Normalizing Trump

The old Candid Camera show came to mind today. If I recall correctly, the usual setup was to insert something bizarre into a regular situation and then observe the lengths to which the unsuspecting participants would go to treat the highly irregular as normal.

What brought this to mind was a Bill Kristol tweet on Wednesday night:

“Lefty media types: Stop. Take a breath. You loathe Trump. Fine. But it's now hampering your ability to report & analyze the race accurately.”

A fair point (that also presumably applies to many NeverTrumpers like myself) but also not particularly insightful. If you are on Twitter during any major political event you know something like this is a constant.

A more interesting line of inquiry (he wrote modestly) is to explore whether something like the opposite of what Kristol is warning against is at play. What really stands out this cycle is the stubborn insistence of treating Donald Trump like a normal candidate. A notable political commentator can proclaim after Trump’s Wisconsin speech “that if conservatives hear this speech, he can win” and the same commentator and others on Wednesday were insistent that Donald appeared “presidential” in his meeting with the real Mexican president.

Both propositions would perhaps have merit if it wasn’t for everything else. We’re to take his reading of a speech in a completely different idiom from his other speeches as dispositive? To say of Trump that he looked presidential because he looked sober enough standing behind a podium for an hour or so is silly delusion considering the months of jackassery by the same Donald Trump.

Similarly, Rich Lowry tweeted at one point during the Arizona immigration speech:

“Very important passage here on proposed changes to legal immigration system”

It probably was, but as the immigration speech was, per usual, a verbal Jackson Pollock, to fasten on a particular point seems quite wrongheaded. Like saying in regard to Pollock, ooooh that was a good paint throw! The upper left hand corner is very effective!

What’s truly extraordinary in the current election cycle is how adamant the commentariat has been in normalizing Trump. It’s now September and the candidate still hasn’t opened field offices in many states, still hasn’t stuck to anything like a message for 24 hours, still hasn’t given any indication that he has any knowledge of or actual interest in policy. The rest is just ephemera. Treating his playing around with the forms of politics as if they are were substantive out of habit is to concede too much to candidate Trump.

Under-reported this year, and last year, and....

‘Tis the season for retrospectives on the past year.  Where the media is involved these usually include most under-reported story of the year.  My candidate this year as it has been for roughly the last decade is the profound change that has occurred in how we make war. 

Think about it.  From Napoleon on the trajectory has been consistently in the direction of more all encompassing, more total war, with larger forces and the line between combatant and civilian becoming less and less distinct.  And then America changed everything with its technology, money, and decency.

Consider Michael Kelly’s description of the Iraq war:

“The first morning of the war I was standing across the Tigris River from the Ministry of Defense, looking at the black smoke pouring out of it from a cruise-missile hit five minutes earlier, when the second missile smacked home, shuddering the ground with the explosion and sending up great new billows of smoke.  Five minutes after that, the third missile boomed.  In ten minutes the heart and symbol of Iraq’s armed forces was a burning rubble.  The hospital next to it, though, was untouched, and so were the homes crowded around it.  The attack had been so swift that the antiaircraft guns had not even fired.”

And later in the same piece:

“The sight of tomahawk cruise missiles moving purposefully two or three stories above the city streets became a recurring nightmare vision in Baghdad.  Cruise missiles move at subsonic speeds and can easily be followed with the eye as their lethally single-minded little gyroscopes and computer circuits guide them along to their target.  A stunned Reuters correspondent actually saw a missile arrive at a street corner, appear to pause for a moment, and then turn left.”

Not exactly Dresden is it, even allowing for the important differences between a war like Iraq and the WWII. 

And yet to my knowledge that are has been little attention paid to this change.  Why?  Well two suggestions come to mind.  One, to give proper credit to this transformation would be to give due credit to America and we can’t have that.  And two, I don’t think those who would write the stories are comfortable with the implications of more precise, less horrific way of making war. 

Things Worth Fighting For, Michael Kelly, Blitzed, pages 258 -259 http://www.amazon.com/Things-Worth-Fighting-Collected-Writings/dp/B000BTH5OY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325275799&sr=1-1