The set for the Republican debate at the Reagan Library was a predictable blue. TV news sets in America are universally blue. Electric lapis. Deep azure. Ocean breeze. Aqua Viagra.
Blue, no matter the tonality, secretes a certain gravitas, authority, power. At least that’s what the TV set designers tell network executives who are not known for their originality.
Then again, there are only two national TV news set designers in America. There used to be just one, but the principals of that design firm split a decade ago and now there were two set design firms pimping the same vapid blue fish tank, accentuated by the occasional streak of crimson. Blue sets give me a disorienting vibe of cyanopsia, a condition of seeing things tinted in blue—a common side effect of overdosing on erectile pills.
As if to complete the erection motif, the designer of the evening’s set had built three stories of scaffolding so that the podiums of the eleven Republican contenders would be level with the wings of the Gipper’s old Air Force One jetliner on permanent display at the library. A gigantic silver dildo as a backdrop. The plane was meant to symbolize something, I don’t know what.
Just ten weeks after announcing his candidacy, Trump was in command not only of the polls, but the media. The guy had shocked the establishment and they despised his disregard for their rules, but he was ratings gold for a catatonic industry whose viewers were fleeing in droves. Twenty-four million people had tuned in to watch the Big Orange insult everybody during the previous debate. Seeing that, the network televising this contest was doubling down on the game show motif and increasing its ad buys by 40 percent. Cha-ching!
It is easy to posture with a certain earnestness and idealism about the political process, but under the strain for ratings, these principles are the first casualties. The debate started like this:
INTRO: (Sweeping overhead shot. Host in foreground with blue suit and red tie, his back to the contestants who are jammed together like discount shoe shoppers. Jet plane far in background. Red carpet, blue tones.)
HOST: The eleven leading Republican candidates for president are at their podiums. They’re ready to face off. And if you’ve been watching this race, you know, anything could happen over the next few hours! . . . Now, let’s begin!
After a few opening comments, the host sets them up like pugilists, hoping somebody is going to pull a Mike Tyson and bite off a chunk of his opponent’s ear.
HOST: Would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?
SEN. RAND PAUL: I’m very concerned about him—having him in charge of the nuclear weapons, because I think his response, his—his visceral response to attack people on their appearance—short, tall, fat, ugly—my goodness, that happened in junior high. Are we not way above that? Would we not all be worried to have someone like that in charge of the nuclear arsenal? (Applause)
HOST: Mr. Trump?
DONALD TRUMP: I never attacked him on his look, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject matter there. (Laughter)
The print press was off in the side tent watching on the Jumbotron, banging away on their keyboards, rocking to and fro like a troop of Rhesus monkeys* attempting to augur the sequence that releases the banana chip, compiling the best zingers of the night.
Booyah! That one makes the list! I felt bad for them. By the time their stories were posted, the debate would be over and the talking heads would be frothing like a bottle of rancid wine and by then nobody would read their blogs. Who were they writing for? I wondered. Did they know nobody was reading?
But of course they were reading, this was Trump. Subscriptions were up. The guy was going to save all our jobs.
We had been in Southern California for a few days and already had the bulk of our story in the can. Though the subject didn’t rate more than twenty minutes in the three-hour debate, our story from California was not the debate, but rather immigration.
One million people living in Los Angeles County were without legal documentation. The majority of them were Mexican. In fact, one man we interviewed mopping the Gipper’s grave told us he had come illegally from Mexico a dozen years earlier. Many of the men on the grounds crew who tended the corpse of Reagan were from Central America and had fled Reagan’s proxy wars there back in the ’80s, only to be granted amnesty by Reagan himself. Before we could conduct deeper interviews with the grounds crew, security came and shooed us away.
Trump and the other candidates were talking about the feasibility of building a wall on the Mexican border. New Jersey governor Chris Christie did one better, suggesting we put bar codes on immigrants so we could track them like packages. All of it was bullshit. There was no money for a wall, and international treaty forbade building one along the Rio Grande, anyway. And someone needed to point out to Governor Christie that people have legs, packages don’t.
