Road Rage at MSG
“How the hell does Kamala compete with this?”
I had no intention of watching Trump’s Madison Square Garden 1939 Bund rally. But I was sucked in halfway through in spite of myself and found it genuinely terrifying. As my friend, history prof and author Simon Schama, texted me, “There's something about their cursing and fuck-loaded obscenities that is SO Brown Shirt…It's road rage translated into politics.”
In a 19,000-seat venue, Trump swells like a popadom and fills the screen with the hugeness of his hate, the expertise of his taunts, the relish in his own rolling thunder of lies. Like all the great demagogues, he knows how to pivot from hate to humor, mocking his opponent’s reliance on teleprompters, pumped up like Castro on crystal meth.
How the hell does Kamala compete with this? You could hear the anxiety in Senator John Fetterman’s voice in his excellent interview in the New York Times when he talked about the sheer intensity of the Trump fan base in Pennsylvania. At Kamala’s rallies, we see the same ol’ cast of Hollywood celebrities like the Boss and John Legend who always show up for Democrats. (Ok, Beyoncé was a coup.) But Elon Musk, as Fetterman put it, is Iron Man Tony Stark. For Trump’s base of red-meat male voters, the transgressive, disruptive, superstar rocket man is even more exciting than Trump himself. (Be consoled by how their two gale-force egos will inevitably clash.)
I long to graft the seismic Michelle Obama’s charisma and self-assurance onto the valiant, striving vice president. Michelle spoke of the wearying pressure Kamala is under, as women always are, to prove her perfection, while Trump’s litany of outrages gets a pass. But when the former First Lady blew away a Michigan stadium with her oratory during her reproductive rights speech on Saturday, she rivaled Trump in her effectiveness. It inevitably made Kamala come off like the understudy when she stood next to her on stage.
There is much about Kamala I have come to appreciate over the last weeks. I love her evolving presidential seriousness when she speaks with the press on the tarmac. (Her pantsuits somehow have an Oval Office polish.) I love the rare video vignette of her knocking back a beer with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer at a bar in Kalamazoo. Seeing Gretchen with her 40s movie star looks and Kamala with her sterner, talking-point glamour, the two of them looked like the leads of a new Netflix streamer about Washington power women I very much want to watch.
Political theater today needs the unplugged look we saw at the Kalamazoo bar, but it has to be, not seem, authentic. The high horse media mocked Trump’s stunt serving up McDonald’s French fries but, performance-wise, it was inspired. He looked so bonhomous doing it, handing out the quivering, overstuffed cartons of fries to the carloads of Trumpsters at the drive-thru window. Is it some female curse that women can't break loose in the public sphere with the same ebullience as men? The last female politician who could was Texas Governor Ann Richards in the 80s with her big brassy charisma, piled-up silver bouffant, and ball-busting bon mots that made the room roar. “Poor George [W. Bush],” she drawled. “He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Or is it simply that performance value is irrelevant in a country that has still never elected a woman as president? The endlessly watchable Ann Richards, lest we forget, lost the governor’s race to George Bush anyway.
Endorsement-gate
How ironic that I was writing about the rarity of heroes last week and now it's the press barons of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times who have turned into moral amoebas before our eyes. After Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and LA Times owner and medical tech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong nixed their editorial board endorsements of Kamala Harris, the Post’s management butler Will Lewis rationalized the decision with the lame pretext of letting readers “make up their own minds.”
Why is all this more than a flap in the corridors of the media elite? Journalists may be warriors for the public good, but most of the time it seems the public is too distracted and infantilized by social media to care what the collective good actually is. Not this time. NPR reports that more than 200,000 readers had canceled their WaPo subscriptions by Monday afternoon, a major blow at a paper desperately struggling to drum up more. And the tragedy is that canceling subs only further hurts real journalism’s ability to survive.
Twenty-one Washington Post columnists have protested in the pages of their own newspaper, three editorial board writers have resigned, and the Post’s Watergate legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a stern rebuke, eloquently arguing that this decision 11 days out from the election flies in the face of the Post’s “overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.” I feel their pain. For years, the Post’s newsroom and opinion pages have exposed, sounded the alarm on, and documented the predations of a presidential candidate who now faces the ultimate judgment of the nation on November 5th. To deny the endorsement of his opponent is a betrayal of every political journalist’s professional slog. (Over at the LA Times, a veteran reporter put it to me about his own management’s cowardice, “Thanks to this asshole (Trump), we now have metal detectors when we enter our building. Thanks to him, we are harassed, trolled, attacked at rallies.”)
