How the main-stream media have been played by Donald Trump and continue to dance to his tune…
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-08-20)
A crowd awaits a campaign rally with Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at the airport in Romulus, Mich., (Carlos Osorio /Associated Press)
It is one of the most memorable moments in movie history. Set in a stifling courtroom, during one of the final scenes of Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson (as Colonel Jessep) delivers his greatest monologue, relishing the opportunity to teach Tom Cruise (as upstart lawyer Lieutenant Kaffee) a few home truths of his iron-fisted command over Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. However, Cruise’s character has instead set a ‘gotcha’ trap for his ego-charged superior, with the provoking demand ‘I want the truth!’. Without awareness of his hubris and impending legal peril, Jessep famously replies with, ‘You can't handle the truth!’ and then is drawn him into admitting that he ordered an illegal punishment of another soldier, resulting in his arrest on the stand. It is one of the ultimate gotchas of our shared cinema culture.
‘Gotcha’ is defined as an instance of publicly tricking someone or exposing them to ridicule, especially by means of an elaborate deception and while many news media figures fantasise of nailing a politician or other high profile public personality with such a gotcha moment – it rarely happens. One of the most notable gotchas in Irish TV history occurred on RTE’s The Late Late Show, during its live broadcast on 15 January 1999. The world's second longest-running late-night talk show, after The Tonight Show, was hosted by the iconic Gay Byrne. While debatable in how knowing Byrne actually was that night, his expert interview of Fianna Fáil politician, Pádraig Flynn, Ireland's then EU Commissioner, lulled the former government minister into lamenting "the difficulties" in his life; on a salary of £130k and trying to run three houses, cars and housekeepers along with regular travel. His further comments condescendingly attacked the credibility of a property developer Tom Gilmartin, who had been claiming in the Irish media of planning irregularities in Dublin city.
For the public, working on a fraction of the wages of the veteran Mayo politician, Flynn’s haughty delivery was hard to stomach and his performance was widely ridiculed. Gilmartin himself was stung into publicly releasing details of Flynn’s nefarious attempts to obtain a political donation of £50k from him, meant for the Fianna Fáil party. Instead Flynn had pocketed it himself and then tried to get Gilmartin to change his story. It was considered the end of Flynn’s political career and he was not reappointed by his government colleagues the following September, to the EU Commission. How much Gay Byrne knew this would be a gotcha moment is debatable. Certainly his innate insight and experience as an experienced interviewer saw him create the bonhomie ‘boys club’ mood which deceived Flynn into overconfidence and forgetfulness of who was actually watching the show.
In my imagination, the machinations of how Donald Trump would have handled that interview, kept me awake for far too many hours that I will never get back this past week. I can actually hear him repeat Pádraig Flynn’s words ridiculing Gilmartin, ‘"Oh yes, yes. I haven't seen him now for some years. I met him. He's a Sligo man who went to England, made a lot of money, came back, wanted to do a lot of business in Ireland, didn't work out for him, didn't work out for him. He's not well. His wife isn't well. He's out of sorts". The difference is that while Flynn subsequently lied low as the media storm erupted, Trump would have doubled down on his claims and faced with the fact of his own lies, he would simply deny them and tell a few more. By creating a moving target, the media never get fixed on him and he seems to effortlessly glide by career-ending self-owns or gotchas which would have hobbled any other politician, Republican, Democrat or Fianna Fáil.
The American media play a huge role in Trump’s successful evasion of his chickens coming home to not just roost — but to also enter the house as a SWAT team and shooting all the occupants. Aside from Fox News which has long established itself as an unabashed supporter of Trump’s propaganda (Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election), other networks such as CNN have been expertly played by the former President.[1] As far back as 13 May 2017, Saturday Night Live lampooned an earlier interview of Donald Trump by Lester Holt of NBC. At one stage of the skit, Alec Baldwin as Trump, blatantly admits to obstruction of justice by firing his FBI director for investigating him. Michael Che as Holt, turns to camera and asks ‘Did I get him?, Is it all over?’, before being hit with the realisation that with Trump, ‘nothing matters, absolutely nothing matters’.
The cable networks have been long obsessed with Trump. Since first descending his escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid, the media have carried wall to wall coverage of the property developer, parsing what he says, no matter how ridiculous, self-serving, deceitful and factually inaccurate. It is also clear he knows this and while unburdened with anything approaching a moral centre, Trump expertly throws out contentious social media posts, hastily arranged press conferences and weird old-man-shouts-at-the-moon campaign speeches which the TV and Press devour, irrespective of the complete lies and half-truths always peppered in his words.
In the latest recent example Trump falsely posted to his own social media platform Truth Social, that a crowd photo from Harris' campaign rally in Detroit was faked using Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) It was a ludicrous claim, yet the media seized on it to analyse how it was wrong, even bringing in AI experts and in doing so amply repeated Trump’s claim of his opponent being ‘a cheater’. Something that deserved no attention has spun a whole narrative, and eats up the oxygen in the public square, that in another country would have instead allowed policy discussions or nuanced analysis of political outcomes. But this is far from the coffeehouses of late 18th century France, much less the BBC or RTE.
Just a few days earlier, Trump called a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on 8 August. Clearly upset at the attention Kamala Harris’s campaign was generating, he walked out into his own hotel room to the assembled nation’s media and unleashed an untethered, rambling diatribe for 64 minutes, which consisted of 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies according to the non-partisan NPR. Without being effectively fact-checked in real-time, the subsequent talk shows and news programs fell over themselves to mock the former president’s performance, self-congratulatory claiming it further undermined his credibility with viewers. But who watches press-conferences? Much less parse through the claims made at them. Instead, we witnessed the further ad nauseam repeating of Trump’s propaganda by clever people who each think they have just delivered a gotcha moment, while the general public just shrug their collective shoulders, unmoved from their prior beliefs. Yet Trump achieved what he always wants… attention, to be talked about, to be important. That’s it.
In reality, far from the personality and celebrity obsessed goldfish-memory media, unless voters in November educate themselves into understanding what their political choice for president will mean on a practical level — as happens in other democracies around the world — then in truth ‘nothing matters, absolutely nothing matters’.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe