Show notes
Hello and welcome to the Sensibly Speaking Podcast. This is Chris Shelton, the Critical Thinker at Large, coming at you on Stitcher, Google Play, iTunes and here on YouTube with video. This week, we are going to talk nothing but politics, centered around Michael Wolff’s new book about the Trump White House. If you can, you’ll probably want to watch this on my YouTube channel if you can because there will be some visual aids and you’ll get a chance to see me dress up too. I figured if I was going to talk politics, I might as well look like I’m taking it seriously. On the other hand, if you are one of my long-time viewers who has decided that my politics are useless and stupid, then this show isn’t for you but I think that’s only a few of you. One thing a lot of people may not realize is that my channel is about my recovery from Scientology and application of critical thinking to all areas of my life and that includes politics. If you’ve been following me for a while, you may have noticed that my personal views have changed quite a bit over the last few years and I’m sure they’ll continue to. I have a lot more to talk about than just Scientology and destructive cults but I do get it that some people get sick of hearing about Trump and politics every day. It is an exhausting subject on both sides of the aisle. I think I have something fresh to say about some of this, so hopefully you’ll come along for the ride. Let’s start with this quote from All the President’s Men, which I think encapsulates a lot of what is going on right now: “Look, forget the myths the media’s created about the White House — the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” (Deep Throat, All the President’s Men) Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury – Inside the Trump White House was published last week to a great deal of, well, fire and fury from the White House about its controversial and allegedly fallacious content. Like millions of other Americans, I have been watching the dignity and rationality of both our Presidental election process and the Executive Branch of our government dive in free fall over the last two years, ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015. Having been raised in and then spending almost three decades of my life working deeply in the Church of Scientology, politics was never something I paid much attention to. Who was in office and what shenanigans they got up to were things we thought was just part of problem of life here on Planet Earth, and we were the self-appointed saviors. I came out of that nonsense five years ago and have been recovering from the experience ever since. Learning about and then following politics on the national and, to a lesser degree, the state and local levels, has been a new experience for me. Unlike most Americans, I didn’t learn to become jaded and disgusted with the whole process until much later in my life. I’d say I’ve reached that point now thanks to Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world. Wolff’s book helped me understand how and why our process is so flawed. Much is being made about how Wolff’s book is about the power dynamics between Steve Bannon and Team Donald (meaning not only Donald Trump himself but his whole family, who he brought in to the White House in a shocking display of nepotism at a level never before seen in the US government). However, the central theme of this book is not to lay out in soap-opera-style the power struggles in the Oval Office. Rather, the theme is that Donald Trump, the individual, is wholly, completely and utterly incompetent; emotionally and psychologically unfit for the office he now holds. However, I think Wolff is being overly optimistic when he said on BBC Today that “we will end this presidency now.” I’ll get into this more below, but first there are a few points which become evident in this book which I haven’t seen too many people talk about so I wanted to address them. Elections as Personality Contests It is not any kind of new revelation that the Trump campaign didn’t expect to win, or even want to. I’m no political pundit and we were talking about this very thing right here on this very podcast during the election cycle, wondering if Trump was doing this entire thing just for brand placement. Anyone who knows anything about how political campaigns are run — and none of them seemed to be involved with Trump’s campaign — would tell you as much since almost nothing about Trump’s campaign was normal. If there was any sort of strategy, it all centered around Trump basically trashing anyone and anything that came into his mind at his Nuremburg-like rallies where he went off on stream-of-consciousness diatribes against immigrants of all colors, his political opponents, and his wrecklessly poor understanding of policy issues such as taxes, health care and foreign relations. Whereas one can conjecture about such things, it’s interesting to gain some level of corroboration when Wolff describes the white-faced shock of Trump and his inner circle once the numbers actually started rolling in. How Melania was in a fit of tears. How everyone didn’t just think they were on a losing train but were absolutely certain of said failure and had been making plans