Turning on the ABC radio news each morning over the past four years was one of anticipation. While we slept, what had President Trump been up to? Would the latest be something daring, unusual, unorthodox, audacious, provocative, laudable, outrageous, nasty, hilarious, sensible, absurd, ignorant or a combination of all of them?
It was always unpredictable. It often defied the senses. He shook up politics like never before. But in the new year the morning ABC news bulletins will revert to pedestrian matters out of Washington and no doubt spiced up with a seething outburst or two out of Trump’s gilded Mar-a-Lago among the Florida palms, his new residence. For a change, it will be a stable start to the day for our blood pressure in comparison to what we have become accustomed over breakfast. But still it will be dull and no longer as newsworthy as before.
Trump was not so much a president, but more a showman and an entertainer. He was addicted to television camera lenses, microphones, Twitter and publicity. He was a reminder of a skit during the ’80s showing a Reagan lookalike saying: ‘I’m not a real president. I only play one on tv’.
Nick Bryant, in his book When America Stopped Being Great, recalled how Trump soon after winning four years ago told his aides to treat every day as if it were a television show in which he ‘vanquishes his rivals’. He saw his win in 2016 as not so much a change of power, but ‘the biggest night in television history’.
You must hand it to Trump for his ability to command attention and galvanise not only the masses, but also the media which were as intoxicated with him as he was with them. Even his pandemic briefings drew ratings which thrilled the US tv channels. It was not because he was imparting the latest sobering statistics or that he had reassuring news, as false as it may have been. It was the excitement that he might be unpresidential and fire someone ‘live’ on air or denounce an official or scorn the best medical advice or come up with a virus antidote defying credibility.
He was like America’s answer to Baghdad Bob aka Comical Ali, Saddam Hussein’s spokesman ahead of the Iraq war. He was widely ridiculed for his extravagant claims and threats which provoked the rolling of eyes. But, like Trump, he was always good television.
For a leader of a long-established democracy like the US, there is something shocking and humiliating about tv networks censoring your comments during a ‘live’ broadcast because they were patently untrue or concerned false claims. This was unprecedented until the Trump presidency with his pattern of mythomania also known as pathological lying. For a man who was the victim of, as he saw it, fake news, he dispensed his own variety on an industrial scale.
Nevertheless, the media still revelled in Trump’s attention-seeking nonsense as if mocking and exploiting an irrational person simply because he had entertainment value. The strident Murdoch megaphones on Fox News happily milked his prejudices because that’s where the money was.
Washington correspondents reporting on Trump’s comments did their best to keep a straight face in explaining this theatre of the absurd. You would like to believe it was also true of right-wing supporters in Australia nodding in approval of Trump’s decisions and reasoning, but they had their own conservative reputations devoid of humour to maintain.
It is probably true to say that no president has occupied so much air and print space in Australia – or perhaps anywhere – until Trump came along. In all my time in foreign news, I’ve never known a politician like him to attract so much attention with such ease and free of the obvious influence of spin doctors. It all came naturally to Trump who could play an audience as if they were spellbound by his theatrics.
In 2018, ‘Trump’ was the fourth-most used word in the New York Times, averaging two to three times in every article, including weather, sports and fashion. ‘Trump has ceased to be just a topic of news’, observed the paper.’He seems to be the prism through which we interpret and discuss everything’. Indeed it has been in the past few weeks.
Since Trump came to office in 2017, he has averaged 111 minutes of speaking time a day on top of his avid television viewing, says the Columbia Journalism Review. ‘If people are exhausted, it is no surprise’. But the 2020 voting turn-out – the highest in Republican Party history – indicated half of America still wanted even more. Indeed he has been an El Dorado for the revenue of major US tv and print media, including late night talk show hosts
But it is the record voting MAJORITY which may stain how he is to be remembered – a president widely derided for his ignorance, mangled English, dubious claims, outright lies, diplomatic belligerence and empty bluster. At least, he will be associated also with a rare presidential triumph: he did not take the US into a foreign war even though he came close with Iran.
Just as I miss the ABC morning 0745 news bulletin, I lament the impending absence of its most prominent subject in the past four years. But there is already talk of a 2024 campaign…
John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.
Comments
4 responses to “A lament for the passing of the Trump era”
John,
You hit the proverbial nail squarely on the head. I am reading the final chapters of Nick Bryant’s excellent analysis of the decline of the USA. Like others have mentioned, I will be glad to hear and watch ‘real news’ about far more important issues rather than Trump’s idiotic ‘sprays’ of invective. Biden will have a massive task ahead of him. Like Malcolm Turnbull had his detractors led by Tony Abbott always attacking from the rear, Joe Biden will have to deal with Trump zealots all through his Term. Sadly I don’t think Trump is a spent force yet but he will have years of litigation ahead to keep him occupied.
An excellent article. Whatever we think about the now lame-duck president, there can be no doubt the media loved him. As Sean Kelly writes in today’s Age, he enabled serious policy issues not to be debated as so many journalists focussed on Trump’s style, not his complete lack of substance. Politics as theatre has perhaps reached it zenith–does it have a nadir in Trump?–, but regrettably it has attracted a huge audience which enjoys “mythic narrative” built around the exemplar of a single individual, rather than the exposition and critique of important policy ideas, which require critical appreciation, not just an immersion in races imagery.
Given the immense problems the world faces–all centred on the realisation that the environment is not just an economy–one can only hope that the media will engage in some critical thought and deconstruct the theatre politics can become.
John, I’m not going to miss him at all. Then I’m probably not going to get the chance to. He has another two months to flail around, wrecking and destroying, and even then probably the Secret Service will have to evict him. I’ve never known such a continually malevolent influence on Western politics. Even though Biden won, thank goodness, the fact that 70 million Americans voted for him, KNOWING what he is, leaves me tired and depressed.
It was such a pleasure to wake up this morning and not hear anything about number 45, except that he was on a golf course somewhere. What a pleasure to listen to sensible adult discussions about the coronavirus, climate change and the recession, without the tweeted static.
What a pleasure it was to see Australia’s PM still banging his climate denial drum, and knowing that the rest of the World reckons Australia is on the nose. Nothing short of an election will change this. Bring. it. on.