Insane Clown President

243 Pages·2017·8.02 MB·English

by  Matt Taibbi

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
1: The Great Derangement Redux
2: Inside the GOP Clown Car
3: Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny
4: The Republicans Are Officially the Party of White Paranoia
5: Casting Clown Car, the Movie
6: The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules, Part 2
7: The Case for Bernie Sanders
8: The Clown Car Rolls On
9: America Is Too Dumb for TV News
10: It’s Too Late to Turn Off Trump
11: The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules, Part 5
12: The Vampire Squid Tells Us How to Vote
13: Morning Blow: How Mika and Joe Became Trump’s Lapdogs
14: How America Made Trump Unstoppable
15: Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Donald Trump
16: Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton
17: RIP, GOP: How Trump’s Campaign Is Killing the Republican Party
18: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons from Their Brush with
Bernie
19: In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears
20: Trump’s Appetite for Destruction: How Trump’s Disastrous Convention
Doomed the GOP
21: The Summer of the Media Shill
22: How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo
23: The Unconquerable Trump
24: The Failure and Fury of Donald Trump
25: President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong
26: President Obama’s Last Stand
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Matt Taibbi
About the Author
“I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows
the truth.”
—MOLLY IVINS
Introduction
A little over ten years ago, while writing a book and working as a correspondent
for Rolling Stone, I thought I saw a new trend in American politics.
I was spending half my time in Washington watching Congress make some
very unsavory sausage and the other half hanging around political extremist
movements in various parts of the country. In retrospect, the setup probably
predetermined the conclusion. Nonetheless, I ended up returning over and over to
the same theme, which had a syllogistic formula:
The country’s leaders are corrupt and have become unresponsive to
the needs of the population.
People all over are beginning to notice.
This being America, as ordinary people tune out their corrupt
leaders, they will replace official propaganda with conspiratorial
explanations even more ridiculous than the original lies.
This was the core idea behind a book that ended up being called The Great
Derangement. Between first-person narratives about fringe political phenomena
like the apocalyptic “Rapture” movement and 9/11 Truth, the book tried to warn
about a loss of faith in national institutions, most notably in my own business, the
political media.
I felt sure a collapse of belief in the efficacy of the news media, if it
coincided with widespread (and justified) political discontent, could lead in some
pretty weird directions. One possible future was one in which politics “stopped
being about ideology and…instead turned into a problem of information.”
The 2016 presidential campaign, simultaneously the most thrilling and
disgusting political event of our generation, proved to be a monstrous affirmation
of the Derangement. The stunning rise of Donald Trump marked the apotheosis
of the new postfactual movement.
Every mechanism our mighty oligarchy had devised to keep people like
Trump out of power failed. This left the path to power wide open for anyone who
understood, or sensed, the depth of the crippling weaknesses in our political
infrastructure.
I didn’t see Donald Trump coming. But as a campaign reporter I’d surely
seen trouble on the horizon. The most obvious problem was the total alienation of
candidates and their attendant media from the population.
I’d struggled with this issue from the first time I was sent out by Rolling
Stone to cover a campaign, in 2004. One of the first things that struck me was the
way the candidates and the “traveling press” moved around the country in what
was essentially a roving prison.
Your route was from a bus, to a charter plane, to another bus, to an event
hall (where you were kept behind rope lines most or all of the time), back to the
bus, back to a plane. Then the cycle would repeat until you got to a hotel in the
next city, at night. You slept six hours and repeated the pattern, day after day,
week after week.
This moving prison was so airtight that if you needed cigarettes, you had to
ask campaign volunteers (the Kerry crew called them “Sherpas”) to smuggle them
in.
This seemed like merely a strange detail when I first wrote about it more
than a dozen years ago. But it spoke to a much more enormous problem. It was a
perfect metaphor for the distancing of the ruling class from the population.
Presidential campaigns were bubbles, and the people inside them became myopic
codependents. The establishment pols and their lackeys bullied the press into
becoming guardians of their orthodoxy. The press in turn savagely policed the
agreed-upon lines of decorum.
To campaign professionals, real people became fodder for stylized visual
backgrounds and nothing more. In a less self-deceiving future—perhaps under a
leader like Donald Trump who better understands that presidential races are now
