Today marks the two year anniversary of President Trump’s ignominious reign over the United States. We are now at the midpoint of Trump’s first, perhaps only, term as president of the United States, what we can now understand as our collective Trumpening. It is natural to ask about the consequences of handing the office of the presidency to a friendless, joyless, violence-worshipping narcissist. Unfortunately, what we know about the repercussions of this period is vastly outstripped by the disasters to come. For all the many ignominious assaults that the country has endured over the past two years, we have not yet experienced even a fifth of the calamities this man and his misrule will ultimately inflict upon us.
But we know a few things. We know that President Trump has, perhaps permanently, transformed the presidency with his malevolence, ineptitude, and divisiveness. Donald Trump is by far the laziest and least informed person ever to inhabit the White House. In two years, he has defined deviance so far down that he may have forever altered the expectations of the office of the presidency itself. As we have learned from a thousand anonymously sourced news analyses, the president’s time is largely unstructured, filled mostly with blocks of compulsive Fox News watching, an activity that he telegraphs to the public by live tweeting it. America’s voters are constantly being told, by the president of the United States, to watch particular Fox programs and to applaud quotes by right-wing gadflies uttered without any serious pushback from other guests on what is now effectively Republican state television.
Aides, despairing of any real hope that Trump will take his job seriously, desperately schedule short blocks of “policy time” for their addled boss, a man so bereft of any lawmaking depth that he has repeatedly sent his congressional enablers scrambling to meet his capricious demands and volte faces. He has lit millions of taxpayer dollars on fire visiting his own gauche resorts, time he might have spent reining in the unprecedented corruption emanating from nearly every executive agency he staffed either with members of his dimwitted entourage or the very “globalists” he continues to hypocritically decry. Every day, this darling of the evangelical movement lives his truth, which happens to line up with every one of the seven deadly sins of sloth, envy, greed, pride, anger and gluttony. Lust, at least, he seems to have left mercifully in his recent past.
Heralded as the first post-partisan president, a transactional dealmaker sent to blow up the shriveled gridlock in Washington, Trump has instead governed as the president of the Red States of America. Journalists working outside of the right wing mediasphere are demonized as “enemies of the people” and hounded by his supporters. He rarely visits states that voted for Hillary Clinton unless there’s a golf course there, and signs bills designed explicitly to punish voters in Democratic strongholds. While he constantly caterwauls about Democrats obstructing his agenda, he has never once crafted a public message designed to expand his appeal beyond his MAGA base and clearly views his political future as dependent only on the narrow coalition of people who voted for him in 2016. Fueled by a lifetime of resentment against elites, racial minorities, and immigrants, he is incapable even of treating disasters and tragedies in blue states and territories with the gravity they deserve. Texas is a “great state” hit by an unfathomably catastrophic hurricane, while Puerto Ricans “want everything done for them” and California wildfires are the fault of government mismanagement. Here again what was once unthinkable — a president openly despising people who voted against him and punishing them for their supposed thought crimes — has become routine.
A complete trainwreck as a policy leader, Trump has also managed to be a miserable failure at the president’s ceremonial duties. Instead of comfort to the afflicted, he drags his witlessness and anger into every room with him, teaching victims of calamity that their moral worth depends on who they voted for or which racial caste they were born into. He feuds endlessly with black women, uses the fever-swamp sobriquet “Democrat Party” to describe his opposition, bestows a childish nickname (“Adam Schitt”) on each of his multitudinous detractors, and seems to reserve his admiration only for fellow American white nationalists and overseas strongmen. That this dispiriting display of churlishness, petty grievance mongering, and inept blame-wielding has resulted in consistently low approval ratings is little comfort for the future. At least a third of the country has told pollsters over and over again that there is no line the president can cross, no standard of action that he can violate, no indecency incapable of being waved away by pointing to the unemployment rate or manufacturing gains. Millions of Americans — thankfully not yet a majority — are willing to tolerate from our chief executive execrable behavior that no sane person would put up with from their friends, co-workers, or loved ones. He is able to do this because he is the apotheosis of a 40-year-long Republican-led assault on objective truth, expertise, and policy evaluation.
