It Begins

Welcome to the inaugural installment of The Abstract. I'll be creating an "about" page/mission statement in the coming days as well as designing the site, etc., but I wanted to get the newsletters flowing first. Short version: The Abstract is a chronicle of what is certain to be the mainstream media's abject failure to responsibly cover the Trump administration and the fascist uprising in general. It is written as much to be a historical record as it is to help inform the public today. 

Note: Inauguration Day was so dizzying with all of the executive orders and so forth that this first installment is not particularly representative of what's to come. Because of that and the fact that I'm still dealing with technical issues, I was able to barely skim the surface. Presumably, future days will be less insane (in terms of volume, if not severity) and I'll capture the media's dysfunction in a more holistic and cohesive way than I was able to here.

The first day of the second Trump administration proved to be the start of a major national disaster, with Trump issuing a flurry of executive orders, nearly all of them horrifying and deeply alarming. The orders and other executive actions included: declaring an emergency at the Mexican border, blatantly ignoring the constitution (someone inform The New York Times of that, please) by attempting to end birthright citizenship, terminating federal DEI programs and rolling back protections for transgender folk, declaring that there are only two sexes, withdrawing from both the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, and pardoning or commuting the sentences of nearly all of the approximately 1,600 January 6 defendants, including those who engaged in violence and were convicted of sedition. There were many others, including some purely vindictive ones, like removing the Secret Service protection granted by President Biden in 2021 to John Bolton Trump's former national security advisor with whom Trump is on the outs. Bolton is apparently facing death threats from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Everybody expected that Trump would issue some orders as soon as he took office, but few predicted that he would sign so many or that all of them would be so radical. That forced reporters to deal with dozens of huge news stories all in one day, on top of covering the inauguration itself and the events surrounding it. This was of course purposeful, and we should expect a lot more of it over the course of the administration. Steve Bannon, Trump's on-again-off-again lackey, told Axios as much: It will be "a tsunami this time... flood the zone," he said. "The media is so overwhelmed with so much activity on so many fronts that it cannot process."

But Monday's coverage showed that this strategy might do as much good as harm (by the standards of normal people, I mean). When political reporters, particularly those at major national outlets, are forced to cover a rolling disaster, it leaves less time for them to add their "analysis," which often consists of normalizing the once-abnormal, producing shallow takes, and engineering "balance" into stories.

Much of Monday's coverage was by necessity largely fact-driven, focusing on the "what," rather than the (supposed) "why," and avoiding optics-focused pieces about how various horrors fit into political strategy and will be perceived by voters. Reporters had to work triage.

The Abstract in turn was also forced to work triage. I wasn't able to get to nearly as many outlets as I would prefer (and normally will as things slow down a bit, assuming they do) so this inaugural installment is limited to only a few of the top outlets, and even there, much had to be left out.

"Analysis"
While cable-news reporters and rank-and-file journalists at the big papers spent the first day focused mainly on keeping up with all the executive orders and speeches, that doesn't mean some of the more senior establishment journalists weren't sucking their thumbs. They sucked hard. By the time Monday night rolled around, the top "analysis" writers at The New York Times and the Washington Post had already fulfilled their duties. Those duties consist mainly of describing how a given development will play politically or how it represents a "break from the past" or is " hallmark of a new direction for America" or some similar twaddle.

The key to "analysis" is for the writer to sound like he or she is being profound when they're not saying much of anything at all, while also being careful not to draw any firm conclusions on anything truly important (like "Trump represents an existential danger to the republic and to the lives and welfare of millions") that might upset anyone, particularly conservatives. 

NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker's byline was on only a tiny few of the long list of mini-stories on the NYT's highly useful page that presented live updates of Trump's orders (more on that below). That turned out to be because he was spending most of the day writing the paper's keynote inauguration story. It wasn't labeled "analysis," but of course Baker couldn't help himself. The headline was "For Trump, a Vindication for the Man and His Movement." The summary was "Donald John Trump took the oath of office again during a ceremony in the Capitol, promising a new 'golden age of America' four years after he was evicted by voters."