to place themselves in more upscale positions of influence and power just because of the fact that they had been involved in any of this in the first place. Election night was as much of a shock to their system as it was to ours. More importantly to me personally, though, this also highlighted something Wolff did not mention once: the gross incompetency of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee overall to lose to a political neophyte like Donald Trump. I’m not going to re-hash the reams of analysis that have been done to figure out what were all the factors behind Hillary’s loss, but one thing that liberals have utterly failed to accept is that the most important of those factors was that Hillary’s campaign simply dialed it in. While Trump may have been putting on a good show with the idea that he was just improving his brand, Team Hillary was so sure of their success that they barely tried. Their most fatal mistake as far as I’m concerned is that they didn’t bother to listen to the people on their own side much less to the very real concerns that Trump’s supporters were shouting at the top of their lungs at Trump rallies. “When you don’t reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you’re going to have problems,” said Virgie Rollins, the former chairperson of the Michigan Democratic Women’s Caucus and resident of the key state Hillary ignored becasue she assumed they had Michigan in the bag. “They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t. They believed they had better information, which they didn’t,” said Donnie Fowler who was quoted in Politico as a DNC consultant during the final months of the campaign. I don’t know about before the 1970s, but in my lifetime, political elections could best be described as popularity contests, with more attention paid to the color of a candidates clothing and his/her style of hair then meaningful debates on substantive policy issues. Sure, there are debates near the end of the election cycle, but by that point most voters’ minds are already made up. In the US in part icular, just getting people to vote at all is a very real challenge. The 2016 Presidential election busted the earlier all-time high record from 2008, with 139 million Americans coming out to give their opinion but that is only 60% of the total voting population. Percentage-wise, the highest turnout ever was in 1876 when 83% of the eligible voters turned out, giving Rutherford B. Hayes a bare victory with only a 1-vote difference in the electoral college totals. The bottom line is that it’s a record-breaking event when less than 2/3 of the country even bothers to come out to vote at all. That’s not good news. Now don’t get me wrong. When I say Hillary waged an incompetent campaign, that is not to say that she and her staffers didn’t work hard, that there were not many sleepless nights and a lot of blood, sweat and tears in their effort. But you have to remember the gigantic mistakes: her husband meeting privately with the US Attorney General on an airport tarmac in Phoenix; the inept PR handling of her email server (a contentious issue which ultimately was a nothing-burger and which Trump’s own staff have also become guilty of since coming in to office but which no one bothers to report on because, hey, who cares about emails anymore?); getting back to Hillary, there was also her ill-advised comment about half of Trump’s supporters being a “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it” basket of deplorables. You don’t change hearts and minds by insulting people, no matter how true your statement might be. While Hillary Clinton is better educated, better experienced and was without any question, on any metric you care to use, the superior candidate for President, the way she comes off to Joe Sixpack is as an effete snob who not only doesn’t understand the plight of the lower classes, but doesn’t even care to try. Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, came just short of a gold-gilded Las Vegas show. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t have a chorus line of Trump Hotel dancers parade him out to speak to his flock of desperate and guillible followers who truly believed he was there for them. Call it the perfect storm of showmanship, credulousness, desperation and sheer stupidity with a generous helping of hatred for the DC swamp. Trump’s lies rang true for enough desperate people who felt they had watched their American Dream pass them by, that they decided he was the right guy for the job. At last, a millionaire tycoon who has the resources to get to DC but who is a straight shooter and will stand up for the Little Guy! Not since Ross Perot had anyone put forward a platform like this and the teeming millions who felt they had no representation stood up and took note. They united as Trump (or his surrogates such as now-convicted-felon Michael Flynn) led them in chants of “Lock Her Up!” and “Drain the Swamp!” It would be a new era of government by the people and for the people. Why, I hadn’t seen anything like this since…Obama. Even when I was in the bubble world of the Sea Org, Obama’s powerful campaign mantras of Hope and Change pierced the veil, as did images of him reminding his enraptured audience at