I have to admit, I didn't see it coming. The form, sure, that is old hat. But not the content. And it is hilarious, were it not so effective.
Yes, I am talking about Trump and the penis-talk of the weekend of October 19-20, 2024. This following the bizarre dancing.
Let me begin by a mentioning just one reaction by Erin Burnette of CNN asking, while waving her hands about: “Could there be any sort of a strategy in Trump doing all of this and speaking in this way?”
She, and many others who lead the Internet, had eight years to figure out the answer. Are they stupid? Or willfully ignoring the obvious? I checked a lot of other reports, Jake Tapper, Lawrence O’Donnell, etc… all had a field day almost gleefully talking penis on prime time. As for the dancing, Ezra Klein, New York Times podcaster, rambled on for over 40 minutes about it, as if it was something deeply esoteric. All these pundits, often convinced of their importance either don’t see or can’t see what’s in front of their eyes.
Nothing new, knew nothing
Back in January 2018, having observed with increasing hilarity the Donald J. Trump playacting president, I decided to put together some kind of screed on my website and called it: The Revolution Is Permanent Noise. It was actually a condensation of a stack of notes taken over the years since 2016.
My core point was this:
“At some point in the first half of 2016, while Trump was racing from outrageous statement to outrageous statement and tearing through his rivals for the GOP nomination, I noted that if the eye of the camera or the ear of a microphone would veer away from him, as it should have, Donald Trump would pull down his trousers and defecate on the stage just to regain the upper ground in the attention economy.”
Well. He didn’t. Not yet anyway. Instead, he spoke at length about a penis. A large penis. A famous golfer’s penis. And, as planned, anchors and comedians have, pardon the expression, sucked it up and rebroadcast it over and over again. Are the Republicans embarrassed by their candidate? No, you need a sense of shame to be embarrassed. And they know how effective this spectacle is in deflecting attention from Harris/Walz.
My argumentation back then is still as valid as it is today: Trump’s endless outrageous statements are a calculation. And he will be more and more outrageous as the election nears in order to grab that all-important spotlight, especially on weekends, of course. I wrote back then:
“Trump has picked up on something fundamental about communication in the USA, and the world of today, something that is not entirely new, but has been boosted by the information rockets. First, there is no negative feedback in media matters. To misquote Marshal McLuhan, the media themselves are the massage. No typos there. Or, as the Germans would say about a great event: Dabei sein ist alles. The main thing is to be involved. This is key to understanding how mass communication works. This pattern was set by the likes of Coughlin in the 30s, already, Amy McPherson in the 20s, Billy Sunday before that, or Joe McCarthy in the 50s, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin (a pre-Trump Trump in female)....
(…)
Donald Trump barged into that field with skillful cloddishness. He plays the part of the boor, because he is one in essence, an uncouth, lazy, lowbrow predator, a TV windbag, who has adopted some rhetorical techniques from televangelists. The more he pretends to be a victim of the MSM that fights back, echoing the plight of hundreds of film heroes winning against absurd odds, the more his base identifies with him, even if they know they are being tricked. But the #Resistance has also been caught up in the game: love or hate, you’re still connected. (…)
The Trump Train chugging down the track of history, spreading an unbelievable amount of strange fumes, has become an ineluctable element in everyone’s lives. It is like a TV series with very short, absurd episodes (sex issues, racist explosions, conspiracies, even typos!) that fascinate and distract, like watching a garbage tip slowly take over your physical and mental living space. You can’t ignore it though, because it has a life of its own.
The media celebrities and the podcasters can tear their hair out in frustration all they want. They nevertheless continue to feed the spectacle that is his driving force. For months they complained about Biden’s age instead of reporting on the various economic policies that have made the USA the envy of the world. They could have reported on the disastrous pandemic response by an irresponsible president who suddenly became an anti-vaxxer, because he knew that his base would approve.
But all that would have demanded real reporting, hard work, as opposed to cheap — by which I mean low-cost— panel discussions about Trump’s latest outrageous statement. Their laziness, their constant bothsidism, their willful ignorance of the Trump trap, I believe, even fear, means that Trump will most probably once again make it to the White House.
By contrast, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are simply too normal for the American electorate groomed in cinematic hyperbole. The “bump” they had in August was merely caused by neophiliac appeal. It was new, fresh, especially after and many voters were curious about this spectacle. But it fizzled, especially as the legacy media once again got distracted by the Trumpian spectacle. Harris and Walz would be an excellent ticket for the presidency, but their intelligence, their rationality, their calm are not what Americans want. They want spectacles, circuses without the bread.
More to come.
