lapping at the edges of downtown and the parked cars littering City Dock and asking: “Can’t we do better?”
Gavin Buckley seemed to be taking a page out of the Obama playbook and answering: “Yes we can.”
Come December 4, he’ll get his chance to prove it.

A Broken System

Is it just me, or does it seem to some of you that the wheels are coming off our national political system?
Allow me to vent, please, as we look at our current dilemma:
Thanks to the electoral college and nearly 63 million voters, we have a President who is manifestly unsuited and ill-prepared for the job. He was duly elected under arcane rules that have denied the presidency to the popular vote winner in two of our last five national elections. In 2016, that meant his opponent got nearly 3 million more votes…and lost.
Thanks to gerrymandering and big money, we have a Congress that deadlocks over everything from health care to tax reform. It takes a disastrous hurricane to get anything done quickly, or to even kick the can down the road for three months.
Thanks to partisan redistricting and again, big money, there is precious little turnover in Congress. In 2016, 97 per cent of the House incumbents who stood for re-election won; 93 per cent of Senators who sought re-election succeeded. More often than not, incumbency equals job security.
Big money also has given special interests maximum leverage in Washington. No surprise, because campaigns have become ever more costly. Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm had it right when he said: “ready money is the mother’s milk of politics.” As if to prove it, a record $55 million was spent earlier this year in the special election to replace Tom Price in Georgia’s sixth district, most of it on behalf of the Democratic candidate, who lost. It demonstrated how hard it is to win a seat that has been skillfully gerrymandered over the years.
Look as well at what the U.S. presidency has become. It is an imperial office today, with vast powers to rattle nuclear sabers, tear up trade and international climate agreements, dismantle domestic programs and pardon convicted criminals.
The executive order is today’s all-purpose tool of convenience, used equally by our current and former chief executives. Occasionally, as in the case of the evolving travel bans, the federal courts step in. But most often, a stroke of the presidential pen prevails.
Nothing illustrated the current congressional fecklessness better than the Republican failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. After seven years of pledges and promises, the GOP leadership was unable to control the conservatives in its own caucus and deliver the votes to pass a substitute version.
Nor is tax reform likely to be any easier. Or the much-promised trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, or immigration reform or any of the other big-ticket items that were supposed to be adopted now that one party controls both houses of Congress and the White House. Gridlock is what we get instead.
I’m not sure this is exactly what the founders had in mind when they drafted the constitution and bill of rights and created a system of checks and balances. Congress was supposed to be a co-equal branch, not a frustrated and frustrating cave of winds.
Three things could make our democracy more democratic: non-partisan redistricting, serious campaign finance reform with spending limits and expanded public financing and revising or scrapping the electoral college.
Direct popular election of the President will not solve all our problems, but it certainly will better reflect the people’s choice. Independent re-drawing of congressional districts, based on population not partisan politics, will make more races competitive. Gerrymandering is a bi-partisan passion: the Democrats in Maryland are every bit as adept as the Republicans elsewhere. In Maryland, the politicians choose their voters, not the other way around.
And reforming the rules on campaigning, limiting the time and money involved, will open the process to more candidates and reduce the influence of special interests.
None of this will make for a perfect system. But it would be more fair, less beholden to the powerful groups that distort it today and yes, more democratic. With a lower-case “d.”

Americans Afloat Choose Change

Some cheered when Donald Trump went over the top, some groaned, some said it was the dawn of a new era, some said it was the end of history, some made comments not suitable for a family newspaper and just about everybody expressed shock.

Six hundred strong, they were part of a floating focus group aboard Crystal Symphony, one of two luxury cruise ships operated by Crystal Cruises, a top-rated company with the questionable judgment to engage me occasionally as a “World Affairs” lecturer, this time aboard a 16-day cruise from Miami to San Diego via the Panama Canal.

It was not a formal focus group, but it functioned as one, with discussions and panels on the campaign before and after Election Day. The group included 20 different nationalities, but the great majority were U.S. citizens and most said they had sent in absentee ballots or participated in early voting, as I did in Annapolis on Oct. 28, before boarding the ship a week before Election Day.

As Crystal Cruises guests, they were not typical; they are older, well-educated, affluent and mostly white. They included more Republicans than Democrats, more avowed conservatives than liberals, some open supporters of Donald Trump, some outspoken backers of Hillary Clinton and a fair number who said they didn’t like either candidate and couldn’t wait for the endless campaign to be over.

In a poll taken Friday, during a final panel discussion, they disclosed how they actually voted: 52 percent for Trump, 38 percent for Clinton and 10 percent for other candidates. It was a more lopsided pro-Trump tally than the national vote, but not different in the outcome. At the same time, a striking 47 percent said they did not believe the president-elect would keep his campaign promises. About 20 percent thought he could and would; the balance said “maybe.”
Using handheld devices, the audience indicated that it thought the most pressing issue in the new president’s in-box was the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice. The audience selected defeating ISIS and dealing with world terrorism as the most urgent foreign policy issue, and creating jobs, repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and improving the educational system as the top domestic priorities. Donald Trump, take notice.

