Tom Lehrer famously believed that Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Prize for Peace rendered satire impossible. Has Donald Trump’s presidency made the same true of political journalism?
This may sound counterintuitive. After all, Trump has been a boon for news outlets and book publishing as well as social media. Bob Woodward’s Rage sold 600,000 copies in its first week. And that the dean of White House scribes herein abandons his trademark disinterest and pronounces authoritatively that ‘Trump is the wrong man for the job’ has been treated as news itself.
Yet so what? In the four years he has acted as America’s id, journalists have repeatedly demonstrated that Trump is also an idiot – confirming more or less what anyone could tell from listening to him for five minutes. Yet for all that stupendous effort they have hardly shifted the dial by a degree, any more than seven million cases of COVID-19 and 200,000 deaths have. And Rage, sadly, hints why.
Woodward’s stock in trade is the heavily ‘reported’, privileged-access, semi-official version of events, halfway between journalism and history, in which everyone gets their say, usually on a non-attribution ‘deep background’ basis. He departed that slightly for Fear (2018), his account of the first half of Trump’s term, because Trump would not speak to him; he departs it here, too, because Trump does.
Rage becomes an uneasy mix of classic Woodward, in which the state’s flawed but noble servants wrestle with events and nobody comes off too badly, and new formula Woodward, as the journalist sits through seventeen ‘interviews’ in which Trump rambles disconnectedly about obsessions that sometimes do not last the duration of a sentence.
The first half is mainly defence secretary Jim Mattis, secretary of state Rex Tillerson and national security advisor Dan Coats experiencing the ‘almost irresistible call to presidential service’ and living to regret it – ground already thoroughly traversed by Phillip Rucker and Carol Leonnig in A Very Stable Genius (2020). In the second half, Woodward is mainly just a dutiful stenographer, occasionally remarking on the ‘vague, directionless nature of Trump’s comments’, the ‘maddening, convoluted dodging’, the ‘stream-of-consciousness greivance’, ‘the rambling, repetitious, often defensive and angry monologues’.
Which, to be sure, they are, but they are nothing we have not heard before. Yes, prepare to be amazed. Trump unplugged sounds almost exactly the same as Trump plugged: scatter-brained, grandiose, self-pitying, a fashioner of sentences that collapse under the weight of their incoherence if they extend beyond five words, two of which will usually be ‘tremendous’ or ‘unbelievable’. In listening so attentively, however, Woodward fails to hear something integral to Trump’s appeal.
Not for Trump the self-protecting cloak of ‘deep background’. He rings Woodward at all hours of the day and night, and either brags (‘Here’s the thing: I’m never wrong’; ‘You know they talk about the elite. Really, the elite. Ah, they have nice houses. No. I have much better than them. I have better everything than them, including education’) or bitches (‘I have done a tremendous amount for the Black community. And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love’; ‘I have opposition like nobody has. And that’s okay. I’ve had that all my life’). Sure, Trump’s brain is a garbage fire. But even a garbage fire supplies warmth.
Trump is a phony all right: the heir to a fortune who might as well have invested it in government bonds for all his actual commercial acumen but poses as a business genius; the self-styled strong man who prevaricates and postures rather than make actual decisions; the self-professed drainer of the swamp who has simply merged it with his own swamp of overt and covert self-dealing. But the act, as it were, is defiantly real, which to many makes him a refreshing antidote to decades of manipulation by machine politics and dirty dynasties (Bush, Clinton et al). Every now and again, there’s some clusterfiasco – a bald-faced lie, a crude betrayal, a blown whistle, a legal snafu. Yet it blows over, or is dislodged by the next scandal du jour, Trump carries on like nothing has changed, and the impression is: he’s indestructible, he’s our guy.
This never seems to dawn on Woodward, who keeps straining to interpret Trump by the light of previous presidents. He tries fact checks, such as his earnest annotation when Trump invokes Antifa: ‘Antifa, an abbreviation for “Anti-fascist”, is a decentralised movement. It is not an organisation and does not have a leader or membership dues.’ He tries introducing concepts like ‘white privilege’, which simply cause Trump to laugh: ‘You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you.’ He tries pleading with Trump to pivot, to come up with a vision or a plan, to the extent of running past the president his own Woodrow Wilson-esque fourteen-point list of COVID policy objectives, which merely elicit Trump’s condescension: ‘I’m glad you told me.’ Rage comes with a citation from the venerable Robert Caro calling Woodward a ‘great reporter’ who has ‘never stopped seeking out facts’. But finding that facts here have no purchase, Woodward is reduced to pointless imprecations: ‘It’s a matter of the heart and the spirit.’ Trump comes back, quite rightly, with: ‘You don’t understand me.’ At last, Woodward sags: ‘We were speaking past each other, almost from different universes.’
It is incidental comments in Rage that are most incisive. Of Trump’s relationship with truth, Coats says: ‘To him a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks.’ Of Trump’s objectives, COVID guru Anthony Fauci observes: ‘His sole purpose is to get re-elected.’ Of Trump’s party, his creepily cynical son-in-law Jared Kushner observes: ‘The Republican Party was a collection of tribes.’ Trump, argues Kushner, has galvanised them: ‘I don’t think it’s even about the issues. I think it’s about the attitude.’ In which case, what price political journalism, except as just another alternative in the market of attitudes? Emerson spoke of democracy as being ‘a government of bullies tempered by editors’. But the message of Rage is that we are well past that stage, and that after twenty books Woodward is just another voice persuasive to no-one not already persuaded, that a president widely acknowledged to be an incompetent and ill-informed monomaniac who has subverted every democratic and institutional norm he has touched stands every chance of re-election in November. In which case what would become impossible is dystopian fiction.