Trump's continuing scam, the COVID-19 crisis, and critics' desperate to believe the situation isn't as bad as it looks

Peter Wehner writes, "Trump’s success as a politician has been built on his ability to impose his will and narrative on others, to use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a con man to shape public impressions in his favor, even—or perhaps, especially — if those impressions are at odds with reality." (The President is Trapped The Atlantic ß3/25/2020)

One big mistake the Democrats made in campaigning against Trump in 2016 was to smugly assume that Trump's professional-wrestling style of politicking couldn't win him the Presidency. Wehner continues, "He convinced a good chunk of the country that he is a wildly successful businessman," which he wasn't. Now that he has essentially $4.5 trillion dollars that he can allocate to pretty much any companies he wants including his own, maybe he will finally make his business fabulously successful.

But being a lucky and unscrupulous grifter isn't the same as being the business genius he claimed to be. David Cay Johnston has been telling anyone who would listen for years that Trump was a mobster and a scamster, not a brilliant business titan.

Wehner continues that sentence by saying that Trump's persuasion of "a good chunk of the country" also extended to conning them into thinking that he "knows more about campaign finance, the Islamic State, the courts, the visa system, trade, taxes, the debt, renewable energy, infrastructure, borders, and drones than anyone else."

And Wehner predicts that as the COVID-19 crisis proceeds:

Trump’s hallmarks will be even more fully on display. The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame governors for whatever bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters who ask questions that portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand even more cultlike coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t tolerate relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of obeisance, before long we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try to counter a Trump-centered narrative. He’ll try to find shiny objects to divert our attention from his failures. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, Wehner's piece reflects a lot of the weaknesses the American commentariat has displayed in dealing with Trump's Malicious Orange Clown Show. He presents Trump's success at selling his con job image of himself as due to Trump's own talent for scamming. Which is part of the story.

But there is a great deal of the story to which Beltway media types don't want to call attention. One of those factors is the corporate media itself. CBS Executive Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonvies described his view of the Trump campaign at a media conference in early 2016 (Paul Bond, Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS" Hollywood Reporter 02/29/2016):

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.

Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.

"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.

"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.

"Donald's place in this election is a good thing," he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

"There's a lot of money in the marketplace," the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season. [my emphasis]

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as corportate media. And their approach to covering politics is radically different from the classical image of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite that many older Democrats still have in their heads as the normalcy that a successful Make America Boring Again campaign this year would restore.

That doesn't diminish Trump's own success in working that system. He's unmistakably a talented demogogue. But Wehner's article also reflects the very narrow and unrealistic framing of NeverTrumper rightwing Republicans and the Democratic "Resistance" types, which portrays Trump as a unique aberration whose departure from the political scene will somehow restore a lost normal state. The Republican fever will break, conservative Democrats keep telling themselves and the public, year after year, and decade after decade.

The media malfunction, which has very much to do with the business laws that frame the media market, won't go away without serious reforms to the legal framework that currently controls matters such as media concentration.

The political environment that made Trumpism and a President Trump possible is one of asymmetric partisan polarization in a system in which essentiall all meaningful limits to spending in political campaigns have been aboloished. (On the latter point, I don't mean to imply it can't get worse!) The campaign financing model in the US is a system of legalized bribery in which even illegal bribery and corruption become much harder to detect, deter, and prosecute.

For Democrats - to the extent that they actually want a healthy representative democracy - it's especially important to stop pretending that Trump is akin to a Thanos or Cthulhu dropping in from space. The criminal and anti-democratic aspects of the Trump Presidency were present and on very prominent display during the Bush-Cheney Administration. And the subsequent Obama-Biden Administration gave Cheney's project to establish an authoritarian Unitary Executive system of government the one thing a Republican Administration could never give itself: immunity from prosecution for criminal activity granted by an administration of the other party.