Lance Mannion: Nothing nice SHOULD be said. Not one nice thing. Even if there was one nice thing to say

Adapted from the Twitter feed Monday, May 27, 2019, and from the notebooks. Typed up Monday morning, June 3.

I don’t know. This doesn’t look like a rock star’s welcome to me. Looks more like the standard red carpet escort heads of state afford one another on state visits. But YMMV. Japanese Emperor Naruhito escorts Donald and Melania Trump from Air Force One, May 24, 2019. Reuters photo by Jonathan Ernst via Paris Match.

O'ROURKE: --because of this trade war, because of these tariffs. They're no longer able to make a profit doing what they do best and they will not be able to pass these farms and ranches on to the next generation. So yes, in the short term we absolutely have to make sure that they're okay, but we should never have been in this place in the first place. And what we see right now is yet another example of President Trump being both the arsonist who created this problem in the first place and the firefighter who wants the credit for addressing it through this bailout.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Who is America's greatest adversary right now?

O'ROURKE: We face a number of- of adversaries on- on the world stage from ISIS to- to North Korea to Iran. And yet the adversary that has successfully invaded this country through our democracy, Russia, through their leader, Vladimir Putin, is the country and the person who this president holds closest. After the Mueller Report was released our president called Vladimir Putin, spent an hour on the phone with him, described the resulting report as a hoax giving Putin a green light to further interfere in our democracy. We've got the most dangerous person who's ever held office in the White House right now who's inviting the involvement of our- our greatest adversaries. And we've got to be able to stand up not as Democrats, but as Americans to this challenge. And so I want to make sure that we do that.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Can you say one nice thing about President Trump?

---from “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan’s interview with Beto O’Rourke on the edition that aired Sunday morning, May 26, 2019.

What? Brennan’s asking O’Rourke to say something nice thing about the guy he’s just called the most dangerous person who’d ever held office in the White House? The way O’Rourke framed it, this makes Trump worse than not just Richard Nixon. It makes him worse than Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger. (I’m not sure if Aaron Burr had his own office in what was then called the Executive Mansion.) What nice thing is there to say about such a villain?

Before I get into the stupidity of the question, let’s take a look at the stupid in Brennan’s intro to the show:

President Trump received a rock star welcome from the host country of one of America's closest allies. So far it's been a weekend of trade meetings with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe; plus, some summer recreation Japanese style. The trip appears to be cooling off what has been a fiery start to summer back in Washington…

And that's what worries intelligence officials as Attorney General Barr now has access to some of the country's top secrets as he opens an investigation into how the Russia probe began. The President authorized fifteen hundred troops to the Middle East in light of potential new threats from Iran just after ordering two thousand out of Syria, and he did an end run around Congress by following through on an earlier promise to sell arms to the Saudis. And then there's that feud with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…

We'll also look at the crisis at the border.

Sigh.

Where do I start?

The stupidity here isn’t Brennan’s personally. It’s institutional. The premise of the Sunday bobblehead shows is that something useful is accomplished by a panel of smart, savvy, serious, and reasonable professionals sitting at a table yakking in serious and reasonable tones about the news and that none of those smart, serious, reasonable professionals will be self-interested, self-serving, or self-promoting, that none of them will play to the camera, and all of them know what they’re talking about. Consequently, the words Brennan, as host to the smart, serious, reasonable guests, uses to introduce the yakking must be as smart, serious, and reasonable as her guests.. What it is is conventional---cliched, drained of feeling which drains it of meaning, “objective”, “balanced”, and expressive of the received opinion and collective wisdom circulating among political establishmentarians, institutionalists, and their hirelings, underlings, fixers, and courtiers who are the journalists’ sources and therefore the providers of their bread and butter. In short, the words are designed to make the insiders feel smart. The purpose isn’t to make things clear. It’s to make it sound like the wizards and sachems know what they’re doing and have things safely in hand. Which is, of course, a lie.

That intro is made up of a string of lies.

Words perpetuating and reinforcing a lie are lies.