The passengers from other countries – they included Brits, Canadians, Australians, Latinos and representatives of perhaps a dozen European and Asian nations – seemed to follow the campaign and election every bit as closely as the Americans. To a person, they seemed shocked by the outcome and worried about the impact a Trump presidency might have on their countries and economies.
The Americans showed their political colors by which cable channel they chose to watch for the election night coverage, The ship stayed studiously neutral by putting CNN on the big screen in one theater and Fox News in another. MSNBC and two British channels – Sky News and the BBC – were available in the staterooms.

Most of the cheering came from the Fox crowd as it became clear that Trump would prevail. Most of the groans came from the CNN-watchers.

Even before Election Day, a man from Florida came up to me after a lecture on the campaign and said, “You know those people who won’t tell pollsters whether they support one candidate or the other and then vote for Trump? Well, I am one of those people. I voted for him before I left Florida.”

When I asked him to explain his choice, he said, “Change. We need change.”

A Florida woman, on the other hand, told me, “I’m a Republican who votes for Republicans. But not this time – not Trump. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for him.”

The Clinton enthusiasts were harshly critical of Trump before the election, calling him totally unqualified. After his victory, they were mostly subdued. “Aren’t you worried?” a woman asked me after Trump’s victory. “I am.”

I am, too.

The View from Abroad

My wife, Susy, and I just returned from a three-week, 26,000-mile, Eastport-to-Eastport, jaunt around the world. We flew to Sydney, Australia, sailed to Bali, Indonesia, and flew home from Bali, via Doha, Qatar, to Dulles.
Here is what we learned:
* The non-stop carnival that is the 2016 U.S. Presidential race has seized the attention of the rest of the world just as it has here.
* Donald Trump makes almost as many headlines abroad as he does here. His picture was on the front pages when we arrived in Sydney.
* The rest of the world thinks we are nuts. (But, just like a train wreck, can’t stop watching.)
* Annapolis has a lot of admirers. (Every time we said we were from Annapolis, people smiled and said “beautiful,” or remembered visiting the Statehouse or the Naval Academy or sailing the Chesapeake.)
The excuse for the trip was my assignment as a speaker, ahem, “World Affairs lecturer,” on the lovely Crystal Serenity, a gleaming, white, 1,000-passenger cruise ship that is currently on a world cruise. The Sydney-to-Bali run was one segment of that four-month, San Francisco-to-San Francisco cruise that is still underway.
Crystal features all kinds of speakers on history, geography and current affairs. I gave four talks on topics ranging from the current state of the news business to the fractious relations between the U.S. and Russia, but the one that grabbed people, or at least provoked the most reaction, was entitled “Part Carnival, Part Circus: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race.”
Roughly half the audience were Americans, plus Brits, Canadians, lots of Australians and guests from perhaps a dozen Asian countries. The Americans on board doubtless included a majority of Republicans, but a fair number identified themselves as independents or Hillary Clinton supporters and a few — not many — seemed to back Bernie Sanders.
One passenger declared his sentiments by pasting a bold “Trump for President” sticker on his stateroom door.
Everybody had their opinions about the different candidates and the race, but it was the non-Americans who kept asking, in effect, “have you Yanks taken complete leave of your senses?” Or, more politely, what explains the Trump phenomenon? Or, why the enthusiasm for political outsiders this year?
I said I had no simple explanations, but that the United States seems to be in a era of discontent, in which people on both sides of the political spectrum are dissatisfied with their leaders, especially Congress, and feel let down.
Republicans have heard their standard bearers promise smaller government, reduced regulation, lower taxes and entitlement reform for generations — and have been disappointed when none of it has come to pass. They are frustrated and angry and inclined to turn to someone outside the political mainstream.
Democrats are equally frustrated by endless wars, wage stagnation, income inequality, big-money politics and a Congress that seems to respond more to special interests than the concerns of the average citizen. That’s why Bernie Sanders has enjoyed such resonance, even if he isn’t going to be the nominee.
The international passengers on the ship said they understood all that, but still found it strange — some said, appalling — that so many voters seem to think Donald Trump is the answer to any of it. Some found the spectacle of this primary season amusing, others openly doubted that Donald Trump would ever emerge as the GOP nominee, while still others were frankly apprehensive about the whole primary spectacle.
One Canadian woman who said she was worried about the political trends south of the border used a metaphor: “You know,” she said, “when you sleep next to a bear, you don’t want him to get upset and roll over.”
The wall-to-wall coverage of the campaign and the fractious, noisy GOP debates were broadcast live on the ship’s television, which carried CNN International, Fox, MSNBC, the BBC and Sky News. Not everyone watched them, of course, but those who did came away shaking their heads.
“Three hundred million people and this is the best the U.S. can come up with?” asked one Australian.

