Of the nine pages of national news inside the paper, approximately five were dedicated to Trump-related pieces (G.O.P. doubts about the president; unease on Wall Street over the departure of economic adviser Gary Cohn; the way Trump campaign workers scored jobs in the new administration; reaction to the Trump tax cut in Ohio; the latest on Trump and the Mueller investigation; former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg's agreement to testify for that investigation; and more on Sessions, California, and immigrants). Those pieces absorbed the time and attention of 10 more reporters (and Maggie Haberman a second time).
Two more reporters and another half-page should be added for a piece in the international news section ("Kushner Goes to Mexico, A Shift in U.S. Diplomacy"), and both of the editorials on the opinion page that day ("Gary Cohn Joins the Exodus" and "The Race-Based Mortgage Penalty," which started, "As the Trump administration begins to gut federal enforcement of civil rights laws...") were Trump-focused. On the op-ed page, the very headlines of two of its four columns ("Mr. Trump, Here's a Hero; It's Your Turn" and "Is Trump About to Start a Trade War?") were similarly oriented, and a third column dealt with the president at least in passing.
That's 15 reporters, three op-ed writers, and the unnamed people who produced those editorials. And on any given day of the Trump era so far, you stood a reasonable chance of finding something similar in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere across the shrinking world of American newspapers and far more of the same, hour after hour of it, on cable news. And yet you already know that this seemingly overwhelming media reality goes largely unnoted and unacknowledged in those same papers and news shows.
An All-American Cult of Personality
Believe me, if this were happening in Russia or China (The cult of Putin! The cult of Xi!), it would be a major news story and treated as such. After all, thought of a certain way, what we've been watching is indeed the creation of an all-American cult of personality (quite literally so when it comes to Trump's "base," as any of his rallies suggest). And yet that and the media's role in it isn't news.
Admittedly, Donald Trump is a hell of a story. And for a media filled with shrinking news staffs and desperate to find ways to hold onto or increase readership or viewership, he's a godsend (as well as a monster). After all, his greatest skill -- the one he's spent a lifetime perfecting -- is undoubtedly his unerring instinct for just how to attract the camera under more or less any circumstances. The result, however, is a picture of the world that's deceptive in the extreme. These days, if you only watched TV and read mainstream papers, you would be excused for thinking that we were in a world of Donald Trump and little else. By now, he's all but blotted out the sun itself. In this sense, for instance, he isn't so much a climate-change denier in an administration filled with them and dedicated to the promotion of fossil fuels as a climate-change obliterator. (Hence, p. A20 is the only spot left for that "little" story on the sinking of San Francisco.)
And doesn't all this suit him to a T? Yes, he hates and excoriates the "fake news media." Can there be any doubt that the negative treatment he regularly receives from all outlets except Fox News does indeed get under his skin, big time. But above all, good news or bad, who can't feel that his deepest desire is simply to be the news, any kind of news, all kinds of news -- and in this he has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imaginings?
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, with the help of a thoroughly controlled party press, Communist Party leader Mao Zedong developed a remarkable cult of personality that blotted out just about everything else in China. He, his face, even the mole on that face, loomed over the landscape in an unprecedented way. He was literally looking at you wherever you were in that country.
Donald Trump is evidently our upside-down version of Mao, a major difference being that the media that rushed to create his all-American personality cult did so without either official approval or the threat of a draconian state forcing it to do so. As Trump himself insists almost daily, our "crazed" media has not been brought to heel at all. And yet, the effect is in some ways eerily similar. These days, you can't really escape that big, ambling, shambling, rambling body, that pugnaciously jut-jawed red face topped by the iconic orange comb-over (his equivalent of Mao's mole).
Back in 1948, George Orwell imagined a society 36 years in the future in which, no matter where you went, "Big Brother" was watching you. That certainly fit the desires, if not the capabilities, of totalitarian governments in that twentieth century moment. It even fit with certain tendencies Orwell believed he saw in western capitalist society. And he wasn't wrong: the urge to surveil populations has only grown in our American world in the years since in ways that would have blown the minds of the Communist leaders of that past era.
Seven decades after Orwell's dystopian classic 1984 was published, we in the United States do indeed find ourselves in a full-scale surveillance society -- and that world, as Edward Snowden let us know in such a memorable fashion back in 2013, preceded Donald Trump. But when it comes to Trump, here's the curious thing that Orwell himself couldn't have imagined: Big Brother isn't watching us, we're forever watching him.
Donald Trump, the president we meet in the media every hour of every day, blots out much of the rest of the world and much of what's meaningful in it. Such largely unexamined, never-ending coverage of his doings represents a triumph of the first order both for him (no matter how he rails against the media) and for an American cult of personality that will take us who knows where (but nowhere good).
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. His next book, A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books), will be published in May.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2018 Tom Engelhardt
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