Controversy makes good headlines (and crawlers). The press could count on the former president to deliver them himself almost daily, often first thing in the morning. Or his lying spokespersons would. Now Donald Trump’s Twitter privileges have been revoked. He is reduced to being a greeter at his Florida club. No criminal charges have been filed (yet). And the current Oval Office occupant, President Joe Biden, is too busy with the boring business of governing to hold a formal press conference for them. What are national reporters to do?
Eric Boehlert snarks at Press Run:
Leaning hard into the task of creating conflict and controversy where none exists, the Beltway press is trying its best to rustle up gotcha stories that ding President Joe Biden. Struggling to adjust to the new media landscape that does not feature a narcissistic, pathological liar president, and one who does not purposely create outrage, journalists are swinging and missing as they work too hard to manufacture news.
Biden travels during the pandemic! Biden wears a Rolex! Biden hasn’t given a press conference! Biden hasn’t credited Trump for the vaccine! Biden hasn’t “united” the nation! The breathless exercise is already tedious. And it’s only March.
In a way this is the Beltway press returning to “normalcy” after Trump’s four years of deliberate chaos. And normalcy for the D.C. media is pelting Democrats with gotcha stories about optics and how something the president has done doesn’t look right, as determined by journalists. Not that the president has done anything wrong. Just that it doesn’t feel right, and that now that gets treated as Important News, just months after a president who ran the White House as a criminal enterprise and tried to demolish free and fair elections in America left office.
The problem is there is no return to normal as we knew it any more than there was after the Depression and the Dust Bowl. The New Deal, WWII, the Cold War, and growing middle-class prosperity made the pre-1930s normal obsolete.
Four years of the most corrupt administration in American history began with Trump’s vicious attempts to stem the browning of America and ended in a pandemic with an American death toll of half a million — responsible largely to Trump’s fecklessness. Throw in his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Trumpists’ attempt to overthrow the government. Conservative critics of “cancel culture” cancelled the normal they hoped to conserve. There is no going back to the way we were.
With any luck, the Biden administration will do for the 2020s what FDR and WWII did to put the 1930s behind us. The press will just have to catch up.