The interesting question is what comes next.
The battlelines are drawn. The President has made it very clear. Crystal. We can’t handle the truth. It’s the economy, stupid, and that is his priority. This is the only way he could ever see this. It would be an obvious political advantage if the economy just takes a brief break and then comes roaring back. He can run on that. He has always seen the United States as just a big business. The biggest. The best. His decisions are seen through that lens, and in business there are casualties. That’s just the nature of the beast. Would the public be so embracing of their new role as “warriors”?
On the other hand, there is reality. That’s the opposing force he is facing. Many businesses are already gone. Many folks on unemployment will have no job to go back to and a pretty horrific job market. The rest will be scared. Scared to go in to work. Scared to go out when they leave. Some will not go in until forced, others not even then. They will know the risks. They will be forced at the latest to go back in July when the money runs out, or be without income altogether.
So back they will go, no matter the risks. Those who can finance their defiance will stay home and be utterly perplexed why everyone doesn’t do it. That privilege is not afforded to the vast majority of the population. When the money runs out, the calculus changes. The Second Wave will begin.
The President has one playbook, and it applies to everything he does. Say what his people would ideally like to hear on any topic. It does not have to be true, just what people wish was true. Declare it, take credit for it and repeat it. If in an inescapable corner, say you were being aspirational and move on or find a scapegoat and bury them. The accusations need not be true either, just demonstrative and constant. For this administration and its adherents, repetition is truth. Previous reichs have understood and embraced this idea to devestating effect.
For the rest of us, this is so mystifying. How can lies, sometimes utterly ridiculous ones, be persuasive? How is that possible, the truth is readily available and repeated just as often. Credible people are working so hard and risking so much. Who would perform such heroic acts for a fantasy, a partisan hoax manipulated for political gain? They are even dying in the attempt to serve. Who would do that?
The answer is really quite simple. These are people that aren’t hearing any of that. Their sources are not reporting it, and some of them are actually creating competing characterizations that are factually impoverished, but nonetheless embraced. No alternative is even encountered.
But even Fox is finding the challenge of protecting the President during his response disaster daunting at best, and more and more frequently simply impossible. This has forced the President to paint them with his same broad brush “fake news” moniker, and endorsing a newer, purer form of journalism, the only guys reporting with integrity, One America News Network, or OAN. Their claim to fame is an ideological purity that is impenetrable, facts being a malleable raw material in any broadcast recipe. If Trump does not start his own network when he is done abusing a nation, he will undoubtedly become a partner in this grotesque imitation of a news organization.
For those not exposed to this factual flatulence, the White House would like to introduce you, so they were inconceivably invited to the Covid-19 press briefings, even being allowed in on a day they pulled the short straw for seating in the age of socially distanced press events. Not everyone who wants to attend the briefings could go to them anymore as seating was severely limited to allow for distancing, but somehow a personal invite from the Administration allowed access to this up-and-coming standard bearer of journalistic excellence, and they would never just be present.
Very quickly, a new face would grace the events, and the President could be depended on to call on her at least once at every presser, and sometimes multiple times.
Chanel Rion would appear on our TV screens, looking for all the world to be excited to reveal The Big Showcase on the Price Is Right. With an overly manipulated hair helmet that invoked an inescapable nostalgia for the 80s and late night club-hopping make-up that was jarring in the harsh light of the briefing room, she would serve up softballs that were obsequious and cloying, but the extremity of it made it almost admirable. Who on earth would have the balls for this? Who would publicly present this vision of political prostitution for cash? Who would sell it like a bad soap opera actress on their first set?
Chanel Rion, that’s who! She had no shame, just naked ambtion and a complete lack of ethics, all things the President holds in the highest regard. She has sold the lie of her holding a Harvard undergraduate degree successfully to the extent that her Wikipedia listing reports it as an established fact. The truth is she graduated from Harvard Extension School, a community service provided by the University to provide college level studies to anyone that can pay the bill on a per class basis. There is no qualifying for the classes, no SAT scores or past academic excellence evaluated. You pays your bucks and you go to class.
I know. I attended for two semesters. These were great classes, often taught by elite professors in their fields, and I had great experiences there, but I was never held to the standards that the actual matriculated students of Harvard Unversity were held to. The intensity was not there, nor was it intended to be. These were college level classes for the everyman, for the general public to be challenged but successful. Harvard University, on the other hand, is conceptualized around the idea of teaching the most gifted minds the school can discover, and pushing even them to heights of achievement that are frequently astonishing, and not infrequently horrifying. Harvard Extension School operates on a completely different model.
Ms. Rion has perpetuated the lie, suggesting her Extension School degree is exactly the same as the elite degree proferred by the parent company, and her b.s. has gained enough traction to be unchallenged on Wiki. Her secondary schooling was done at the kitchen table, a homeschooled wunderkind with an invented name because she just couldn’t land on which of her swindling dad’s names she would go by. Like father like daughter, she made up her own. With Harvard’s recently published disdain for homeschooled students, it is hard to imagine them putting the pretender on a pedestal of honored graduates. The only job anyone has been able to identify with Chanel before being the Chief White House Correspondent for OAN was drawing political cartoons for a firm owned by her sister.
This was Trump’s kind of journalism!
Orange Julius (Caesar) wasted no time in directing his adoring masses to collectively endorse this new razor-focused source for dependable journalism. He questioned Fox, suggesting they were simply believing and rebroadcasting the lies perpetuated by the Mainstream Media Conspiracy, primarily CNN and MSNBC, and wildly endorsed the upstart as the single source of truth in American media.
There is a lot riding on this roll of the dice. Up until now Trump’s base had two sources of dependable information, the President himself and Fox News. That was it, and nothing else was even watched. As Fox tepidly changed course to retain even a suggestion of journalistic integrity in the face of overwhelming evidence of Presidential malfeasance and public endangerment from the virus, OAN faced no such challenges. None of that was their mission statement. The President had to change the allegiance of his worshippers from one Holy Book to another. It was like asking Franklin Graham to reject the Bible for the Koran. Many years and many lies had been invested to create the illusion of jounalistic integrity for Fox. Presidents, Congresspeople and Senators had all invested in the charade, knowing the power of disinformation and propaganda. None of this had been an accident. It had been hard work dedicated to the undermining of public trust for a decade. It’s success was undeniable.
Would they really throw that all away? Could they?
So far, the answer is no, but the battle is not over. If Fox continues its very slow drift toward news, which is by no means assured, then the continued cheerleading for OAN will continue. But the base has been trained to have true faith in Fox, and they integrated those lessons into an axiom so beloved they had even abondoned their own credibility to the altar of the one true journalistic faith. They were true believers, had been before Trump. Could Trump and OAN overcome odds that great? Or would Fox return to form and defuse the threat when their ratings started to be affected by the transition to a more faithful resource?
Let the disinformation war begin.