Like domestic abusers and cult leaders and con men, the activity that consumes the preponderance of President Trump’s time is relentlessly hammering away at our self-worth and our sense of objective reality. His war on truth operates on multiple fronts and never rests. Arrayed against him are journalists, and at The Washington Post and Politifact they employ a truth-value spectrum, where the number of ‘Pinocchios’ or a four-category schematic lends a sort of nuance to the kind of nonsense claims politicians clobber each other with in staged debates or campaign ads. Was Barack Obama ‘lying’ when he said, “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor?” I guess, but the real problem there was the inability to be straight with voters, to able to say something like, “A small number of you may be forced to change insurance plans, for the greater good of your fellow citizens.” Donald Trump’s lies are not like this. He fills up the public record with things that are not just artful rearrangements of things that are basically real, but rather outlandishly, transparently, undeniably untrue.
I’m not here to recount this litany of lies for you. Set aside for a moment the running count of the total number of lies that he has told — the content of each is irrelevant. The point is for you to forget what it is like to have the president try to tell the truth, to disorient you, to get you to make a false confession. This is our truth, he wants us to say. That’s why the president of the United States gets up every morning, uncaps a bottomless flask filled with lies and magnificently ill-informed opinions, and spends entire days and evenings pouring it out over all of us. It is working. We have become inured. We are told that to point out the president’s preposterous, outrageous lies is to play directly into a game whose rules only he sets and understands. This is how you got Trump, we are told over and over again by our abusers and their apologists.
In the haze of this unending sensory and rhetorical assault, President Trump has also, loosely, governed the United States as the leader of the most disinterested and unproductive unified government in American history. Has the president delivered on the promises he made? His economic policies, it should be obvious, have been radically different than what you might have gathered from his rally bluster. The man who campaigned on behalf of ruined factory towns and raw-dealed blue collar workers immediately appointed a gallery of sniveling economic con artists to his Cabinet. Together, they have mildly tweaked American trade policy but have tripled down on Reagan-era economic orthodoxy, blowing a long-term hole in the deficit with reckless tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Fleeting manufacturing gains have not been married to any coherent reorientation of American economic policy that will survive the next recession. He has ruined the lives of many people — workers in Ford manufacturing plants and soybean farmers in the Midwest, for instance — that he explicitly promised to rescue.
America is also deliberately, as a matter of official Republican policy, hemorrhaging money during a long economic expansion. If Trump is in charge when the economy crashes, he will surely listen to the Randian ideologues in his coterie, who will tell him to cut spending, which will make it all incomprehensibly worse. Millions will suffer needlessly. If Republicans manage to slip out of office before the reckoning, the next Democratic administration will be forced to run unthinkable, politically toxic deficits in order to pull us out of the economic spiral. Everything that the leaders of the Democratic primary field want to do will be made more challenging by the wreckage they will first be compelled to wade through. Heads they win, tails we lose. A Trumpist minority that, during these relatively good economic times seems bent on cruelty to minorities and immigrants, will turn darker and more sadistic when the good times come to an end, or when their status as a numerical minority is finally reflected in our politics. They will not go quietly and they almost certainly will go violently. They will add social mayhem to the economic wreckage. It will not be pretty. And yet we do not know, cannot know, the precise shape of the horrors to come. What we know is that over the past two years, we have cheapened and embarrassed ourselves. Even if this man and his enablers are removed from their offices next year, or even if the latest bombshell leads to Trump’s impeachment, we will be like a teenager slinking back home at midnight, stinking of booze, promising that we only had one beer and that we’ll never do it again. The moment of release will be poisoned by the memory of what has already transpired. Something about America, as an idea, has been obliterated.
On Jan. 20, 2017, President Trump delivered a bleak inauguration address that warned of “American carnage.” He has spent the past two years turning those words into a self-fulfilling prophecy. So much has happened that it’s hard to keep it all straight. Every week, the Trump administration produces more news than previous administrations did in an entire year. It’s not all bad: We haven’t seen a new war or a recession. Conservatives can be happy about judges and tax cuts. But at what cost? A few stark themes have emerged from the past 730 days—the days of whine and poses. Trump’s presidency so far can be summed up with four bleak words: Racism. Authoritarianism. Incompetence. Megalomania.
Whenever Rudy Giuliani gives a round of interviews to defend President Trump in the Russia scandal, there’s a good chance he’ll blurt out something that implicates his client in new wrongdoing or admit that Trump has been repeatedly lying about some element of the case. We’ll try to sort through the changing stories about the Trump Organization’s efforts to put together a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow while Trump was running for president, but here’s what’s most vital to understand: You don’t have to believe the absolute worst version of this scandal, where every accusation reveals an actual crime, to admit that Trump was and is both deeply corrupt and utterly dishonest. That is the thread that binds nearly every element of the sprawling Russia scandal: corruption and dishonesty, over and over again. With this statement by Giuliani (which, who knows, he might contradict by day’s end), we now have four different versions that the president and his representatives have told about his pursuit of a Moscow deal during the campaign.
