He's winning while losing

Trump either intuited or stumbled into a profound insight about the media: It’s easier to get bad press than good press. There is an old line about the media: We don’t cover the planes that land safely. Most politicians try to get media coverage while landing the plane safely. They stage photo ops at factories, give prepared statements, deliver carefully crafted speeches. The result is dull, predictable, normal — and ignored.

Trump dominates news cycle after news cycle by crashing planes into Twitter. He is everywhere, seemingly all the time. He says things no national politician in history would have dared say, things that the press covers because they are outrageous, controversial, unnerving, appalling.

Trump is demanding and receiving our attention, crowding out everything else, accepting that it’s better to be hated than to be ignored.

  Vox

Indeed, I've long believed that the real way to diminish Trump is to ignore him. But, I too, have become consumed by the Trump presidency. With previous presidents, I blogged about the shit they were doing, with Trump, it's almost all about the shit he is. My labels list has far and away more Trump labels than any other topic. For instance, in health-related labels, I have three: health, health care, and Health and Human Services; for one of my most-blogged topics - military - I have 13 labels; but for Trump, I have a whopping 98! (And that's not including the other Trump family members.)

Every time I see that list, I object to the amount of attention I've paid to the most disgusting human on the planet, and I use the term 'human' loosely. I never paid any attention at all to Trump before his 2016 campaign. There were zero posts about him; he didn't have label one. I never once watched "The Apprentice", and I knew absolutely nothing about his "business" or anything else about him other than I knew his name was on a Las Vegas casino. And even that was in error. It's only a hotel. His casino adventures were in Atlantic City and failed spectacularly.

In my mind, making America great(er) again would be going back to 2015 before I knew anything about The Most Notable Loser.

Every so often, someone will suggest that we just ignore Trump’s words, his riffs, his tweets. But Trump controls a nuclear arsenal. His tweets are “considered official statements by the president of the United States,” according to Sean Spicer, who served as Trump’s first press secretary.

These are words that start wars, that drive deportations, that set policy, that end negotiations, that empower bigots, that reveal scandals, that represent our country. That the president of the United States is acting outrageously, or worryingly, or offensively, is important. As much as Trump might treat his presidency like a reality show, it remains a presidency, and lives are in the balance.

That's the truth and the bottom line. We can't ignore the asshole any more.

Yet in owning our attention, in driving the agenda, in setting both the terms and tone of the debate, and in doing so by generating constant negative attention, cultural conflict, and emotional alarm, Trump makes us a little more like him, and politics a little more like the tribal clash he says it is.

And that's also true, and the part I hate the most.

“It says so much about our current media moment that the president would announce plans to shame news organizations with his first-annual ‘Fake News Awards’ and every reporter would be praying to God they made the list,” wrote Kyle Pope, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Trump drives his opponents to respond in kind, to adopt just a little more of his tone and language and pitch. Twitter swells with jabs and nicknames, cries of “Sad!” and “Fake news!”

[...]

Trump understands this power. He knows he can wrest the news cycle back at a moment’s notice. In September, amidst Puerto Rico’s misery and bad news for the GOP’s congressional agenda, Trump lashed out at kneeling NFL protestors, creating a multi-week firestorm that didn’t have policy stakes, but drove a deep wedge into our cultural divisions.

[...]

Here was the President of the United States choosing to ignite a racialized controversy, telling the mostly white attendees at his rallies that “people like yourselves” shouldn’t have to see “those people” kneeling during the anthem. Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence to an NFL game with instructions to walk out if the players kneeled — which was exactly what happened. It was a transparent effort to distract us, to inflame our divisions, to lure us to have the fight Trump wanted to have rather than continue discussing his flailing governance.

I disagree somewhat with that conclusion. I don't think Trump does anything to distract us from his flailing government. I think he believes he's doing a great job there. I think he simply lashes out at every moment he gets an itch to punish someone - anyone - everyone. He's an angry, self-centered brat who will only grow old, never grow up. I don't think he actually gives a shit what happens to America or Americans. He can sell his name anywhere in the world. He doesn't need America for that. It's his lack of any real self-confidence and the unparalleled publicity available in New York and LA in the country of his birth that has any connection to this country at all.

If anyone is doing anything with a plan in mind, it's Fox News via Fox & Friends that knows he will repeat anything they say if it praises him or takes a jab at anyone who opposes him or who he doesn't like. Trump, the man, the president, is simply one huge disgusting bag of sensory nerves with automatic reaction.  He's an angry gut, and nothing else.

Trump dominated the national conversation on almost every day of 2017, and that was true no matter whether you looked at liberals or conservatives or political elites or everyone. The mindshare he occupies, the energy he consumes, is vast.

[...]

I say none of this from atop a soapbox. I am as guilty of it as anyone, and more guilty of it than most.

I find it hard to resist commenting on Trump’s tweets. I find it hard to tear myself away from his daily outrages, even when I know they’re less important than other things I could cover. I find it hard not to respond to him in kind, not to let his language, his energy, his approach, infect mine.

We'll only be released when Trump has made America irrelevant and he's out of office.

Keeping politics at this pitch for four years is a terrible strain on an already divided country. Dozens of news stories have recorded psychologists reporting patients streaming into their office with Trump-related anxiety. Trump is deepening the threats we feel — and, in some cases, the threats we truly face — from each other; he is breaking us into warring factions in the hopes that that collision will strengthen his supporters’ loyalty to him.

[...]

This is, I think, Trump’s true purpose in public life: to have everyone talking about him, looking at him, reacting to him.

Bingo.

Even before Trump, American politics was becoming dangerously angry, polarized, bitter. In this, Trump’s rise is more symptom than cause. But his presidency has been an accelerant, and the consequences of it are yet untold.

There are three years left in Trump’s term. It will not be good for the country if they all feel like Trump’s first.

Gird yourself the best you can. There's no "if" involved.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.