How can it be, you may be wondering, that 55 percent of Americans tell pollsters they approve of how Donald Trump is handling the transition? He has nominated—almost but not quite literally across the board—unqualified extremists. These are people who’ve never run large, complex organizations and who, if they shouldn’t be ruled out on those grounds, should certainly be ruled out on the basis of their way-outside-the-mainstream views and announced goals to all but destroy the agencies they’re going to run; they’re people whose only association with the word cabinet should be the ones they select when remodeling their kitchens.
Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kash Patel are just the starting rotation, as it were (and Matt Gaetz the lone casualty so far). Many, many others are objectionable in some way. Trump’s would-be IRS guy is an auctioneer (seriously) who, in a brief congressional stint, sponsored something called the Tax Code Termination Act. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guy, another former congressman who runs a medical practice and whom Trump proposes to head a 13,000-employee, $9 billion operation, is arguably more anti-vax than RFK Jr. And so on, and so on. We could do this with about two-thirds of them.
And people support this. Why?
Here’s a conventional explanation. Because Americans are ready to turn the page. Because Joe Biden is so deeply unpopular that the country is restless to see him and his whole crew go. Because people still think Trump the businessman can make things better.
There’s a little truth in all that. But here’s another explanation. People don’t really know about these Cabinet picks because average Americans just aren’t as read-in to the news as they once were. They watch the news on their phones in 30-second snippets. If they read, it’s headlines and social media posts, maybe. So they know, probably, that Trump nominated Dr. Oz to something or other. But do they know that he has a roughly $30 million financial stake in companies that will be doing business with the very Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that he is probably going to lead? I very much doubt it.
Let me make two points here. First, I don’t think there was some golden age when every citizen, or even most citizens, read all they could about such matters. That’s ridiculous. The concept of the informed citizenry on which democracy depends has always been a challenge. Second, this is not a blame-the-idiot-people column. People are busy. They have lives and kids and bills and passions and hobbies, and they don’t make a lot of time for politics. That’s life.
All this is increasingly a by-product of life in a time of widening inequality too. If you’re working longer hours to make ends meet, and it’s that much harder to tend to the immediate obligations the real world throws at you, you’ve got much less time to read news and reflect. Just one more reason why a more broadly shared prosperity is so important.
So no, I don’t blame people. I blame the larger culture, which has been almost totally drained of common concern about our civic health. First and foremost, I blame Rupert Murdoch (and to a lesser extent his imitators), whose media properties have injected so much poison and so many lies into our discourse since 1977 that common civic agreement about basic morality in public life has become impossible.
We used to have that—except about sex, which allowed JFK (among others) to survive politically, and about which society was completely hypocritical. But on all other matters, we had a basic understanding about what kinds of actions did and did not reflect our best values, and this was why Richard Nixon had to resign in disgrace for committing far fewer offenses than Trump already has. Everyone, whatever their politics, agreed that Nixon had clearly crossed a line. But that impulse is dead in the United States, and the right-wing media killed it.
I blame the mainstream media also for failing too often to fight hard enough to maintain their commitment to that common civic agreement about basic morality. Every narrative and meme that the mainstream media uncritically picks up from the right-wing ecosystem and runs with for the sake of clicks—and there have been thousands of them over the years—has contributed its little share to our civic collapse.
Many mainstream media outlets, starting with The New York Times, still do tons of important work, and we’d be far poorer without their scoops and investigations. But those occasional scoops have been, in my view, more than outweighed by an overall tenor of political coverage that has watched one of our two parties descend into a particularly un-American blend of authoritarianism and cartoonish radicalism without nearly enough alarm bells getting raised. So much of the political media hasn’t reckoned with what’s coming—at least not in a public-facing way with their readers and viewers.
Making matters worse is that we seem to have good reason to worry that some outlets now want to make peace with Trumpism. The owner of The Washington Post (and I think you know who he is), after nixing the paper’s already-written Kamala Harris endorsement, is donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. The owner of the Los Angeles Times is cooking up these new rules promising a more “fair and balanced” approach to the news. ABC is paying Trump $15 million (plus a million to cover legal fees) to settle a defamation claim that came after several ABC and Disney executives made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to meet with transition officials.
It’s chilling. It’s nonetheless true that the mainstream media in general have been pretty aggressive in what they’ve been writing about Trump’s nominees. But that just leaves us with the other problem: No one is reading. Only about 10 percent of people read newspapers anymore, and their online engagement with newspaper websites averages less than two minutes.
So: Sure, your average American is ready to bid Biden hasta la vista. But that isn’t why people are relatively sanguine about the early days of a coming administration that has the makings of the most corrupt presidential administration ever. They’re sanguine because they just don’t know. They haven’t heard. Or if they’ve heard, they don’t believe it. They still think the checks and balances they learned about in school will sort things out and hold Trump at bay. They don’t realize that Trump & Co. have formulated specific plans to evade or trample those checks and balances, and if they’ve read that, they don’t believe it, either.
I’ll bet you my mortgage that among people who read news, whatever their political views, concern runs much higher. But these days, that describes a rapidly dwindling number of people. You know how pollsters ask respondents basic demographic and attitudinal questions before they get to the substance? I propose that all pollsters start including questions about people’s media habits so we can see, repeatedly, week in, week out, the growing chasm between the informed and the less informed (or, in the case of people who rely solely on right-wing media, the anti-informed).
In sum: The transition approval is more proof that the right-wing media has won. Disinforming is the new informing. And it’s spreading to more and more mainstream outlets. The only question, which more and more of us are asking, is when the liberal establishment in this country will wake up and tackle this problem.
