Schmuck of the Week: Major Newspaper Editors Doing Trump’s Bidding
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Donald Trump could not ask for a better set of allies than the chunk of media who still desperately wish he was the moderating force of their bothsides dreams. I went to bed thinking that sad low-energy Trump would be Schmuck of the Week, Splinter’s new subscriber-only column that will remain free through what is sure to be a super normal and not at all psychotic Democratic National Convention, then I woke up and saw Parker Molloy point this out and the rage center in my brain took over. How the fuck is this bullshit still happening at so many of America’s major newspapers in 2024?
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) July 19, 2024
As anyone who actually watched Donald Trump’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention knows, unity was one of many, many, mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnyyyyyyyyy subjects he ran through in his meandering 92-minute missive, the longest convention speech ever, where he gave up the sunny Reagan impression two-thirds of the way through to make room for classic freewheeling Trump.
Focusing on his prepared remarks over his full delivered remarks is a choice. I can’t tell what’s more embarrassing, that this is either a cynical decision to tell a preferred narrative over what everyone can easily observe for themselves, or that their brains are so damaged from sniffing their own farts that they still cannot accurately process the words that come out of Trump’s mouth.
Of course, time constraints play a role in this. Newspapers must print physical copies and cannot wait for a doddering old man playing the hits to wrap things up, but they surely saw the attacks Trump launched on Democrats and the justice system and all the other things we have heard him complain about a million times by now. There’s no reason they couldn’t have hedged their bets like The Wall Street Journal did with this headline: Trump Calls for Unity but Shifts to Familiar Attacks.
Focusing just on what Trump wants people to believe is what Trump’s communications department does. At least for a day, the editors who greenlit these front-pages freelanced for Trump, pushing the Reagan 2.0 image team Trump so clearly wants to cultivate in the wake of him surviving an assassination attempt. The people who had a hand in creating these front-pages are a core part of team Trump’s strategy to make everyone feel like it’s 1984 again.
A part of me does sympathize with the impossible task of summarizing that rambling nonsense in a handful of words before he was done spewing them, but again, there were many words to choose from, and only going with unity is just one Trump-approved window into what he actually said. There are a lot of good headlines today that accurately portray the duality of Trump’s speech, and there are more good than bad out there. Many reporters have learned how to properly cover Trump by now, which makes the ones who still struggle to do so even more pathetic.
This strain of media has long since proven they wish Trump would be a moderating force he has never had interest in being, and so they deserve no benefit of the doubt, especially when Politico is still publishing babybrained 2016 pablum like this.
There appears to be a new softness to Donald Trump, with people who’ve talked him describing him with words like “existential,” “serene,” “emotional” and even “spiritual.” https://t.co/djiajacStr
— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) July 18, 2024
That tweet is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever read. I have never seen a human less capable of existential thought than Donald Trump. It hasn’t even been a week since a bullet whizzed by his head, and portions of the press are chomping at the bit to tell us what a clearly changed man he is. Can we at least sit with this and see how he acts over the coming weeks before we try to write the assassination attempt’s impact in permanent ink?
Trump is smarter than this strain of idiocy in the media, and this is proof. He’s trying to play into an image they’re more than happy to launder for him, because it satisfies their pathetic need to say both sides are equal in a marketing scheme masquerading as journalism—where the subtext is that if both sides are Bad, then the writer and reader simply just documenting and reading it are above it all and therefore, Good.
I want to scream. Trump gave a very classic long-winded Trump speech last night. If you didn’t see it, I promise you, you’ve seen it already. It had everything, but he tried to cover it with a Reagan-y veneer to play to the clapping seals in the audience and in major editorial positions at our nation’s largest newspapers. Only a schmuck could believe that “unity” was the sole focus of it.