Tweets and TWITS

Local and national media members are developing a routine.

They wake up, see the latest wacky tweets or “tweetstorm” from President-elect Donald Trump, and then dutifully write a story on it.

We saw it last week — twice.

First, Trump tweeted about flag burning — the ultimate in distraction issues, as really it doesn’t affect anyone’s life which malcontent burns a Chinese-made screen— print of our national symbol at this point.

Trump opined that possible recourses would include divesting the burner of citizenship or giving that person a “year in jail.”

That tweet got a predictable response: lots of handwringing articles about free speech and the First Amendment, and social media feeds flush with fulmination about how it’s the end of the world as we know it, but we don’t feel fine.

Meanwhile, half a world away, Israeli jets were strafing Damascus, protected by the Russian military. Despite Al Qaeda being massed on the Israeli border, our most prominent Mideast ally hopped over them to target — again — Hezbollah.

No need to talk about that theater in the Global War on Terror. Not when the press spent the morning agog over the flag-burning flap, and the evening deconstructing a picture of Donald Trump (“A Fraud! A Flim Flam Man!”) stealing Willard “Mitt” Romney’s soul over a dinner of frog’s legs.

The next day, Trump broke news with a blockbuster pair of tweets, saying that he would relinquish control of his businesses to his progeny, and that he would be calling a press conference this month to discuss it.

Off went the scribes to their laptops, to file myriad versions of the same story. 

And again, Trump managed to move the news cycle from the tedium of policy, such as appointments of cabinet members, to reinforce and burnish the cult of personality.

Is media simply duped? Do the members of the press, a smart, cynical lot, not see what’s happening?

Doubtful.

Media is a capitalistic enterprise. And what members of the press realize is that people would much rather fulminate or effuse about the president-elect than they would deal with the policy details.

We learned this bigly. 

We learned this soon after his election, when “lock her up” became “let her heal.” When the promise to practically repeal Obamacare from the inauguration dais was walked back, changed to “well, we’ll keep the parts that people like.” And when the great, big, beautiful wall on the Mexican border became a white picket fence.

A campaign with more than a year’s worth of hot quotes and intemperate elocutions saw all that intellectual heft flushed, with no or less ceremony than a mass coursing down the pipes from an EverBank Field bathroom in the third quarter of a Jags’ game.

Was there outrage from the Trumpenproletariat? No. Just shrugs, an understanding that the campaign was just a performance. Why would it be anything else?

The media followed that cue. For as much coverage — live TV hits, tweets of their own, opinion columns about the republic choking on its own vomit in this moment of crisis — as the press granted to Trump’s outrage of the day, the media realized that none of it mattered.

It didn’t matter in terms of getting Hillary Clinton elected — and to many members of the press, that was a desired outcome, for a variety of reasons ranging from ideological affinity to “access,” the true coin of the realm.

And with that in mind, a recalibration.

Minor details — a $20 trillion national debt, the latest rinse cycle from another round of quantitative easing of the money supply, the future of Guantanamo Bay, the actual plans for the Affordable Care Act, what might happen to federalism on the issue of cannabis, and will there be a real response to the opiates members of the ever-growing white underclass keep ODing on — have all been elided in the wake of the cult of personality.

Policy taking a back seat to persona is nothing new. We’re becoming more like the rest of the world. More like Russia. More like Turkey.

People call it “populism” or “nationalism.” But what those descriptions leave out is that there is something distinctly anti-populist about subverting a process of representative democracy and placing an inordinate amount of faith in a man whose major talent has been working the marks his entire life.

Expect more tweets. Before a bombing campaign, maybe Trump will tweet about the dishonest media or some lapsed celebrity from a decade before. Before the next round of QE (quantitative easing), perhaps he’ll critique the latest SNL sketch.

When that happens, expect everyone to write it up.

And for you, the reader? Expect that you will read multiple versions, perpetuating the revenue model, and proving that Trump’s approach to manipulating the press and the populace is much more rational than we like to pretend.