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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

By the Usual Standards of American Politics, Most January 6th Testifiers
Would Be a Disgrace

They countenanced or took part in the kinds of scandalous acts that
brought more 'normal' presidents down.

Writing in The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg points out

that many of the people being celebrated for telling the truth about
Trump to the January 6th Committee are awfully late to the ball. She
singles out, among others, former Deputy National Security Adviser
Matthew Pottinger, who was hired as a China hawk in the Trump
administration and worked, as she notes, "from its beginning until
Jan. 7, 2021. He was one of many who didn't resign over Trump's
defense of the rioters in Charlottesville, Va., his attempted extortion
of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his claims to have won an
election he clearly lost, to cite just a few milestones." Given the
crimes of the Trump administration to which Pottinger and his colleagues
managed to turn a blind eye, it feels almost trivial to point out that
the very act that Pottinger declared himself most proud of under his
watch was both a moral and strategic disaster.

According to the hearings' transcript
,
Pottinger, now at the Hoover Institution, claimed: "As an example, in
late December the Iranian government attacked the US embassy in Baghdad.
They did that using some of their terrorist proxies ... [Trump] sent a
very clear warning to the Ayatollah and his regime, which I think had a
useful effect."

Here, Pottinger was apparently bragging about Trump's decision to go
ahead with the assassination of Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani and
nine others, including the deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi militia
movement, at Baghdad's international airport on January 3, 2020. If I
had more space, and if we were living in more normal times where our
biggest problem was, say, a presidency characterized by ideological
obsession and willful dishonesty leading us into counterproductive
wars-as per the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush
administrations, among others-I would spend a lot more time on these
incidents: how they happened, what they mean, and whom we should never
trust again as a result of their dishonesty. Instead, I am going to
suggest you read about them, as you can read about the consequences of
the Soleimani killing here

and here
,
because these are, amazingly, the least of our problems. (And yes,
I've written two books that are sort of about this: Lying in State

and When Presidents Lie
,
and that's enough.)

What the eighth January 6th Committee hearing last Thursday demonstrated
most conclusively is that Donald Trump sought to overthrow the
nation's election system before the vote was certified, and when this
strategy failed, he encouraged the violent mob he had summoned to the
capital to do so by violent means, up to and including murdering his
vice president. Trump did not, as President Biden intoned, do nothing to
stop them. He did whatever he could do to encourage them, finally giving
in only when their failure had been established. As Amy Davidson Sorkin
notes
:
Trump "sat in a dining room near the Oval Office, watched Fox News,
and called senators to tell them that they should object to the election
results-in other words, they should concede to the mob's demands.
(He called Rudy Giuliani ,
his lawyer, too.) He also fended off pleas from various officials to
stop the violence, and instead put out what the White House counsel, Pat
Cipolline, described in videotaped testimony as a 'terrible tweet'
targeting Vice-President Mike Pence
, who was being hunted by the
mob."

Trump had already defended the plan to kill Pence in his August 2020
interview with Jonathan Swan
, but so inured are we to
his sociopathic criminality that this turned out to be a one-day story.
Now, Swan has returned with a two-part series based on in-depth
reporting about the plans that Trump and his allies have for a second
term, should he win or-far more likely-succeed in stealing the 2024
election. Part one is here
,
and part two is here
.

The hearings, combined with Swan's stories, make it crystal clear that
we are literally one election away from the purposeful destruction of
our system of government and its replacement by the equivalent of a
mafia state, run by people a lot stupider and more malevolent than those
who ran the mafia. Indeed, they are telling us what other coup leaders
and aspiring autocrats usually have the sense to keep to themselves.

Given what we already know, I am at a loss to find a historical
precedent for a democratic nation willfully inviting such a man and his
followers to return to the scene of their earlier crimes and commit far
worse ones. Reading Lynn Hunt's review of a biography of Robespierre
in The New York Review of Books, I came across her description of his
"peculiar hold on his fellow deputies." She asked, "How could this
unprepossessing, previously unknown lawyer come to incarnate the
Revolution in its most intense period?
"
Hunt's question got me thinking about Jeffrey Clark
,
the fellow whom Trump will likely make his attorney general should he be
returned to power, to say nothing of what will happen to the country
with an entire government filled with the likes of Jeffrey Clark.