Then there was the matter of rounding up grandmothers in greater Los Angeles. It would only serve to incite a riot, Deputy Chief Jose Perez of the Los Angeles Police Department told me. Besides, where would we hold abuela while she was awaiting the bus ride home? We had no place to put the children we were catching on the Texas border, for that matter.
Our story from Los Angeles asked a simple question: Why not start with something most Americans agree on. Why not run out the three-quarters of a million illegal aliens who had been convicted of violent crimes? Why not legally compel so-called “sanctuary cities” to cooperate with the federal authorities in identifying these people?
Take the sad life of Jamiel Shaw, who watched his son die on his own street corner in South Central Los Angeles. A high school football star and honors student, seventeen-year-old Jamiel Jr. was gunned down by a gang-banger who was in the country illegally, after the gang-banger mistook Jamiel Jr. for a member of the rival Bloods street gang because he was carrying a red Spider-Man book bag.
The killer was a suspect in three prior murders and had been released from the county jail just the day before, where he’d been serving time on a weapons charge. Immigration officials were not notified of his release. And what’s more, Los Angeles’s Special Order 40 forbids police from checking the immigration status of known criminals or suspects.
Shaw wept bitterly as we spoke at the scene of his son’s murder, a plaque marking the spot not a hundred yards from his home.
What was the guy doing here? Shaw wanted to know. Why can’t we get these people out of here? Because he has rights? Didn’t my son have a right to grow into a man? Didn’t he?
A recent poll by the University of California at Berkeley showed that people overwhelmingly agreed with Shaw about sanctuary cities. Among those people was Alfonso Fernandez, an undocumented day laborer at the Home Depot in Hollywood.
The criminals are no good, he said. They make problems. They steal from us. Every week, we have to pay the gangs to be here. You don’t pay, you have problems.
The intellectual justification for sanctuary cities and Special Order 40 is that the protection they provide encourages illegal immigrants to cooperate with law enforcement authorities without fear they’ll be deported. But if that was the case, then why weren’t men at the Home Depot informing the cops about the pukes and shakedown artists preying on them?
Are you loco, señor? is the answer I got.
There was also nothing said in the debate about what to do with the three-quarters of a million farm workers who make less than the federal minimum wage, but do one of the most important jobs for Americans. They feed us.
For one hundred years, these have been Mexican jobs because American farmers have always been addicted to cheap labor. And the arrangement has been good for all concerned. Why not legitimize the workers with a ‘“Blue Card”—an agricultural work permit? Maybe this way, Daniel, a grape picker in the San Joaquin Valley and the father of three American-born children, could have returned to Mexico for his mother’s funeral. Why not free him from these petty indignities?
As far as I knew, the only referendum ever held on illegal immigrants occurred in California two decades earlier. Proposition 187 would have established a statewide screening system that would have prevented the undocumented from receiving public money, health care, and education. It passed easily in liberal California but was eventually struck down by the courts. The most interesting thing about the referendum was the racial breakdown of those who voted for it: 63 percent of whites, 58 percent of blacks, 58 percent of Asians, and 31 percent of Latinos. Americans and their view of immigration was much more complex than the TV debates and news segments were presenting.
Immigration. This was the true subject of our California story. The debate was simply cellophane wrap to us. A couple of empty calories to fold into the dough.
Swept away in the post-debate media scrum, we waited respectfully as our colleague from the Access Hollywood think tank asked Trump about his facial expressions and soul-brother handshakes.
Sensing an opening, I slid my question in while clutching Trump’s jacket tails.
ME: Why don’t we get the Mexicans to build the Wall on their side? That way everybody at the Home Depot will run home to build it and seal themselves in!
TRUMP: Yeah, and Mexico’s gonna pay for it.
ME: Awesome!
Senator Lindsey Graham, who statistically may have been drawing negative votes, was still hanging around, all five foot seven of him, talking tough.
What about the violent illegals? I asked. Shouldn’t we focus on them?
We need to kick their asses, the little guy snarled.
The nonsense. The platitudes. The starched collars. The soft-handed politicians talking like gunslingers. It was too much, and I spontaneously snatched Matt’s lapels and we do-si-do’d, spinning around the spin room. I’m told we appeared in the background on every major cable network. My mom called to say hello. But it did not go over well with the executives.
