American Breakdown by David Bromwich

Author:David Bromwich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

4

The Age of Detesting Trump

July 2017

“Putin Butts In to Claim There Were No Secrets, and Says He’ll Prove It”—so ran the main headline in the New York Times on May 18. The subject was Donald Trump’s supposed revelation of foreign intelligence assets when he met with Russian officials in the Oval Office. It isn’t yet clear if anything dangerous was done, but the US media were showcasing their heavy artillery with a leak of their own, which had to have come from the White House staff or intelligence agents on the scene. Mostly, however, the article seemed to be an excuse to deploy the expression “Putin Butts In”—a cut below the diction once permitted in the Times. This descent into brashness, which teeters on the brink of open contempt, has been a feature of American media coverage of Trump ever since January; it is growing shriller and more indiscriminate, working up to a presumptive climax no one has imagined with clarity. Impeachment is the constitutional name for the fast finale they are hoping for; the idea is that the brass and cymbals will soon enter, lawyers and good spies, private detectives and who knows what else—and out the door goes Trump.

The center-left media went to sleep after the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986–1987, dozed through the Clinton years, and were half-asleep and nodding when they approved Cheney and Bush’s war in Iraq and Obama and Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. For obscure reasons, they have been quite certain that Western dismantling of yet another Arab country, Syria, is the surest path to a sane policy in the Middle East. All the mainstream outlets, with CNN and the Times at their head, have now re-emerged as anti-government centers of news, opinion, and news perceptibly mingled with opinion. But they are new to the work of “resistance” and it shows. The Times on May 27 ran a lead story by Maggie Haberman, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo, headlined in diminishing type: “Kushner Is Said to Have Mulled Russia Channel—Trump Tower Meeting—Aim Was a Secret Means for Communications During Transition.” Those lines say all that the story has to say—the channel was never established. But they strung it out to seven short paragraphs based on a leak from “three people with knowledge of the discussion.” Fourteen more paragraphs followed rehearsing the likely, possible, or conjectured relations between Trump’s associates and various Russians, weaving in the name of Kushner as an intermittent reminder. The Times speculation was prompted by an earlier report in the Washington Post: Kushner wanted special Russian facilities to prevent intrusion by US intelligence, in order to conduct transitional discussions with Russia. A strategic misfire on Kushner’s part; but no less questionable was the assumption guiding the story: any plan for back-channel privacy is properly viewed as an attempt to dodge the civic duty of all Americans to submit to US surveillance. Now that we know what we know about Putin, nobody should be free of surveillance: not the president or his advisers or his cabinet; and surely not members of Congress, either.

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