What actually happened, of course, was that a criminal lunatic returned to the White House bent on revenge and mayhem, and immediately started carrying it out after making a couple of long, angry, grievance-filled speeches. You might not know that from reading Baker's story. In the key second paragraph, sounding a bit like he was heralding that "golden age," Baker wrote: "In a triumph of the man and his movement, Mr. Trump took the oath of office during a ceremony in the Capitol four years after he was evicted by voters, reinvigorated for another term aimed at remaking America in his vision. He wasted no time outlining an ambitious program of often divisive policies to 'reclaim our Republic' and purge its enemies and his own."

What Americans most need to know about Trump's re-ascent, Baker seems to believe, is that it was a "triumph" by a "reinvigorated" Trump, and that his program is "ambitious" (as opposed to say, "dangerous" or "insane"). Also note where he seems to agree with Trump on who America's enemies are. Trump's statements and executive orders aren't terrifying or even alarming, but merely "divisive," Baker told us.

Over at the Washington Post, now explicitly a MAGA mouthpiece, veteran political writer Dan Balz similarly said essentially nothing in his "analysis" of the day's events. "It's long been said that elections have consequences," Balz wrote in his opening sentence. Huh. You don't say.

"Trump showed how profound those consequences could be as he signaled his determination to move as quickly as possible to make good on his campaign promises," Balz continued, not mentioning that Trump amassed a long list of broken campaign promises in his first term. He declared that the inauguration itself was moved indoors "because of the frigid weather," credulously taking the Trump camp at its word even though the reason almost certainly had to do with Trump's fear that the crowd would be scant and/or his fear that somebody might try to assassinate him. Balz characterized Trump's transition as "disciplined" compared to his first outing, and he ticked off a bunch of stuff Trump said and did without bothering to weigh in on whether it made sense or not. For instance, Trump assailed the public-health system and supposedly rising crime rates, but Balz didn't bother to note that crime is way down and that the public-health system actually works pretty well, even if there were a few hiccups (some of them caused by Trump) at the start of the Covid pandemic.

On The Tube
Erstwhile CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote a scathing (for him) account in his newsletter Status (which is behind a $15-a-month paywall) of what transpired at his former network on Inauguration Day, declaring that his onetime colleagues' formerly "fervid spirit had unmistakably evaporated" and that Jake Tapper and other CNNers seemed "devoid of the passion and conviction that once defined them."

One is left to wonder whether Darcy ever watched CNN when he was on the payroll there up until last August. From what I've seen, Darcy's newsletter is generally quite good, particularly on what's happening in media C-suites. He's broken several big stories already. But while he's better than most Regular Army Media types, he also doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on just how badly America's newsrooms have degenerated in recent years, perhaps because he was in one of the most degenerate of them for years until very recently.

Trump's Brain
Perhaps the political media's most egregious omission on Monday and into Tuesday was that they largely ignored the fact that Trump's speeches were incoherent and starkly showed that his mind is slipping away from him. This has been true for years (both Trump's enfeeblement and the media's downplaying of it) but it gets worse every day and it was blindingly obvious on the day he took back the Oval Office. This amounts to a national emergency, but most news accounts that mentioned it at all characterized it with deceptive descriptors like "rambling" and "freewheeling." This is especially grotesque given how the political media covered Biden's supposed mental lapses with story after story for weeks and months. Biden certainly isn't as sharp as he once was, but his deterioration seems no worse than it is for the average octogenarian. That might mean that he was too old to be president, but Trump was clearly already suffering from some kind of mental malady (malignant narcissism seems to be the most likely diagnosis, perhaps combined now with some kind of dementia) when he entered the race, and it's only grown worse over the ensuing decade. The media has essentially ignored it all along.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Enquirer, one of the few remaining mainstream opinion columnists worth reading, capped off his typically on-the-nose assessment of Inauguration Day with this:

"We’ve just flipped the car keys of this 248-year-old republic to a grandpa who starts his four-year road trip already in a serious state of mental decline, with all the guardrails of yesteryear stripped away by a corrupt Supreme Court, a feckless and increasingly useless Democratic Party, and a bended-knee elite media. And did I mention that there’s a nuclear bomb in the trunk? Fasten your seatbelts, America."

Musk's Nazi Salute
Despite the fact that Musk's sieg heils on Monday were obviously meant to be perceived as Nazi salutes, one could theoretically give the media a little leeway in reporting his true motives. It wouldn't necessarily be right for them to state, unequivocally, that Musk threw up the arm as an explicit endorsement of Nazi ideology, even though Musk has repeatedly aligned himself with antisemitism and other major tenets of National Socialism and in fact is clearly a Nazi-style fascist.

