Happy Friday,
Here’s some stuff you might like.
Trump and COVID-19
Yesterday afternoon I started writing about the presidential debate, then I woke up at 4:30 this morning to the news that President Trump and the First Lady has tested positive for COVID-19, and, well, the debate probably doesn’t matter that much now, if it ever did.
First off, as with the other 7.31 million Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19, the President and First Lady deserve our prayers and thoughts (depending on your persuasion). It’s a dangerous disease that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, and made many more very very sick. President Trump is 74, and people in that age range are overwhelmingly likely to survive COVID-19 in the U.S. Mrs. Trump is, ahem, quite a bit younger and the prospects are even better for her. Both will have access to the best medical care in the history of humankind. There is, however, risk for both, and for everyone who catches this thing. May they both be well.
We are now watching, in real time, the process of America’s 2020 media (of which many of us are both consumers and producers, due to social media) processing yet another piece of big news. At other times when people close to the President have tested positive and it’s been reported that he’s been tested, I’ve wondered what the reaction would be like if he tested positive. My first thought was that many of his opponents would be overjoyed. And many are, including many who have insisted on the utmost solemnity regarding the virus in other instances.
I don’t do a lot of media criticism here, because I think it’s generally unproductive and not newsworthy. By not newsworthy, I mean that if you’re politically aware I think it’s pretty darn clear that what many people call the mainstream media is biased against conservative ideas and Republicans and have been for a very long time.
One thing Trump has done is to tear the last vestiges of the veil of objectivity from these sources, and now most “mainstream media” outlets are more or less explicit in their opposition to Trump and to ideas anywhere to the right of something approximating Bernie Sanders. (That is not an exaggeration. Think of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which holds that America is rotten to its very constitutional core with racism, or its coverage of single payer health care or most any issue regarding the proper role of government in Americans’ lives, and it’s clear the NYT is well to the left of Joe Biden.)
I generally view this outing (not Trump’s methods, necessarily, but the effect) as a positive development because I believe a media environment with many voices with different points of view and well-known if not always acknowledged biases is better than an environment in which a few big outlets with, I believe, false and ultimately impossible claims of objectivity.
However, one downside (there’s always a downside) of more of the media openly taking sides is, well, that more of the media openly takes sides, and what we’re left with is politics without the veneer of “objective” journalism. While the claims of objectivity were always false or at the very least aspirational, those claims caused what used to be the mainstream media to usually use more neutral language.
The coverage that we’re seeing this morning and will continue to see, with journalists barely able to hide their glee about the president getting sick, or sometimes not even trying to hide it, is gross. To be sure, if Biden had tested (or tests) positive, the reaction from many of his opponents, including those in conservative media, would be the same: gross. Many of them have already been rude about Biden’s age. Our entire media environment is now openly weaponized in our ongoing partisan war and, at times like this, the results can be really hard to watch.
The impact on the presidential race is surprisingly hard to determine, at least for me. My first thought was this hurts Trump and, if I had to put money on it, I think that’s still the most likely outcome. He is in quarantine with a month to go before election day, while millions of Americans are already voting. In Campaigns 101, they teach you that’s not ideal.
However, there is a definitely non-zero chance that Trump gets a boost out of sympathy and disgust at some of the more callous reactions of his opponents. This story seriously shakes the race up, a race in which polls indicated Trump was significantly and chronically behind. This is the mother of all October surprises, it is unique, and it jumbles the race. Trump likes nothing so much as to troll his opponents, trying to cause them to overreact. Catching the virus could be his biggest troll yet.
The year 2020 keeps straining the atrophied and frayed connective tissue of our body politic. Our country is made up of human beings living under a system of government that prior human beings have set up and tinkered with for generations. That government is comprised of institutions that have, by any reasonable comparative historical measure, served Americans exceedingly well, though by no means perfectly.
We select other human beings to operate the institutions, mostly because no one else is available. Over time, and perhaps naturally, we’ve come to focus on, and indeed obsess about, the people who run or want to run those institutions and structures of government, rather than the institutions themselves. This year serves as a reminder that our alternately idolatrized and demonized politicians are human. As human beings, they are flawed just like us. They are self-interested and possess limited knowledge, just like us. They make mistakes, just like us. And they get sick, just like us.
Something lighter
Two words: swearing parrots.
(Hat tip to friend of OR Sarah Kowalski for sharing that link.)
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Have a great weekend!
Jeff Eager
jeff@eagerlawpc.com
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What I do:
EagerLaw PC – A business and real property law firm in Bend, Oregon.
Insite LGA Corp. – A campaign consulting, strategic communications and local government monitoring firm.
Waste Alert – Local government monitoring for the solid waste and recycling industry.