Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s corrupt decision to stop the counting of ballots in Florida and award the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. Below is what I wrote for The Boston Phoenix. I think my critique of the media has held up, but I was way off on the Supreme Court, which has devolved into a serious threat to the Constitution. And, looking back, I think a lot started to go wrong with this country as a result of the court’s anti-democratic edict.
How a passive media helped Bush win
The Boston Phoenix | Dec. 14, 2000
As the Phoenix went to press on Wednesday morning, it appeared that the post-campaign was, at long last, over. But before Al Gore makes his final disappearance, it’s worth thinking about how the media helped legitimize George W. Bush’s outrageous — and ultimately successful — effort to stop all the votes from being counted and thus claim an unearned victory.
Despite the 24/7 treatment on the all-news cable channels, the Florida fiasco was not, at root, a media story. It was too big, too important, and too fast-moving for the media to be able to shape (and distort) events. That made it very different from such past spectacles as the Monica Lewinsky saga and the O.J. Simpson trial.
On the latest edition of the public radio program “On the Media,” co-host Micah Loewinger engages in a wonderfully contentious interview with right-wing influencer Cam Higby, a newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps. Higby is among a gaggle of MAGA promoters who’ve moved in after actual reporters walked out rather than sign Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s directive that they agree not to report any unauthorized news.
For most of his first term and now his second, Donald Trump has been deeply unpopular. Both The New York Times and polling analyst Nate Silver track his approval/disapproval ratings based on an average of polls.
As of Monday, Trump was at 55% disapprove/41% approve using the Times’ methodology. Silver has him at a nearly identical 55.4% disapproval/41% approval. There are others who do the same thing, but the Times and Silver may be the best known.
Yet despite everything, Trump’s numbers don’t move as much as you might think they would given the corrupt and chaotic nature of his presidency. Indeed, on Monday, Trump’s disapproval rating actually nudged down by a statistically insignificant amount, from 56% to 55%. And no matter what, a rock-solid minority of just over 40% sticks with him. How could this be?
This morning I’d like to suggest one possible explanation. I’m not a polling expert, but this is obvious and starting us right in the face. The Times’ average is based on a number of polls, some of which it regards as highly reliable, some of which it doesn’t. And, for the most part, Trump is doing considerably worse when measured solely by highly reliable polls.
For instance, the most recent Gallup poll shows Trump at minus 24, with 60% disapproving of his job performance and just 36% approving. The American Research Group has him at minus 27, with 62% approval/35% disapproval. Beacon Research/Shaw and Co. reports that Trump is at minus 17, Ipsos at minus 22.
Now, as I said, the Times showed Trump’s disapproval rating ticked down slightly on Monday. And when you look at the chart, you see that it’s because a poll from TIPP Insights was added to the mix. TIPP, which does not meet the Times’ criteria for reliability, had Trump at just minus 4, based on 43% approval/47% disapproval.
Some of the less reliable polls, especially YouGov, do show Trump with a disapproval gap as wide as the reliable polls. But when you scan down the list, you see a number of less reliable polls showing that Trump’s disapproval rating is on the narrow side — Morning Consult (minus 7), InsiderAdvantage (minus 5), Big Data Poll (minus 5) and RMG Research (minus 7).
As I said, I’m not a polling expert, and it’s likely that the Times has weighted the reliable polls more heavily than the more dubious surveys. But Gallup, in particular, has been the gold standard for generations, and maybe we ought to take them more seriously than an index that includes both the good and the bad.
Why does it matter? Because if Trump is losing support, then the likelihood increases that House and Senate Republicans will be willing to stand up to him at least occasionally. Until recently, the Republicans have been utterly craven, cheering enthusiastically for Trump’s every incoherent pronouncement.
But now we’re starting to see a little movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one sign. Another is that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker the other day actually referred to Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of defense” rather than his cosplay role as the “secretary of war.”