The 2016 Political Circus

In many Presidential years, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary have clarified the race and provided a roadmap to the nomination.
Not this year.
In some Presidential years, the winners of the first two contests have emerged as the odds-on favorites to go all the way to November.
Not this year.
In some other Presidential years, Iowa and New Hampshire have defined the issues and narrowed the debate.
Not in 2016.
Instead, the Presidential circus so far has defied conventional wisdom and set the entire process on its ear. Rather than bringing the picture into focus, the stunning if wacky victories of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders last Tuesday have muddled the picture and guaranteed a long slog to the nomination in each party.
So, in the interest of sanity and a semblance of coherence, let’s list a few points that have been established so far:
1. Donald Trump is for real. He is not going away. Against all the odds, he has made the transition from late-night punch line to formidable candidate. (Not, however, on Wednesday’s page one of The New York Daily News, which read: “Dawn of the Brain Dead: Clown comes Back to Life with N.H. Win as Mindless Zombies Turn Out in Droves”)
2. Bernie Sanders is for real. Against all the odds, he has made the transition from wispy-haired, 74-year-old self-declared socialist fringe candidate to current front-runner. Remarkably, he captured 73 per cent of New Hampshire’s independents as well as seven of 10 women under 45. He is still a remote prospect for the nomination, but cannot be dismissed.
3. Hillary Clinton has a real fight on her hands. She is still the likely nominee, barring another e-mail eruption, but she has got to find a way to communicate her considerable strengths and make her extensive experience a positive promise for the future, not a reminder of her age and past. And, oh yes, she needs to rally younger women.
4. Ted Cruz has a real problem. Despite his victory in Iowa and second-place in New Hampshire, he can’t shake the near-universal enmity of his Senate colleagues and his hard-right, super-conservative image. The GOP Establishment is convinced that if Cruz is the nominee in November, the party will lose the White House and both houses of Congress. On the other hand, he is not Donald Trump.
5. Marco Rubio has a real problem, too. Ridicule is the most lethal weapon in politics, and his robotic debate performance in New Hampshire has made him the inescapable butt of his opponents’ jokes. He has to demonstrate that he can think on his feet, answer a question and go off script.
6. Jeb Bush is not dead. That’s his Monty Python refrain and it is true. His close third in New Hampshire (Once again, ‘bronze is the new gold’) has given him license to head south to far friendlier South Carolina and the dozen primaries on Super Tuesday, March 1. There are some 30 contests to be fought in the first 15 days of March, so Jeb may live to fight again if at least some of his big contributors come back to the fold.
7. Michael Bloomberg might still become the second billionaire in the race. He has said all along that if Trump and Sanders are the nominees, he might pony up $1billion or so of his estimated $39 billion fortune to finance an independent candidacy. Of course, Ross Perot tried that in 1992 and won 19 per cent of the vote, the most by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. A Bloomberg run seems unlikely, but in a campaign as strange and unpredictable as this one, who is to say?

Stay tuned.

The View From Annapolis II

Just two more days to the next Republican Primary debate in the long-running, messy spectacle known as the 2016 Presidential election. So, gather round, pop the popcorn and settle down to watch the next episode of Donald Trump and Friends.
This Tuesday, the leading GOP candidates will assemble in the ornate halls of The Venetian, that gaudy temple to bad taste in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Donald should feel right at home.
Here in Annapolis, we have an excellent perspective on this carnival. We are close enough to Washington to follow the action, but far enough away so your shoes don’t get splattered with mud. All we have to do is tune in to CNN at 9 p.m. Tuesday and watch Wolf Blitzer herd the cats.
It is not really a debate in the Lincoln-Douglas sense, of course, rather a calculated cage fight in which Trump is expected to rail against immigration and Muslims, and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and others will struggle for air time.
Along with most political and world leaders, many in the media started to turn on The Donald in the past week in the wake of his xenophobic proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country. He was widely criticized — but widely covered — on social media and most evening and morning news shows. My former paper, The New York Times, had the story at the top of page one, describing Trump’s remarks as “an extraordinary escalation of language aimed at voters’ fears about members of the Islamic faith.”
The result: Trump remains at or near the top of most polls of likely Republican primary voters, and the GOP establishment is starting to worry about a brokered convention.
The dirty little secret over the last several months is that the media has been fully and joyfully culpable in the extraordinary rise of Donald Trump, giving him almost unlimited air time with scant hard questioning, aiding and abetting his rise in the polls.
There is an unacknowledged-but-profitable symbiotic relationship between Trump and news organizations: the more outrageous his statements, the more coverage — “free media” is the term of art — the greater the ratings.
The GOP debates are a case in point: they have been a revenue bonanza for the cable channels that have carried them.
The first Republican debate on Fox News last August attracted a record audience of 24 million. A month later, CNN pulled in 23 million, half-again its largest audience ever. CNBC attracted 14 million in October. The November debate on the Fox Business channel , which rarely has 100,000 people watching, pulled in 13 million viewers.
Four years ago, the Republican primary debates drew 4-to-6 million viewers. Needless to say, this year’s record ratings translate into serious ad revenue.
I’m not suggesting the debates are not worthwhile; they are. I’m not disputing that the coverage of Trump is justified; it is. A presidential candidate who is leading in most polls six weeks before the Iowa caucus is news, no matter how outlandish his positions.
But more rigorous questioning of Trump would be welcome, along with more consistent fact-checking of his fabrications. The wall-to-wall coverage of his pronouncements is wearing thin.
Many in the media have been and remain skeptical of The Donald and his chances of actually securing the GOP nomination. In fact, my former colleague on the PBS NewsHour, David Brooks, has doubled down on his prediction that Trump will collapse from the weight of his own baggage.
And Dana Milbank in The Washington Post dropped all pretense of objectivity in his column when he flatly labeled Trump a racist and bigot and compared him to Il Duce.
But perversely, the more Trump is denounced, the more popular he becomes with his hard-core supporters who see him as refreshingly honest. The running controversy is likely to build audience for Tuesday’s debate, not diminish it.
And in the now-familiar Trump playbook, any publicity — even this column – is good publicity.