really just big television shows—they will conduct campaigns from a single
soundstage in a place like Burbank and just blue-screen in the different crowds
and locations.
Campaigns needed “people” only as props. If a candidate wanted to show
that he or she was with it on racial issues, that candidate would visit a
predominantly black high school and be photographed clapping to a school band
performance. If he wanted a worker-friendly image, he’d visit a robotics factory
in Wisconsin and be photographed wearing a hard hat and goggles. And so on.
But neither politicians nor reporters were ever in one place for long enough
to see or hear what was really going on with the public. In place of that one-on-
one experience, politicians and the press increasingly relied upon polls, and each
other, to gauge the temperature “out there.” This resulted in a bizarre mutual-
admiration-society situation in which everyone inside the plane gradually became
more and more removed from the outside world.
When fellow Rolling Stone scribe Tim Crouse wrote The Boys on the Bus
nearly half a century ago, he was mostly describing how pack journalism led to
faulty reporting. But his description of the culture on the Bus also accurately
foretold the derangement of the whole campaign mechanism, which included the
politicians with whom reporters traveled.
Stuck inside the campaign bubble for too long, politicians and journalists
alike started to operate like high school Heathers, using abuse and shaming to
enforce the myriad social rules inside the plane. If Candidate A fell outside either
behavioral or policy lines, fifty reporters immediately cried foul and that
candidate quickly retreated, or else.
A classic example was Howard Dean. Now a dependable party creature,
Dean in 2004 initially garnered enthusiasm for his opposition to the Iraq War and
his heretical reliance upon small online donations as a way around the Democratic
leadership’s kingmaking corporate donors.
Dean spent much of his campaign’s first summer fending off questions from
reporters about whether he was too “liberal” or “pointed,” not “nuanced” enough,
etc. Many of my colleagues really didn’t even know what they meant by these
harassing questions. They didn’t need to. The constant pestering questions were
all code. The complaint about Dean was that he wasn’t enough of a company man,
that he’d stepped outside the lines of the agreed-upon orthodoxy.
When the Vermont governor finally stumbled with that infamous scream in
Iowa, the press piled on with what another reporter I know jokingly describes as
the “Seal of Death.” This is a maelstrom of negative reports that is expected to
inspire a plunge in the polls, followed by a series of humiliating rituals.
First comes the Abashed Public Apology, a scene reporters enjoy to the
point of it being unseemly. Next comes the short Dead Man Walking period.
Candidates, Dean included, usually try to soldier on after being excommunicated
by the media, clutching at single-digit poll numbers and speaking in increasingly
desperate or even angry tones to half-empty halls. This tragicomic narrative may
last weeks, even months.
Finally there is the Anticlimactic Withdrawal, when the already-dead
candidate quietly announces his or her exit and disappears for a while to “spend
more time with my family” or go into literal or political rehab. Anthony Weiner’s
recent exile to Tennessee for a stint of horse-riding therapy to treat his sexting
addiction is a typical endgame for a Seal of Death victim.
Before 2016, nobody had ever survived the Seal of Death, with the possible
exception of Bill Clinton, who pathetically squirmed free from the Gennifer
Flowers episode.
In the case of Dean, TV stations around the country played the “scream”
tape a whopping 633 times in the first four days after Iowa, according to the AP.
They were like piranhas skeletonizing a waterfowl. It was viral media before
YouTube. As Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, later put it, “The
establishment wanted to stop us and they did.”
Trippi’s comment implied that reporters were part of that establishment,
which was a pretty damning criticism. But it was true. And people noticed.
—
It’s impossible to overemphasize the toxicity of this dynamic. Politicians and
political journalists were volunteering to be trapped in an endless conversation
with one another about which candidates, and by extension which ideas, were and
were not suitable for consumption by the American people.
It wasn’t a substantive conversation, either. The big topic on the Bus was
who was winning: the horse race. Policy ideas had no meaning except in terms of
their efficacy in helping the candidate win the horse race. Of course, an idea that
was too popular, like Dean’s anti-war gambit, could run up against that internal
policing mechanism again and be dismissed as “populist,” which was something
very bad in the campaign-trail lexicon.
Ultimately, most all of the talk on the Bus ended up being concerned with
the narrow question of which party-approved candidate pushing acceptably non-
populist ideas would edge out the other. We pretended this was a fascinating
intellectual question. It even became fashionable to become a kind of PhD in