In case you haven’t seen it yet, Pete Hegseth, our seriously deranged secretary of defense, posted this on Twitter Sunday night. As of this moment, it’s still up.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered that two injured men clinging to a boat in the Caribbean that U.S. forces had just blown apart be killed in a second attack. Experts have already said that Hegseth could be charged with murder, war crimes or both.
As you might expect, Hegseth’s shockingly demented tweet is inspiring a host of memes. Here’s one:
Donald Trump has denied that Hegseth ordered the killings, but we’re starting to see the first stirrings of Republicans Congress demanding accountability. We’ll see how far that goes.
The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.
In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.
The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has been harshly criticized for his handling of the government shutdown. Photo (cc) 2024 by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
We’ve been hashing out the pros and cons of ending the government shutdown on Facebook this week. My position has been that the Democrats shouldn’t have caved, but that it was a close call. Certainly the shutdown couldn’t have gone on too much longer, especially with families in danger of going hungry and federal workers not receiving paychecks.
More than anything, I didn’t see any possible way that the Democrats could achieve their stated objective of forcing Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to extend health-care subsidies. The government could have stayed shut for six more months and that wouldn’t have changed.
It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.
“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,”by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.
Donald Trump is wreaking so much havoc and engaging in so much corruption that it’s hard to stay focused. But I urge all of us to keep our eye on this: He is killing civilians from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean and, now, in the Pacific. The number is up to 43 victims.
Charlie Savage, who is one of The New York Times’ most perceptive reporters, has written a news analysis that places Trump’s actions in perspective. With Trump’s apologists perpetually engaging in whatabout-whatabout-whatabout, Savage notes that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went out of their way to come up with legal justifications for drone strikes against Al Qaeda (in Obama’s case) and for torturing terrorism suspects (in Bush’s).
You may not like what Obama and Bush did (I certainly don’t), but the point is that they understood the rule of law had to be asserted, even if they were paying it little more than lip service. By contrast, Trump is just killing people who may or may not be drug smugglers and who have the right to be arrested and tried, not “blown apart, burned alive or drowned,” as Savage puts it. He writes:
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
Savage adds: “In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime.”
Trump might ponder that one of his favorite former dictators, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, is on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for accusations that he was involved in dozens of killings in an attempt to crack down on illegal drugs.
You don’t have to draw a convoluted analogy. Trump is doing exactly the same thing that Duterte is accused of doing, and he’s reveling in it publicly. It is the worst thing he’s done as president, and that’s saying a lot.
Did Donald Trump get excited about sending troops into Portland, Oregon, because he was watching 5-year-old footage on Fox News depicting violence in the streets? It would appear that the answer is yes.
Independent journalist Philip Bump, part of the Washington Post diaspora, reported that Fox ran B-roll from Portland during segments with Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sept. 27 showing a violent protest in Portland that included fires, what appears to be tear gas, and demonstrators squaring off with law enforcement. But the footage is dated June 2020. Who knows if Trump was paying attention?
Bump offers this as well:
In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.
“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”
Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.
Mike Masnick writes at TechDirt, “The President of the United States — who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth — is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his ‘people’ told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.” Masnick adds:
So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.
That’s terrifying!
But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies.
Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports that Trump activated 200 National Guard troops on Friday in order to respond to the non-existent violence. City and state officials sued to stop the deployment, and a ruling is expected later today.
Jill Lepore at the 2023 Kentucky Author Forum. Photo (cc) by uoflphoto3.
Over the weekend I finished the audio version of Jill Lepore’s monumental survey of American history, “These Truths,” published in 2018. At 960 pages or, in my case, 29 hours, the book is a major commitment, but it’s well worth it.
That said, one thing I learned was that I already knew a lot about American history, so much of “These Truths” was familiar to me. There’s nothing startlingly revisionistic about it, but it nevertheless works as a skillfully executed and gracefully written overview of the past 500 years, from Columbus to Trump. I especially appreciated her extensive treatment of Black and women’s history.
