After the mayhem on Saturday night in Washington, one of journalists in the cavernous basement in the DC Hilton echoed the mantra of Americans who’ve found themselves directly caught up in the madness of this nation’s love affair with guns.
“For a decade I have been following the twists and turns of Donald Trump’s America with the privilege of journalistic distance. On Saturday night I felt the darkness come viscerally close,” he said.
What he meant of course is that it came viscerally close to me. That’s the attitude of the vast majority of Americans, which is that as long as gun violence doesn’t touch me and my family personally, it’s an abstraction, a thing happening out there.
And that’s why American journalists report America’s violence at home and abroad, whether it’s bombing Iran or the latest school shooting, with as much psychological distance as they can muster. And that’s what made the “treasured tradition” of their correspondents’ dinner seem like a metaphysical comeuppance.
Afterward there was the refrain: “Unsettling questions of the Trump era – questions of truth, normalization, resistance, capitulation, authoritarianism – hovered in the air.”
But such questions have been hanging in the air like frozen columns of toxic fog for years. It’s just that as the supposed tellers of truth to power squirmed under their tables, their illusions of objectivity and distance temporarily evaporated.
As for the American media’s “resistance” to Trump’s authoritarianism, it was proven false the moment they walked into the room dressed to the nines. “Access,” it turns out, is just another word for capitulation.
What were the elites of American journalism doing there anyway? How were they able to literally sit under the banner of a lie – “Celebrating the first amendment” – when Trump has spent fifteen months trying to destroy the first amendment?
Rationalizations of comity and tradition flowed as freely as pre-dinner drinks as the cream of US media hobnobbed with all the president’s sycophants in ballroom gowns and tuxedos. How many times does Trump need to call journalists “vermin” and “the enemy within” for them to stop bending the knee to power?
When female reporters ask questions he doesn’t like, Trump calls them “piggy.” Yet he’s so thin-skinned that he wouldn’t allow the usual comedian to be an emcee, for fear of being roundly roasted. Fittingly, a mentalist was slated to be master of ceremonies instead.
No mentalist’s tricks can camouflage the violence and chaos the United States is perpetrating on the world. It pains me to report what people outside the USA already know: the darkness of “Donald Trump’s America” is simply the darkness of America.
Metaphysical non-coincidences spawn madhouse conspiracy theories. Ronald Reagan was shot yards from the same spot where Saturday night’s lone gunman opened fire. And like Reagan’s reign after his assassination attempt, Trump’s bald-faced tyranny has been sealed by the mythology surrounding three assassination attempts.
There are no secret cabals sitting in dark rooms on moonless nights planning these things. It’s simply the darkness in human consciousness operating in increasingly obvious ways.
Torrance California, where the self-described “friendly federal assassin” is from, is less than an hour from Hollywood. But no scriptwriter could invent such a surreal scene.
There were small but telling moments. As the huge room full of reporters cowered under their desks, shouts of “USA, USA, USA” went up in the room, like some incoherent tribal incantation of complicity.
After the non-event, Trump’s performative narcissism compelled him to hog the stage and malevolently declare how it was “a beautiful thing” to see everyone, Democrats and Republicans, scrambling in terror together. “Everyone came together. There was unity. People who have been hostile to me were saying ‘great going.’ It was something very nice.”
On his Lying Social post, Trump immediately added a pitch for his besotted ballroom next to the White House: “This event would not have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom under construction at the White House.”
The accelerating news cycle has moved on. An increasingly bitter Melania called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for making an anti-bereavement joke about the Donald’s death a few days before the correspondents’ dinner. Prince Charles has arrived, though he’s not providing any royal diversion.
And today, Jim Comey has been indicted for threatening the life of the president because he took a picture of shells arranged on a beach that used restaurant slang to cancel an order – “86 the eggs.”
Besides ubiquitous gun violence, insanity has also become normalized in America.
“The will of the people” is the definition of a democracy — “a republic, if you can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin said after the Constitution was ratified. The sad truth is that the American people gave up the ghost over three decades ago. So there was nothing to prevent the tyrant Trump from rising incrementally and excrementally to the surface.
However rotten an economic and political system is, the essential character of a people is both the irreducible source of civic life, and the irreplaceable safeguard against civic death.
As another reporter swept up in the chaos lamented, “Political violence is rampant and on Saturday, in a fancy Washington ballroom, the media glimpsed the edge of the abyss.”
So will the American media meet the moment? Trump is insisting the correspondents’ dinner be rescheduled in a month. That means journalists have another day to reassess their complicity, and refuse.
The fourth estate will probably continue to cover and duck, even if it means they must duck and cover. The question is: Are there enough people at home and abroad still standing, people who don’t feel “this madness has nothing to do with me?”
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