Trump Fatigue? Spare Me

[babylonsister]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/17/spare-me-your-trump-exhaustion-086597


OPINION | Fourth Estate
Trump Fatigue? Spare Me
Yep, he’s exhausting. And the nation’s pundits owe us more than a plea for sympathy.
By JACK SHAFER
12/17/2019 04:22 PM EST
Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.


You can barely taste the opinion pages anymore without being drowned in the carping and moaning from the commentariat about how President Donald Trump’s endless Twitter devilments, preposterous executive orders, and steady, mendacious haranguing at political gatherings and in the Oval Office have rendered them fatigued and exhausted.

Columnists have been complaining about Trump fatigue since the opening months of his administration, but lately the gripe can be heard everywhere opinion journalism is practiced. In his last New York Times column, David Brooks whimpered softly about how the politics of exhaustion have warped not just American politics but those of the United Kingdom. “There’s no relief from the exhaustion of our national crackup,” New York Times columnist Tim Egan wrote at the beginning of the month. In November, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin framed her column on how the “country, Democrats included, suffering from exhaustion.” (Earlier, Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis diagnosed Trump fatigue even among Republicans!) And on a single day late last summer, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote of his exhaustion with “Trump’s whirling-dervish” performances and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni expressed a “weariness” with Trump that has “transcended partisanship.”

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To be sympathetic to the columnists, it’s apparent that many of them—having called the president a demagogue, a bully, an authoritarian, an aspiring dictator, a despot, and a monster—have emptied their rhetorical quivers and have nothing left to fire. They’re not just exhausted. They’re spent and disheartened by the fact that the biggest Trump stories—the Russia investigation convictions and guilty pleas; the exposes of Trump’s self-dealing; Scott Pruitt’s tenure at EPA, Ryan Zinke’s at Interior, and Tom Price’s at HHS; the incarceration of children at the border; Trump’s coziness with Putin; Trump’s cavalier use of pardons; Trump’s revocation of White House press passes; Trump’s role in covering up the Khashoggi murder; et al.—seem not to have weakened or even disciplined the White House. Nor have these stories failed to reverberate beyond their original soundings the way they might have in the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.

But my sympathy has its limits. If they can’t appreciate the fact that they’ve been dealt one of the most consequential assignments in the history of political journalism, the columnists should surrender their pens and make way for writers who don’t need Adderall to remain vigilant. No matter how spent they feel now, they still have the upper hand. Trump hasn’t abolished the First Amendment; he hasn’t instituted prior restraint; he hasn’t sent any of the scribes he considers “enemies of the people” to jail; he hasn’t shuttered any news outlets; and readers aplenty await the commentariat’s findings.

Drafting the penultimate paragraph of this column, I intended to exhort columnists to set their emotions aside and get to work. But as I did, I paused as I found myself veering ridiculously close to the over-the-top speech Bluto gives in Animal House, when he rallies his fraternity brothers to action against the college administration: “Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!”

But a Blutoesque enthusiasm for the mission is exactly what’s demanded of the commentariat right now. Expressions of self-pity and weariness only play into Trump’s hands by making the opinion pages sound like they’re about the writers, not the unusual president they’re paid to cover. And nobody should want that. So allow me to end my harangue as Bluto ends his. “We’re just the guys to do it,” he shouted in Animal House. “LET’S DO IT!”