Trump is blessed with a preternatural shamelessness; while ordinary people would ask themselves, “What will happen if I get caught in this lie?” Trump never seems to. He simply updates the old lie with a new one, and when that one is exposed, he offers up yet another. Now that he can no longer deny that he was pursuing a deal with the Russian government while running for president, he argues that of course it happened, and it was completely appropriate. After issuing denial after denial, in November 2018 he finally fessed up, sort of. “We were thinking about building a building” in Moscow, he told reporters. “I decided ultimately not to do it. There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it.” You’ll recall that this is the same evolution he underwent on that infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting: First he lied and said the meeting was just to discuss adoptions, then when the lie was exposed he admitted it was in fact for getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians. Did he also commit crimes along the way? Maybe, maybe not. But even if it turns out that he didn’t, Trump’s profound corruption is not in question.
Two years after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made 8,158 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That includes an astonishing 6,000-plus such claims in the president’s second year. Put another way: The president averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office. But he hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year, almost triple the pace. We started this project as part of our coverage of the president’s first 100 days, largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements. Readers demanded we keep it going for the rest of Trump’s presidency. Our interactive graphic, managed with the help of Leslie Shapiro of The Washington Post graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. You can also search for specific claims or obtain monthly or daily totals.
Michael Cohen’s checkered history and many lies have always meant investigators would need documentation to back up his statements. BuzzFeed’s dramatic report Thursday night, based on two unidentified federal law enforcement sources involved in the investigation, suggested prosecutors might have what they need to prove President Donald Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress in 2017 about Trump Tower Moscow negotiations during the 2016 campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office took the unusual step Friday, after this column was first published, of calling the BuzzFeed report “not accurate” in its “description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony.” The statement from Mueller spokesman Peter Carr raises a number of questions. Was it another office, not Mueller’s, that Cohen spoke to? Was BuzzFeed’s reference to “internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents” inaccurate in whole or in part? If the core of the BuzzFeed report holds up, it appears investigators could have evidence of obstruction of justice and suborning perjury — impeachable offenses — on a platter. As former Clinton administration lawyer Ronald Klain tweeted Friday, answering a question on articles of impeachment from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, “I don’t know how many is too many, but I do know that one is enough.”
I would not ask Republicans in the Senate to commit at this point to trying and convicting Trump if in fact, as seems increasingly likely, the Democratic-led House impeaches him. But I think it is fair to ask Republicans right now: Do you really want to continue this record-long government shutdown because of a preposterous and largely symbolic campaign promise by a presidential candidate who never thought he’d win? A candidate who then and now puts his business interests and material wealth ahead of the national interest? Who insists on shutdown chaos that is hurting American workers, taxpayers, national security and the economy, even as it shakes trust in democracy and warms Putin’s heart? Where will congressional Republicans draw the line and start making their own best judgments, for their constituents and their nation?
The BuzzFeed report made a huge splash for more than one reason. It clues us in to what Mueller may know. If the gist of it is true, it could be a turning point in this presidency and, one can only hope, within the GOP. And it came as a surprise. Unlike so many other possible crimes, like asking Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails and saying he fired FBI director James Comey over “this Russia thing,” Trump hadn’t already announced this on Twitter or TV. So here we have a presidential candidate whose lawyer and children are reportedly negotiating a profitable ($300 million) real estate deal with Russian officials, whose party is making its platform friendlier to Russia, whose aides and advisers (at least 16) are meeting with Russians, who conveys he’s eager for Russian help, and who constantly makes clear he admires and trusts Putin. All through the campaign and into 2017, Trump dishonestly denies any business dealings with Russia. Then the investigations begin, and so does the lying about the Moscow project, and so does the speculation about its possible role in Trump’s embrace of Putin. The Russian president knew Trump and Cohen were lying and could expose them (the kompromat theory)? Trump still hopes to do the project and make the money? As he said himself, if he hadn’t won, “why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
The awful thing is that BuzzFeed’s potential game-changer wasn’t the only shocking information that came out Thursday. The Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen offered a tech firm $50,000 to rig CNBC and Drudge poll results in favor of Trump — at Trump’s direction, Cohen claimed in a tweet after the report appeared. We also learned that many more migrant children were separated from their parents than originally known. A day earlier, a top Housing and Urban Development official quit, in part over Trump attempts to divert Puerto Rico hurricane aid to Florida and Texas, based on his false claim that Puerto Rico was using the money to pay off its debt. As Vox noted Thursday, Congress directed the money to Puerto Rico so it would have been illegal to take it away. This came the same week the Washington Post reported that Trump has gone to great lengths to hide details of his talks with Putin. And that was a day after the New York Times report that when Trump fired Comey, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president had been influenced or compromised by Russia.The Trump presidency has seemed unsustainable since the day it began. Yet two years later, Trump is still in office and moving steadily toward realizing the deeply pessimistic vision he laid out in his inaugural address. Each new court filing and investigative report is a step toward making it stop. And each Republican who breaks with Trump can help. In times of trouble, when things get scary, “look for the helpers,” Mister Rogers said. We’re looking at you, Republicans, and hoping. Hard.