Pundit-ese is an exercise in elision, euphemism, equivocation, false equivalencies, and evasions, all of it alternate world building---a village-elder approved alternate version of this world, versimilitudinous but sanitized of passion, absent of self-criticism, with real dangers reduced to “concerns”, and disagreements on matters of life and death dismissed as “controversies”, and intractable problems treated as manageable as long as the smart, serious, reasonable people are left alone to manage them.

The alternate world described in Brennan’s intro is dealing with problems, issues, and controversies similar to ones roiling Washington today but with the significant difference of Trump’s not being president. Not the Trump we know and love, at any rate.

Our Trump is missing because the effect of those stories on him and his effect on them is missing.

Take his supposed “rock star welcome” to Japan.

What does that even mean? Rock star welcome? It doesn't mean anything that happened on this trip. It’s a leftover cliché from 2016 and the fact that it was a cliché is another piece of evidence that the political media was not doing its job during the campaign. They weren’t covering Trump as a presidential candidate. They weren’t covering him, period. They were covering a celebrity named “Donald Trump” whose “rock star” status entranced them. It was also useful for portraying Hillary as an inauthentic scold nobody liked. See, no screaming mobs of red-faced, racist middle-aged white men turned out for her. What were those mobs screaming about and for? Same thing teenage girls in 1964 were screaming about when the Beatles came to America, I guess.

Trump didn’t get a rock-star’s welcome, or if he did reporters on the scene didn’t notice it. I can’t find any photographs showing it. He received a cordial welcome from Emperor Naruhito and a slightly warmer one from Prime Minister Abe, the only one among the leaders of our closest allies who still likes him. And the basis for their working friendship is Trump’s handling of North Korea and China, which hasn’t been all that adept. The visit to Japan was all for show, anyway. Nothing significant was accomplished on the economic or diplomatic front. Nothing along those lines was expected. Ostensibly Trump went to Japan to pay his respect to the new emperor. But you know he went with the same goal he has when he goes anywhere---self-aggrandizement. His object was to make himself feel loved. I suppose there was a cultural accomplishment, of a sort. Those pictures of him grinning his cheesy car dealer’s grin as he presented a four and a half foot loving cup to sumo wrestling champion Asanoyama probably pleased sumo fans the way a picture of Abe with LeBron James would please basketball fans in L.A. Of course he made it about himself by inventing an award and naming it after himself--- “The President’s Cup” he calls it, but there’s only ever been one President in his mind----and the honor of which was that he was presenting it.

As for the trip “[appearing] to be cooling off what has been a fiery start to summer back in Washington”: That’s a gratuitous statement, at best, but as Brennan must know, it doesn’t reflect reality. Whatever cooling off there was was going to be of short duration. Trump can’t let things lie quiet. He’s compelled to undo whatever good he’s done himself almost as soon as he does it. Sure enough, the next day he stood next to Abe and insulted Joe Biden, calling on Kim Jong Un to back him up. And then came the news about the USS John McCain.

Brennan also knew Trump’s next big trip was going to take him to Great Britain where he was not going to get a rock star’s welcome. Giant protests were already being planned. The Trump Baby Blimp would probably fly. The Queen was going to be chilly. He disgusts her. He doesn’t dare visit his own golf course in Scotland. The only Brits who’d be glad to see him are the Brexiters and the Little Britain types among them. And, Trump being Trump, he’d pave his own way to diplomatic and public relations hell with ill intentions. It’s not likely to have come as a surprise to Brennan that, true to form, he’s insulted Meghan Markle and tried to pick a fight with the Mayor of London by way of a Hi, how do you do?

“And that's what worries intelligence officials as Attorney General Barr now has access to some of the country's top secrets as he opens an investigation into how the Russia probe began…” equals “Trump is determined to abuse his power to punish his political enemies even if it means compromising our national security.”

“The President authorized fifteen hundred troops to the Middle East in light of potential new threats from Iran…” equals “This is Trump’s half-assed and half-hearted attempt to start a war just to placate the lunatic John Bolton who seems to scare him.”