I thought everybody knew this was a sock puppet show. But apparently I wasn’t showing the process proper reverence. This is our country. This is the highest office in the free world. Give it the proper respect.
Respect? The promo commercials had called the debate Round 2: The Main Event, and even dubbed in the preposterous chiming of a prizefight bell. It was sold as Rocky Balboa meets Family Feud.
To me, the spin room was no better, nothing more than a powder room of empty parlor talk. This was TV journalism, and I was guilty of running down the long plastic hallway and urinating on the carpet.
I thought back to that Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960: We’d gone from two men trying to avoid makeup to ten men wearing more makeup than their female rival. We’d gone from two chairs and a drab gray background to a Hollywood set lit in boner-pill blue and a silver jet plane. Americans knew what time it was and I thought I was doing them the proper job.
I don’t know if the spin-room spinning was the last straw. It could have been, but maybe it was New York. A few weeks earlier, we had done a story on the seeming unwinding of New York City. Like in a lot of urban centers in America, murder there was up and bums were bathing in public fountains. But in the Big Apple they had the additional scourge of costumed cartoon characters and topless women wandering around Times Square posing for pictures for tips. Sometimes Elmo and Batman were arrested for pushing kids to the ground or groping women. Sometimes the topless chicks were busted for turning tricks. If you believed the New York Post headlines, it was the end of times. Naked chicks!
In the course of interviewing the topless women being topless myself, I received an alert that Trump was giving a press conference at Trump Tower just a few blocks away that very afternoon. He was going to sign the Republican loyalty pledge. Now all seventeen hopefuls—including Trump—would agree to support the party’s eventual nominee. No third-party candidates. One big happy family. It was bullshit, of course. Nobody in politics keeps his word. Another media stunt. Still, a Trump cameo always boosts ratings. So we headed over to Fifth Avenue.
Security was heavy. The media crowd was huge, taking up half the lobby. We weren’t on the list. Not to worry.
NEWS MEDIA PRESS OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION.
Worked like a charm. And we were waved in.
We waited and waited for the political media to talk itself blue about the pledge. Then Access Hollywood got its turn asking about rapper Kanye West’s threat to run for president.
Don loved Kanye.
Someone else asked about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the playoff-game Deflategate scandal. Don was happy to entertain the questions. Don loved Tom.
Then he called on me.
Sir, the naked women in Times Square, I asked. Where do you stand on that?
His brow crinkled. I don’t want to talk about that, he grumbled. It’s inappropriate.
Snickers from the media again.
Inappropriate? The American urban center was spinning off its axis. There were riots and marches and poverty and bums in the birdbaths. You want to lead the country, then you have to know where to begin. That starts with knowing what’s going on outside our window. Inappropriate? Cool with me. I can write to that.
I had TV gold in my hand. I had America wrapped up in topless chicks. I had Batman calling them prostitutes. I had Tangerine Trump.
The call from the executives came after the Los Angeles piece aired. No more Trump, they ordered. No more spinning in the spin room. The local TV executives around the country did not appreciate it.
How was I to know I was supposed to take the shitshow seriously? What with the gigantic aluminum dildo as a backdrop and a five-foot senator threating to beat Mexican gangster ass? This wasn’t New York’s or Los Angeles’s or D.C.’s election. It was ours, out here in the moldering middle, a place apparently impossible to see from the coastal corridors of power or the skyscraper canyons where the media elite resided. This election didn’t belong to the suits. It belonged to the flannel. But orders are orders and I was being shipped back to the minor leagues. The serious girls and boys of TV news would handle the national politics.
I also received a call from accounting over my New York expenses, questioning a dinner receipt I had submitted, which consisted of nine pints of beer and a plate of calamari.
Guilty as charged. But you’ve got to oil a pimp somehow, I tried to explain. Sources want drinks, not baked ziti. And beer is cheaper than a New York strip steak that I was entitled to if I had wanted it.
No booze on the tab, period, I was informed. Company policy.
And just like that, I was grounded until further review of previous expense forms. No more traveling. No more America.
You’d have thought I’d hacked into Prince Harry’s cell phone.