Michele Kearney's Snuffysmith's Blog

February 7, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's The Donald in the News!
Crimes of the Trump Era (a Preview)
The 25/8 News Cycle Is Already Rolling, But the Looting of America Hasn’t Really Begun
By Tom Engelhardt
It started in June 2015 with that Trump Tower escalator ride into the presidential race to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” (“But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead, there's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead, don't feel like Satan, but I am to them...") In a sense the rockin’ has never stopped and by now the world, free or not, has been rocked indeed.  No one, from Beijing to Mexico City, Baghdad to Berlin, London to Washington could question that.
Who today remembers that, in those initial moments of his campaign, Donald Trump was already focused on the size of his first (partially hired) crowd?  (“This is beyond anybody’s expectations.  There’s been no crowd like this...”)  And he’s been consistently himself ever since -- less a strong man than a bizarrely high-strung one.  In the process, while becoming president, he emerged as a media phenomenon of a sort we’ve never seen before.
First, it was those billions of dollars in advertising the media forked over gratis during the race for the Republican nomination by focusing on whatever he did, said, or tweeted, day after day, in a way that was new in our world.  By the time he hit the campaign trail against Hillary Clinton, he was the ultimate audience magnet and the cameras and reporters were fused to him, so coverage only ballooned, as it did again during the transition months.  Now, of course, his presidency is the story of the second -- each second of every day -- giving us two-plus weeks of coverage the likes of which are historically unique.
Think of it as the 25/8 news cycle.  From that distant June to now, though it’s never stopped, somehow we have yet to truly come to grips with it.  Never in the history of the media has a single figure -- one human being -- been able to focus the “news” in this way, making himself the essence of all reporting. He’s only been banished from the headlines and the screen for relatively brief periods, usually when Islamic terrorist groups or domestic “lone wolves” struck, as in San Bernardino, Paris, or Orlando, and, given his campaign, that worked no less well for his purposes than being the center of attention, as it will for his presidency.
The Never-Ending Presidency of Donald Trump (Has Barely Begun)
Nineteen months later, Trump's personality, statements, tweets, speeches, random thoughts, passing comments, complaints, gripes, and of course, actions are the center of everything.  One man’s narcissism gains new meaning when inflated to a societal level.  Yes, at certain moments -- the assassination of John F. Kennedy, O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco chase, the 9/11 attacks -- a single event or personality has overwhelmed everything else and taken the news by storm.  But never has one person been able to do this through thick and thicker, through moments of actual news and moments when nothing whatsoever is happening to him.
As an example, consider the New York Times, the newspaper that both Donald Trump’s ascendant adviser Steve Bannon and I have been reading faithfully all these years. At the moment, Trump or people and events related to him monopolize its front page in a way that's beyond rare.  He now regularly sweeps up four or five of its six or so top headlines daily, and a staggering six to ten full, often six-column pages of news coverage inside -- and that’s not even counting the editorial and op-ed pages, which these days are a riot of Trumpery.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176240/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_it%27s_a_bird..._it%27s_a_plane..._it%27s_the_donald_in_the_news%21/#more