“And then there's that feud with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…” There’s no feud. It takes two parties to have a feud. Trump threw a Twitter fit because Pelosi hurt his feelings. And this happened because Trump himself blew up an infrastructure bill the artist of the deal supposedly wanted because he couldn’t leverage his way out of Congressional investigations into the many scandals of his own making. But calling what’s going on a feud between himself and Pelosi allows the political media to retreat into their comfort zone. It’s the usual he said-she said-process and personality-politics as a game-nothing real is at stake here sort of story that lets them relax and have fun without mental strain or endangering their invitations to the best parties, instead of the story of a burgeoning Constitutional crises with Trump as the villain.

Now, onto Beto and Brennan’s stupid question.

In context the question might not have been a stupid a question. It might not have been a question at all. Journalists routinely say things in the course of an interview meant simply to keep the person being interviewed talking. Sentences ending in question marks are verbal nods of the head intended to let the source know the journalist is paying attention and taking it in. Brennan might have said “Go on” or “I’m listening” instead and it would have been the same thing.

She might have been playing devil’s advocate too. A role journalists routine adopt to keep the conversational ball rolling or to provoke a sharp and quotable answer. This is an especially useful tactic when the source is a politician speaking politician-ese. But it works on any sources who start meandering or following the script written for them by their PR consultants.

O’Rourke was being sharp and quotable already but Brennan may have hoped he’d be even sharper and more quotable.

“Can you say one nice thing about President Trump?”

“No! What is there nice to say?”

Journalists also ask questions they think the folks at home would ask if they were the ones doing the asking, and they work from the assumption that the folks at home aren’t as informed and as in-the-know as the journalists themselves are. What sound like stupid questions with obvious answers are framed and posed on behalf of people for whom those aren’t stupid questions because how would they know, they have lives, you know? And for whom the answers aren’t obvious because the subject is out of their ken.

“E=mc²? Really? How does that work?” is not a stupid question with an obvious answer if you’re not a physicist.

Or Brennan might have been expressing her own surprise at O’Rourke’s answers to her previous questions. He went hard at Trump. Called him an arsonist who wanted credit for putting out fires he started, at one point.

O’Rourke’s answer was built around a lie. The one nice thing he had to say about Trump was that Trump had signed the VA Mission Act. The law wasn’t of Trump’s devising. He wasn't about to veto it. It passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. He might have vetoed it out of spite or perversity, that’s the way he is. But it wasn’t likely he’d have done it, even if he was tempted, because he wouldn’t have wanted to have had to face the humiliation of having his veto overturned, not on that issue, at any rate. So, yeah, it was nice of him to sign it, I suppose, but then he signed it with a lie and almost immediately his administration went to work fighting funding for it. O’Rourke was doing his own world-building there.

But if Brennan’s question was an expression of Beltway insider etiquette that dictates that nothing bad can be said about fellow members of the club without it being “balanced” by something good. To do otherwise is to acknowledge that the smart, serious, reasonable people aren’t always smart, serious, and reasonable, that the wizards and sachems don’t always know what they’re doing and don’t have things safely in hand, that sometimes there’s nothing good or “nice” to say because the world as it is can be an awful and dangerous place and no amount of yakking on television can fix that.

Under those conditions, it would have been a stupid question even if the subject wasn't Trump. But this is something the political media can't seem to wrap their collective heads around: There is nothing nice to say about Trump.

He's a terrible human being, not just in comparison to our best presidents but even compared to our worst

There's more good to be said about Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon.

He was awful before he ran for President and being President has just given him power and freedom to indulge his worst inclinations, habits, and instincts.

You can't even say “Well, at least he loves his family” because he doesn't show any signs that he does.

He treats Melania as a prop and a trophy. He thinks both his older sons are idiots. He regards Ivanka as a spokesmodel for the TRUMP brand. He ignores Barron and does his best to pretend Tiffany doesn't exist.

And he is not the least good at any part of his job. Not even the purely ceremonial.

And it's not just that he's bad. All the Republicans in Congress are committed to propping him up; 90% of Republican voters are prepared to vote for him again.

So it's not just that Brennan's question was trivial, it was irresponsible because it completely misses the point and probably on purpose.

The point being that Trump is a danger to the country and a menace to the world, and as such there can be nothing nice to say about him. Nothing nice should be said about him. Not even ONE nice thing.

Even if there was one nice thing to say.