More darkly, it’s the first whiff of how much billionaires with multiple business interests before the government now fear Trump’s retribution. Endorsement-gate shows the beginning of the instinctive self-censoring by America’s oligarch class, a syndrome that Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw termed “working towards the Führer.” During the tenure of Marty Baron, the first editor appointed by Bezos, the Amazon founder proved admirably stoic, backing Baron in the face of relentless Washington Post reportage on Trump’s political outrages. As Baron recalled in this week’s New Yorker, in 2016, when editorial page editor Fred Hiatt framed things as, “if and when we make a presidential endorsement,” Bezos replied, “Why would we not make a presidential endorsement?” (The Post endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.) Trump, who never believed in editor/owner separation of influence, raged to Bob Woodward about what he saw as Bezos’ calumny in the Post’s undaunted coverage. He exacted presidential revenge by yanking a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract from Amazon that the company had to sue to retain a part of. Today, though Bezos insisted in a WaPo op-ed that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind at work here,” it’s hard not to believe that the certainty of Trump inflicting corporate collateral damage on Bezos’ global empire made a Harris endorsement just not worth it.
If Trump gets back into the White House, the US could gradually slide down the slippery slope of Narendra Modi’s India. After government harassment of the owners of the left-leaning TV channel NDTV, the Indian media property was bought by Modi’s BFF billionaire friend Gautam Adani, and that was the end of oppositional content. Modi is too smart to ever openly announce he is going after any media organization or journalist, as Trump did when he recently announced on Truth Social that CBS should have its license revoked for the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that was purportedly favorably edited.
The canny Indian prime minister always uses legal means to control press freedom. He deploys lawfare and bogus tax investigations against the few non-toadying news sites like The Wire and Newslaundry. Just weeks after the release of a documentary critical of Modi, which was banned by the government, BBC offices in India were raided by tax department officials. He puts pressure on the big brands to pull their ads from anti-Modi outlets, starving independent players in the media business, until the voices of dissent are steadily stilled.
Modi’s malign reach against his critics even includes Indian expatriates like the novelist and essayist Aatish Taseer who, since he penned the 2019 Time magazine cover story on Modi as Divider-in-Chief, has had his passport revoked and is unable to return home. “It is a highly sophisticated tool kit in silencing criticism,” he told me. “After a decade of strike after precision strike, depressingly little remains of the once rambunctious democracy he inherited.”
How piquant that David Hoffman, who quit the Washington Post editorial board in protest at the quashing of the Harris endorsement, had just received a Pulitzer for his series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age.”
Democracy dies in increments.
Tiara Tiff
I probably shouldn't have mouthed off about Meghan Markle to my friend Janice Min on the Ankler podcast. Or broken my rule of never giving interviews on an addled Friday afternoon. “The trouble with Meghan is that she has the worst judgment of anyone in the entire world,” I burbled to Janice. “She’s flawless about getting it all wrong unfortunately…….all her ideas are total crap.”
I should know by now that the slightest reference to celebrity media’s favorite piñata would lead to a deluge of cackling tabloid amplification, devoid of the nuance afforded by the written word. As in MOST of Meghan’s ideas are total crap (and so are many of mine).
Tina,
Please do not filter yourself! You are among the last of the true vocal editors and truth tellers.
On the WAPO front, Kate Graham must be rolling in her grave. She would never have let this happen on her watch and neither would you. Keep 'em coming, Chief!
Kamala doesn't have to compete. Trump and his acolytes said everything that needed to be said in Madison Square Garden. It's pretty clear where he and his crowd are coming from. Now, it's up to the American public to decide which direction to take the country. As Machiavelli put it, a crisis that forces a society to reconfirm its values can be a positive thing. If the wisdom of crowds fails--well, that society ends, and it is time to move on. This election is pretty much a pass/fail test for the American public.