President Trump and his defenders are spiking the football as if they were heading to the Super Bowl after the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III publicly disputed a BuzzFeed report that Trump had instructed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump even went so far as to thank Mueller for “coming out with a statement,” saying, “I very much appreciate that.” Yes, this is the same Mueller whom Trump disparages as the leader of 13 or 17 (the number varies) “Angry Democrats” who are engaged in a “WITCH HUNT!” Turns out that Mueller is not engaged in a witch hunt but a fact hunt. His willingness to set the record straight even when it helps Trump indicates his fundamental integrity — something that Trump implicitly admits by citing Mueller as an impartial authority.
But Trump should not take too much solace from Mueller’s cryptic correction. BuzzFeed may well have been wrong in writing that Trump personally told Cohen to lie (although the publication still stands by its article). But Cohen himself admitted in his sentencing plea that his lie to Congress was “in accordance with Client-1’s directives.” So while the special counsel’s team might not have evidence that Trump personally told Cohen to lie, it’s not disputing Cohen’s claim that his false testimony was coordinated with Trump’s aides in furtherance of the president’s own lies. Trump has repeatedly denied doing business with Russia. Now his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, admits that Client-1 was pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow through the fall of 2016 — in other words, long after it was common knowledge that the Russians were hacking Democratic Party computers. Trump might just have dodged accusations that he actively suborned perjury, but what he did was bad enough — he concealed his business dealings with a hostile foreign power that was helping him to win the presidency.
That BuzzFeed might have gotten some part of the story wrong hardly exonerates Trump. While BuzzFeed’s disputed report does make the rest of the press look bad by association, we should remember how much the media have gotten right. Thanks to intrepid reporting we know that the Trump campaign tried to change the language of the Republican platform to be less critical of Russia; that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, got millions of dollars from pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine; that Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had secret conversations with the Russian ambassador and then lied to the FBI; that Trump pressured FBI Director James B. Comey to shut down the investigation of Flynn; that Trump told Russian diplomats that firing “nut job” Comey eased pressure on Russia; that the high command of the Trump campaign met with a Russian representative promising dirt on Hillary Clinton; that Trump repeatedly tried to fire Mueller; that Trump tried to hide details of his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin from his own aides; and that the FBI investigated Trump as a possible Russian asset. And those are only some of the major revelations about the Trump-Russia connection. Non-Russia-related scoops include Trump’s reference to “shithole” African countries, his alleged involvement in tax fraud and foundation fraud, and his own aides’ disparagement of him as a “moron” and an “idiot.”
The Trump-Russia story is hard to report, because both sides are so secretive and deceptive. But what’s striking is how few scoops have been revealed to be wrong — especially now that we know Mueller’s office will sometimes steer reporters off what it believes to be an erroneous allegation. A few attention-grabbing articles — e.g., the Guardian report that Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or the McClatchy report that Cohen met with a Russian representative in Prague — remain uncorroborated by other outlets. When that happens, news organizations such as The Post make clear that the reporting is unverified. Maybe they shouldn’t mention the allegations at all, but it’s hard to see how they can be ignored when they circulate so widely online — and when members of Congress are commenting on them, as they did after BuzzFeed’s article appeared last week.