Terence Smith, who lives in Annapolis, is a former media correspondent on the PBS NewsHour.

What Sleepy Summer?

Summer is normally a drowsy, dull time in the news business. Papers struggle on a diet of shark sightings and weather stories, waiting for things to pick up after Labor Day.
But this summer was different: desperate migrants streaming across Europe, the Iran nuclear deal and the Greek debt crisis filled the front pages. There were wildfires in the west and wild market gyrations on Wall Street. There were shootings around the country and riots in Baltimore. The Supreme Court upheld same-sex marriage and subsidies for Obamacare, while Congress fulminated and mercifully left town. Pope Francis remade the face of the Catholic Church by everything he said and did.
On the normally somnolent political front, we had Bernie rising, Hillary sinking and Joe Biden pondering; we had17 – count ’em, 17 – Republicans volunteering to be president, with Jeb! slowly subsiding, The Donald and Dr. Ben ascending in the polls and all the others struggling to get a headline.
The biggest cable audience of the summer – 24 million – watched the Aug. 6 GOP debate on Fox and then followed along as The Donald trashed Megyn Kelly and insulted most of the others on and off the stage.
For news organizations, the Donald Trump spectacle was summertime catnip. Talk shows like “Morning Joe” and “The O’Reilly Factor” couldn’t get enough of him. Stephen Colbert had a running joke on his inaugural “Late Show” in which he could no more stop talking about Trump than stop eating Oreos. Even when The Donald phoned it in, as he often did, ratings jumped as he ranted and raved about immigration, China or his “low-energy” competitor, Jeb!
It all seemed like innocent summer fun. Pundits and hacks like me confidently predicted that the audience would tire of The Donald’s act and that he would fade like Herman Cain four years ago. Except he didn’t. He climbed in the polls as the other candidates sank and serious commentators seriously suggested that he could win the GOP nomination. Seriously.
The other summer phenom was Dr. Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who became famous for being part of the large surgical team that separated a set of Siamese twins. “Gifted Hands” was the title of his bestseller. The media treated him gently, never mentioning the sad fact that the twins died shortly after the operation.
A soft-spoken African-American movement conservative, Carson climbed steadily in the polls, eclipsing Jeb! and the other establishment wannabes in Iowa and other early states.
Another of the Gang of 17, Carly Fiorina, also moved up in the polls. As the only woman on the Republican side, the former Hewlett-Packard executive stood out in the junior varsity debate when she prodded Trump and his pomposity. The Donald responded last week in an article on the website of Rolling Stone mocking her appearance. “Look at that face,” he was quoted as saying, “would anyone vote for that?”
These three overnight sensations have one thing in common: None has been elected to public office. All three consider the presidency a starter office. Beyond their egos, they share something else: They personify a massive protest vote, in which voters are expressing their exasperation with government in general, politics as usual and the current crop of candidates in particular. These voters evidently admire Trump as too rich to be bought, Carson as genuine and Fiorina as smart.
The question, of course, is whether these voters and more will still support these nonpoliticians when casting an actual ballot, not just answering a pollster’s question. Once they have “made a statement” in the polls, will they reconsider and choose one of the more experienced candidates?
I have no idea. But this unusual, news-filled summer has set us up for a fascinating fall and winter and spring.