the DNC National Convention that he was not born in a manger. When he was elected, there were tears of joy and hope in people’s eyes. Like Trump, Obama was going to be the savior they had hoped and prayed for. It’s mind boggling to me how short people’s memories are of these things, somewhat akin to Charlie Brown’s hopeless quest to finally kick that football that Lucy swears she will hold in place for him. Trump is not a genius; he’s not even of average intelligence, but neither is Joe Sixpack and that is who Trump was levelling his instinctively good salesmanship at. He talked using a fifth graders vocabulary, boucing around from one topic to another depending on what took his fancy. Of course, this mostly consisted of angry tirades and blistering attacks on anyone who had ever insulted Trump in any way (meaning, of course, that they had dared to make an accurate observation about him). There were empty promises of draining the swamp, and best of all, making America great again. When asked what that meant, Trump was routinely at a loss for specifics but never at a loss for words, so his followers filled in the blanks for themselves. The genius of slogans like “Make America Great Again” are that you don’t have to provide specifics because everyone already has their own ideas of what that means and they are sure you are speaking to that understanding. Kicking out job-stealing immigrants, closing the borders, renegotiating foreign trade deals from a position of American Superpower strength, creating an endless parade of jobs for every red-blooded patriotic American and more more more. “Everything you’ve been waiting for, everything you’ve needed and Washington hasn’t done, I’ll do” he promised and they believed him for no better reason than because he looked and acted so different from any other politician they had seen before. We know we don’t like what we’ve had; Trump is different from that; he must be the Real Deal. He’s got my vote! Trump was Something New and Something Different and after decades of empty promises by an ever-more blatantly corrupt stream of Same Old Same Old politicians in the House, Senate and White House, the Hope and Change the GOP offered was the perfect counterpoint to 2008 Obama. Joe Sixpack bought into Trump hook, line and sinker. Soap Opera Politics If the election cycle has become a popularity contest, then the administration and running of the affairs of government has become a soap opera, at least as far as the American people are concerned. While this may sound like a dumbed down insult to the perception of Washington by an Idiocracy public, my reasoning is a bit more complicated. Public and foreign policy and legislative bills take reams of paper to describe and law degrees to really understand. Without some kind of middleman to explain what is going on, people are just not going to follow or understand the inner workings of Washington and frankly, don’t want to anyway because most of it is very dry stuff which doesn’t have broad appeal or even directly apply to them. Not too many people in Kansas are very interested in hearing about the intricacies of infrastructure development in the San Francisco Bay Area, but this is the sort of thing that gets haggled over in Congressional meetings all the time. When confronted with confusing, boring or repetitive information, people tune out. So how does an ad-driven, profit-centric media present what goes on in Washington in a way that people will tune in? The answer is that instead of focusing on policies or legislation, for the most part news stories tell a personal story or focus on celebrities or politicians in conflict. Which do you think most people would watch for longer than 10 seconds: Charles Krauthammer describe changes in tax deductions or Brooke Baldwin talk about the latest politician busted for sexual harassment? People can relate to other people much easier than they can relate to abstract legal issues or legislative referendums, so our entertainment-focused, drive-by media serves up salacious stories with as many gory details as they can dig up. As Don Hedley said: “We can do the innuendo,We can dance and sing, When it’s said and done,We haven’t told you a thing.We all know that crap is king,Give us dirty laundry!” During Donald Trump’s campaign, media coverage was overwhelmingly negative. A December 2016 study by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center analyzed news reporting both on cable news and in print media like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The study’s author, Thomas Patterson, was quoted in Politico: “Negative news has partisan consequences. Given that journalists bash both sides, it might be thought the impact would be neutral. It’s not…. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a levelling effect that opens the door to charlatans. The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.” [Coverage of both candidates] “was overwhelmingly negative in tone and extremely light on policy.” Big surprise there. Donald Trump received free and extensive coverage from the point of his announcement in June all the way through to election night and he took full advantage of it, getting an…
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