“Does anyone remember when Donald Trump wasn’t president?” Senator Roy Blunt (D-Missouri) asked the audience recently at a Capitol Hill seminar sponsored by the law firm Baker-Hostettler.
He was joking. But his comment touched on a phenomenon absent from all the summations of the president’s first 100 days in office: Trump’s sheer presence. He overshadows Washington and the entire political community. He’s omnipresent.
There hasn’t been a president who commands this much attention since FDR. In Washington, no matter what subject a conversation begins on, it winds up being about Trump. I’m exaggerating, but the truth is everything swirls around him.
The media are spellbound. With their penchant for flyspecking everything Trump says and does, they’ve focused the nation’s eyes on him. I’ve tried, but it’s impossible to keep up with what’s printed and said about Trump in the “prestige” media.
Trump didn’t show up at the White House Correspondent’s dinner–an event presidents rarely skip–but he was the center of attention. The comic relief of the evening said he was asked not to focus on Trump, but he did anyway. He couldn’t help himself. And the correspondents praised themselves for standing up to Trump as if their livelihoods depended on it.
Meanwhile, Trump dwarfs other presidents as far as the joke writers for late night TV talk shows are concerned. In the first 100 days, he was the butt of 1,060 jokes, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. This is more jokes than were told about Presidents Obama (936), Bush (546) and Clinton (440) in their first year.
Many of the NeverTrump types who emerged in last year’s campaign are still actively anti-Trump. They can’t let go. That he’s adopted a big chunk of the conservative Republican agenda and picked a conservative Supreme Court nominee hasn’t appeased them.
Trump, by himself, is the biggest force behind his command of the limelight. He’s not called a narcissist for nothing. He’s a different species of president. He tweets, he says whatever he wants (often making press interviews redundant), he punches back at critics, he makes wild claims, and on and on. More often than not, he is interesting.
That doesn’t translate into being persuasive. He drew massive coverage last week when he fired FBI director James Comey. But the longer he dwelt on the matter, the more public support for his action dwindled. As the Washington Free Beacon‘s Matt Continetti wrote, Trump doesn’t “face crises so much as manufacture them.” In the case of Comey, he did just that.
This past week the pace escalated, with a major story dropping like clockwork nearly every day. It feels like weeks ago that the Washington Post reported that Trump revealed classified intelligence to his Russian guests in the Oval Office. It was Monday.
Trump’s dominance can be distorting. Democrats have become exempt from media scrutiny. All that’s required for coverage is to attack Trump and await his response. Should a Republican assail the president or simply quibble with something he said, the greater the coverage.
A final point. Monopolizing public attention doesn’t signal success. I don’t think it advances his agenda. It creates too many enemies: the media, Democrats and the left, non-whites, the rest of the world. His path to success has not been turbocharged.
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That the press takes its cues from Democrats is a longstanding reality. The latest example is the notion that Republicans are in overwhelming danger of losing the House in 2018 because they pushed through legislation to repeal and replace ObamaCare. When Democrats waved bye-bye to Republicans after the House vote, the media took the hint and declared Republicans all but doomed.
Maybe they are. The party that controls the White House loses an average of 32 House seats in the first midterm election of a new president. And Republicans in several dozen districts are already at a disadvantage thanks to Trump’s unpopularity.
But the midterm election is 18 months away. That’s a lifetime in politics. A lot can happen between now and then. Having just announced at that point in the presidential race, Trump was considered unelectable. At things stand now, the plot to kill ObamaCare has barely gotten off the ground. The Senate hasn’t acted. There’s been no House-Senate conference, much less a compromise or Trump’s signature on a bill. So it’s a bit early to write off House Republicans solely on the basis of a House vote to get rid of one of the most dysfunctional and least popular domestic policies of all time.
But ObamaCare has positive poll numbers now. Doesn’t that matter? Yes, but not much. It reminds me of how popular Teddy Kennedy was when he ran against President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination. Chappaquiddick was no longer a problem, that is, until the media focused on it again. And Kennedy never recovered. I suspect ObamaCare won’t either as it continues to collapse.
For this to happen, Republicans will have to remind voters constantly of all ObamaCare’s flaws. This should be easy, but Republicans have often fumbled the health care issue and could again.
Another case of the media subservience to Democrats involved Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats said he was re-election trouble because he wouldn’t hold a hearing for Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. That wasn’t all. Democrats claimed they had a strong candidate against Grassley. The media swallowed the pitch. Grassley, however, was unscathed. He won 60 percent to 36 percent.
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In hindsight, two things larger than generally acknowledged in Trump’s election. One is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McDonnell’s decision to bar consideration, in President Obama’s last year, of a Supreme Court nominee to succeed the late Antonin Scalia. The other the list from which Trump picked his replacement, Neil Gorsuch.
McConnell gave GOP voters a powerful reason to vote for Trump, if only to prevent Clinton from choosing the next justice. And with the list of 21 conservatives from which Trump said he’d name his nominee, a second strong reason for voting for him came into play. It’s unclear how many leery Republicans the list steered to Trump, but enough to keep Hillary out of the White House.
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Recommended reading: Twelve Turning Points of the Second World War by British historian P.M.H. Bell. World War II books these days tend to focus on single battles. In 264 pages, Bell starts with the collapse of France and ends with atomic bombing of Japan. This is a very persuasive book.