But that doesn't mean they have to pretend that it's possible there was no ill intent at all. Obviously, there was. It might have done more in order to "own the libs," or to make some kind of "joke," than to endorse Nazism, but that doesn't make it any less odious, or, in effect, any less Nazi.

But of course the media went beyond all such considerations and applied its usual "critical distance" to what we all saw with our eyes. The New York Times, for example, didn't frame its story around the fact that Musk threw a Nazi salute, but around how people reacted to Musk throwing a Nazi salute, with the headline "Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture." The summary read: "Speaking at a celebratory rally in Washington, Mr. Musk twice extended his arm out with his palm facing down, drawing comparisons to the Nazi salute."

The headline and summary perfectly fit the story itself. Tech reporter Ryan Mac (writing for the politics section) opened his piece with "Elon Musk ignited speculation and chatter online when he made a hand gesture twice during a speech celebrating President Trump on Monday." Characterizing people's horror and disgust as "speculation" and "chatter" is clearly an attempt by Mac's editors, and perhaps Mac himself, to present the story as a trivial sideshow. Adding "online" to the mix makes it sound even more trivial.

The story also went whole-hog on "balance" with this questionable sentence:

"The motion soon drew comparisons online to the salute popularized by Adolf Hitler, and others interpreted it as a Roman salute, which is also known as the 'Fascist salute' and was later adopted by the Nazis.

Doing the "some say X while others say Y" with this incident is particularly egregious given that the subject is simple, observable reality. The "others" Mac referred to there were, presumably, the many right-wingers who made the "Roman salute" claim in an attempt to cast the gesture as innocent (even though the so-called Roman salute itself is anything but).

Some other iffy headlines and summaries about the incident:

The Independent: "Elon Musk accused of giving ‘Nazi salute’ at Trump inauguration celebration. The world’s richest man drew a ton of attention over an ill-advised ‘salute’ he did on stage, with many likening it to a Nazi gesture" [He was accused of it because he did it. Many "likened it" to a Nazi gesture because that's what it was.]

The New Republic: "Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump’s Inauguration?" [Answer: yes.]

BBC: "Elon Musk's gesture at Trump rally draws scrutiny"

Politico: "Elon Musk's Salute Goes Viral" [many stories, like the NYT's, similarly focused on the reactions; few were quite as shallow as Politico casting it as not much different than a LOLcats meme.]

Variety: "Elon Musk Generates Controversy With Hand Gesture at Trump Inauguration Event, Draws Comparison to Fascist Salute"

NYT Live Updates
Even those political reporters who are generally given to shoehorning "balance" into stories that don't merit it, or to treating politics like it were sports or showbiz, will act like serious journalists when they're dealing with a huge, breaking story. This was evident on Monday when The New York Times rolled out its useful, well-executed "live updates" page devoted to Trump's flurry of authoritarian-minded, spite-fueled, sometimes blatantly unconstitutional executive orders. By necessity, and fittingly for disaster coverage, it was mostly just the facts: a huge horrifying mess of them.

Social Disease
The Abstract will generally stick to chronicling and examining mainstream news coverage of the Trump administration, but other sources of news, including from organizations that aren't strictly in the news business, will sometimes merit scrutiny when they appear to support the fascist cause. In this case, the subjects are Google and Meta.

Google decided that users who searched on "inauguration day" or variants of that term should be greeted with animated fireworks that morph into American flags on the results page. NYT tech reporter Kate Conger noted on social media: "Google has never done something like this for the inauguration, sources told me, out of fear of appearing partisan. But that's changed now, with Sergey and Sundar attending."

Also on Monday, Instagram users found that searching the photo app for "Democrats" yielded a "results hidden" message. Looks bad! Meta, Instagram's parent company, issued a statement that the problem was a technical glitch, and not an attempt by the firm, whose founder and CEO has gone all in on fascism, to stick it to the opposition party. Maybe so, but then when the purported glitch was "fixed," the top five suggested results yielded by a search on "Democrats" were "democrats"; "democrats crying memes"; "democrats meltdown 2024"; "democrats 2024"; and "democrats melt down." Still looks bad!