The press and politicos would be well advised take a deep breath and not pounce breathlessly on every new story claiming wrongdoing by Trump. But occasional blunders should not distract from the larger truth: The Trump era has been a golden age of reporting. Trump rages against the “fake media” not because they get so much wrong but because they get so much right that he would rather keep hidden. Do reporters get the facts wrong occasionally? Of course. And then they apologize and set the record straight — as Post reporter Dave Weigel did after he mistakenly posted a picture on Twitter of an empty arena that gave the impression that hardly anyone was attending a Trump rally. That stands in stark contrast to Trump’s pattern, which is to repeat lies long after they have been corrected. It’s a little rich to hear Trump say that the media have “lost tremendous credibility.” The media have a lot more credibility than a president who averages 16.5 falsehoods a day.
Using the same subtlety of mind employed by the vice president, we, too, discover the many uncanny similarities between Trump and King:
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigated King. James B. Comey’s FBI investigated Trump. The National Security Agency eavesdropped on King. Trump said he had his phones tapped by President Barack Obama. King wrote the famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Many of Trump’s former advisers are facing jail time. King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Trump boasts that he is more popular among Republicans than Lincoln (“I beat our Honest Abe”). King was stabbed, stoned, firebombed and shot. Trump believes “no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly” than he. King fought against the Vietnam War. Trump avoided the Vietnam War with bone spurs, then said avoiding venereal disease was his “personal Vietnam.” King dreamed that “the crooked places shall be made straight.” Trump warned about Crooked Hillary.
King wanted his kids not to “be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Trump, in a similar vein, proclaimed that his daughter has “got the best body ” and is “very voluptuous.” King was the greatest orator of his era. Trump says: “I have the best words.” King was the foremost civil rights figure of his age. Trump has learned that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” King was president of his class in divinity school. Trump says that “nobody reads the Bible more than me.” King was Time’s Man of the Year. Trump’s golf resorts displayed fake Time covers with Trump’s face on them until he won the distinction legitimately. King imagined “little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” Trump declared: “Look at my African American over here.” Norway granted King the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump wants “more people from places like Norway” rather than “shithole” African countries.
King observed that “nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Trump, of similar belief, declared that he is “like, really smart” and “a very stable genius.” Admittedly, Trump differs with King on some minor, technical points. King was defined by civil disobedience. Trump thinks “it’s embarrassing for the country to allow protesters.” King believed passionately in nonviolence. Trump promised to pay the legal fees of people who “knock the crap out of” protesters at his events. And nothing fulfills King’s dream like miles and miles of concrete (or steel!) barrier keeping out poor, dark-skinned people. King said: “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.” Trump says: “We must build the wall!” King said “hate is too great a burden to bear.” Trump feels the same — which is why he says he is building the wall out of “love.”
One of the more peculiar political phenomena of the last few years has been the rise of “woke conservatives,” sometimes called “Never Trumpers.” These are old-school conservatives — like Bill Kristol, founder of the now-defunct magazine the Weekly Standard, and Washington Post columnist Max Boot — who have become the self-appointed citadels of a dying brand of conservatism in the Trump era. Many of them, individually, have done quite well, raising their pundit profiles and commanding plenty of media attention. As a group, though, they’ve so far failed to accomplish their main objective: stopping Trump. Indeed, since Trump’s election in 2016, the Republican Party — and conservatism more generally — has been thoroughly Trumpified. A big reason for this is right-wing media, which has become increasingly insular and invested in Trump’s political success. In response to this, a group of Never Trumpers, including Kristol, just launched a new website called the Bulwark. Their goal, stated clearly on the site, is “to push back against the moral and intellectual corruption that now poses an existential threat to conservatism as a viable political force.” According to the Bulwark’s editor-in-chief, Charlie Sykes, that means resisting both the left and a conservative movement led by “grifters and trolls” in right-wing media. I reached out to Sykes, who published the 2017 book How the Right Lost Its Mind, to talk about what’s happened to conservatism and how he plans to save it from Trumpism. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
I’m someone who has spent a good deal of time in the center of this transformation of conservative media from being a legitimate alternative voice to becoming an alternative-reality silo. Today, most conservative media functions as a massive fog machine for its audience. How all this happened is a pretty long story, but I think as our politics has become more tribalized, the media has started to mirror that tribalization more and more. But conservative media is really exceptional here. The funny thing is that conservatives spent years mocking the idea of “safe spaces,” and yet that’s exactly what their media has become — a safe space for their worldviews. It’s a place where they can go to have their biases confirmed over and over again. If they happen to hear something that’s uncomfortable or disturbing from the mainstream media, they can click on Fox News and be immediately comforted and have their anger turned back on the true boogeyman — the left. So that’s the situation we now find ourselves in: Conservative consumers have been conditioned to have their biases constantly reinforced, and they’re increasingly intolerant of dissenting voices. Is it any surprise, then, that they’ve surrendered so easily to Donald Trump? Is is it any surprise that the conservative intellectual infrastructure has been so heavily degraded?