I am no expert on German political history, but I wonder if people knew
as much about Hitler and his cronies before allowing him to come
(democratically) to power as we know about Trump and his. (I know, I
know, Trump is not Hitler. Nobody is anybody else. And he probably
won't kill millions of Jews, Gypsies, and gays, and launch a series of
ruinous wars-unless, of course, he comes to believe it is somehow in
his interest to do so ...) My point, ladies and gentlemen, as Mark
Danner puts it: "We're in an Emergency-Act Like It!
"

For instance, it would be nice if articles like this one

mentioned the Republican candidate's support for the destruction of
our democracy, somewhere, anywhere in the article. (I know, an
informative headline is far too much to ask.)

And it would be nice if the Times' most famous political
reporter-the one with 1.6 million Twitter followers and a massive
best-selling book in the works-would stop flacking for Trump's
enablers, like the barely-any-less-evil-and-stupid Jared Kushner. For
instance, as last week's hearing was being broadcast, Maggie Haberman
wanted us to know
that "at a
diner at a restaurant in upstate Rhinebeck, N.Y., [she] was seated near
Charlie Kushner, Jared Kushner's father, who put his son on the phone
on speaker to say hello to the waitstaff."

She also felt moved to observe
: "Committee
is really demonstrating who it disdains through some of the footage. One
example tonight was the Kushner shower clip," as if the injustice to
this poor half of the "Sources Close to the President" couple
committed by the committee by mentioning that he was in the shower
during their daddy's attempted coup was somehow the most significant
facet of the various horror stories visited upon the nation that
evening. I fear for the book ...

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Meanwhile, the Trump Republican strategy to change the subject over
their lies, lawlessness, and incitement to violence continues to be "I
know you are, but what am I?
"
as evidenced by the crazy quotes reported in this piece. Thing is,
it's (largely) working. But my issue here is with this sentence
authored by David Weigel: "The rhetoric is bracing, if not entirely
new. Liberal commentators made liberal use of the word 'fascism' to
describe Trump's presidency." Note that he does not-and cannot
without undermining his purpose-discuss whether the use of the word is
appropriate. I therefore have a few questions for Mr. Weigel:

* David, is your fellow David, Mr. Frum, also one of these
"liberals"? Because, otherwise, what's this
?

* And what about the case itself? Are articles like this one

and this one

and this one

all deserving of your blithe dismissal?

* And while we're on the topic, is it also worthy of mockery when
discussing the beliefs of Peter Thiel
and his
puppet politicians in Ohio and Arizona?

I'm genuinely saddened to see that Weigel, a smart and hard-working
reporter, has now volunteered to catch this Beltway virus. He does not
address the question. He treats it as de facto ridiculous (and therefore
unworthy of discussion). This sort of reporting is one of the reasons
why, in a roughly 50/50 country, we may end up with a fascist government
in 2024: because the people responsible for exposing it are pretending
it does not exist.

Odds and Ends

Speaking of bothsidesism (or "on-the-onehandism," as I once tried
and failed to name the phenomenon), when you've lost Marvin Kalb
,
what do you have left?

Here is an
air-tight argument against allowing self-serving anonymous quotes that
do nothing but advance a politician's agenda by lazy political
reporters in just one tweet.

Altercation Life Advice: People need to spend more time thinking about
their obituaries. Imagine that doing "reporting" like this

is your job in life. Consider, for instance: "Ashley Joy Parker
Deceased; Broke Story of Ben Affleck Taking Nap."

Many readers have no doubt seen snippets of this already, but here

is the entirety of Joni Mitchell's re-emergence as a performer after a
20-year absence, with Brandi Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival, three
years after she suffered a brain aneurysm. ("Both Sides Now" is the
only form of bothsidesism we, at Altercation, can support.) Bonus: here
and here
is the
retired-from-touring-but-not-from-guest-appearances Paul Simon, also at
this year's festival. And here
's a guy who caused quite a
commotion when he brought a band and an electric guitar to the festival
back in 1965. Barry Goldberg was there
.
And Elijah Wald has written a fine book

about its implications.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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