No matter how you look at it, it’s hard not to fall back on the gullibility of the audience here, which obviously doesn’t speak well of the conservative movement. But conservative media has become dumber and meaner and it would not be successful without the willing support of the audience. But the vast majority of conservative media right now is not filled with intellectuals. They don’t traffic in ideas. They traffic in memes and in narratives and in anecdotes, which is why Donald Trump is their most perfect creation. His whole way of doing politics mimics talk radio and the way he frames issues is the way right-wing media has been framing issues for years. Think about how Trump talks about almost any issue: He picks a couple of misleading anecdotes, isolates a clear enemy, picks a fight with that enemy, and then turns every issue around to whataboutism — meaning “look at what the other side is doing, look at how crooked Hillary is, or look at how corrupt Mueller is.” These are all just the staples of conservative media.
I think it’s going to take a very, very long time for conservatism to wipe the stain of Trumpism off — and it may not be able to. In the long term, I think conservatism will always have a place as a moderator of radical change. Its real heart and soul is in reacting to destabilizing changes, as opposed to being a mainly positive ideology. But I suspect that the whole project of creating a conservative intellectual infrastructure might have run its course. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I’m just not sure. Maybe the one good thing about the current mess is that it’s forcing conservatives to rethink their dogmas and really question what’s going on. Whatever form of conservatism emerges out of this will not be the conservatism of Ronald Reagan or the libertarianism of Milton Friedman. It will look different and hopefully be more responsive to the actual needs of the real world, without the sort of ugly bigotry we’re seeing now. It’s also possible that the conservative movement and the GOP will just become a white-identity party, in which case I think we’re doomed. I think so, but we’re hoping at the Bulwark to stand in opposition to this and say, “We’re not going along for this.” We’re hoping to salvage what we can, because the next couple of years are truly pivotal, and we need all the rationality we can get.
Miller and Mulvaney’s whispers into Trump’s ear are amplified by conservative media. When, in the week before the shutdown, the president seemed ready to accept a stopgap spending measure that would have kept the government open, there was a furious backlash from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and the hosts of Fox & Friends. The Fox presenters Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs continue to pressure Trump to stand his ground, warning that he will otherwise lose the loyalty of his base and with it his hopes of re-election. Limbaugh said this week: “Trump is assuring everyone he’s not gonna cave on this, and I hope he doesn’t.” Coulter told Vice News Tonight: “He is dead in the water if he doesn’t build that wall. Dead, dead, dead.”
It was the kind of argument that seems to be working on Trump. Even one of Fox News’s own political analysts, Juan Williams, said on air this week: “You should go listen to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, because they’re running this government. And they have forced this president into a trap.” Cassino, the political science professor, said: “Fox News has been telling the president to stick to his guns and using the caravans in Central America as a chance to push that. We’ve also seen a lot of talk on Fox about Democratic divisions, suggesting that the Democrats are going to fold. Of course MSNBC and CNN are saying the opposite.” Owned by Rupert Murdoch, Fox News has reduced coverage of the shutdown over the past two weeks, Cassino noted, while Hannity spent two nights bashing Trump’s election rival Hillary Clinton. “It suggests they’re playing it down and don’t see a way to make it positive for the president,” Cassino said.
Often Fox seems to be regurgitating Miller and Mulvaney’s talking points. Cassino observed: “It seems we have reciprocal causation. It’s hard to tell which is the dog and which is the tail. People in the White House know one of the best ways to influence the president is to get on Fox.” Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, suggested that Tea Party Republicans, Fox News, crowds at Trump’s rallies and his love of fighting were all contributing to the current impasse. “He likes the drama of it: a president taking a heroic stand on television. It influences him and might even make him dig in more. He does not want to turn on TV and read a chyron saying he’s conceded. Then there are crowds he spoke to in the campaign. He’s talked about this wall and boxed himself in. He hears those voices in his head and doesn’t want to give in.”
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