Bill O'Reilly gets inside the mind of Donald Trump

Review by Doug Gibson

"The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America," By Bill O'Reilly, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2019. (Amazon link here).

This is a book that has unfortunately aged too quickly in the nine months since its release. That's not O'Reilly's fault. President Trump's life is so volatile than any book that has not captured 2020, the feeble impeachment trial Democrats launched with popguns against the President, followed by Covid-19, followed by the current rallies and riots, is out of date.

Nevertheless, using his familiar narrative style, mixed with exclusive interviews he got with President Trump, and others -- particularly Donald Trump Jr. -- O'Reilly gets inside the mind of  Donald Trump to some extent.

Some insights into Trump's life:

-- Trump was both a talented athlete and "rambunctious" teen, rambunctious enough that his father placed him in a military school.

-- Trump has very few close friends. He's very reluctant to trust people. However, he's very amenable, probably more than the average pol, to work with a political rival in order to accomplish a policy. In that sense he is a pragmatic leader.

-- Trump differs from his late father, Fred, a very successful businessman also, in that the son -- besides craving success in business -- also sought fame and global recognition. Donald Trump Jr. mentions that his grandfather, Fred Trump, was content to just live quietly in Queens. Trump sought, as O'Reilly the New Yorker notes, to be bigger than Joe Namath.

-- Trump is a supportive, but not hands-on father. He's not big on compliments. He sees things pretty clearly; one is either a winner in a conflict, or a loser.

-- Donald Trump will never admit he is wrong, Donald Trump Jr. told O'Reilly. The son has learned that when his father begins to initiate small talk in a conversation with his children, it's a signal that he knows he is wrong.

-- O'Reilly writes that Trump's short-lived embrace of the discredited "birther" conspiracy against President Barack Obama was designed to lock in support of conservatives and Republicans who despised Obama.

This underscores something that has baffled many people regarding Trump. How does he embrace positions despised by elite media and political opinions, as well as the millions of "social media privates and corporals" who follow the elite, and be successful?

O'Reilly says that Trump's huge success with "The Apprentice" (I admit here I never watched an episode), provided Trump with the training he needed to run his unconventional 2016 campaign.

He understood, far more than his hapless GOP opponents, and Hillary Clinton, how alienated and frustrated many Americans were after the Wall Street corruption of 2008 crashed the economy, followed soon after by the badly botched Obamacare roll out.

In an irony perhaps only Trump is capable of pulling off, he connected with high-school educated, working- and middle-class voters, many of whom had regularly voted Democrats. He was perceptive enough to see that these voters -- so many in the Rust Belt and other swing states -- were up for grabs.

Unlike a Mitt Romney, for example, Trump understood that criticizing immigration policy was a more effective talking point with these new voters, or re-energized voters, than extolling the virtues of the Chamber of Commerce.

Clinton did not try to connect with these voters. As O'Reilly notes, she helped Trump enormously by referring to them as a "basket of deplorables."

Another important insight into Trump is that he will go with his instincts. He's done that all his life. Writes O'Reilly: "Donald Trump is not going to change. He will not modify his behavior, stop tweeting, or begin wearing jeans. He will stay the way he is until the grave." 

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We live in a vicious political environment today. Social media has perfected the cancellation of individuals, and candidacies. Look how quickly Michael Bloomberg was taken out by Elizabeth Warren, who castigated him for alleged sexism. Although Bloomberg did not realize it, his campaign was kaput after 30 or so minutes of his first debate.

So, how does Trump survive in this environment? About a month before the 2016 vote he was caught on tape boasting loudly about sexually harassing women. Yet he defeated Hillary Clinton.

O'Reilly believes that Trump survived because we are jaded with all the political "scandals." He also believes people were turned off by perceived hypocrisy from disapproving pols. Hence many decided to overlook it, and gave Trump a pass.

Trump has survived too many "scandals" to count during his first term, as well as a partisan impeachment effort. Right now just about every poll says he will lose this November, just like most polls were saying four years ago. They may be right. Who knows? In the era of Trump, consistency and certainty are more rare.

I think the secret to Trump's success, and his political survival, is that he has placed the elite media, and much of establishment politics, into a bubble that constantly talks to itself, and its millions of progressive acolytes.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. have moved --- in the minds of one half of the nation --- from the usual impartiality of its news departments to becoming news reporters of "The Resistance." Media have abandoned a long-time promise, sometimes broken admittedly, of disinterest. They are against Trump; all the time. Within this bubble, a guy who lives in said bubble, like Bloomberg, can be easily crushed when he upsets the bubble. There is no fallback for a Bloomberg. Trump's base has no use for him.

But Trump thrives outside the bubble.

Back to the aforementioned elite media (I'm not talking about local media, which has its own unique issues). They will never regain the trust or respect of "the other "deplorable" half." And frankly, I don't think they care. After Trump, their economic survival will depend on feeding "news reports" to progressives, with correspondents such as Jim Acosta, and finding a never-ending supply of pedigreed Washington policy insiders to criticize conservatives; as unnamed sources, of course.

This is not my favorite Bill O'Reilly book. I prefer the informative, narrative style history books he co-writes with Martin Dugard. But he does a passable job of deciphering Trump, an often amoral man who nevertheless has proven himself a far stronger advocate for traditional social conservative values than the previous three Republican presidential candidates. Another irony; Trump's full of them.

The book underscores this truth. The 2020 election is not really between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The latter is a long-time Democratic Party man who arguably appears to be bordering on senility. Biden backed into the nomination. Donald Trump just had a rally in Tulsa as I write this. In the cautious era of Covid-19, it didn't fill the arena, but I'd wager it was watched on TV and via streaming by several million.

Joe Biden right now couldn't fill the "banquet room at the Blue-View Motel," or garner 500 streaming viewers.

This November's election is between the magnetism of Trump and the influence of the elite media and political establishment. Both are powerful. Both have a lot of sway. We'll see who wins. Another irony is that whatever the result, life will go on for all of us, pretty much the same.

Hate Inc. a provocative, and often accurate, take on the elite media

Review by Doug Gibson

The cover of journalist Matt Taibbi's book, "Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another," OR Books, 2019, is an iconic representation of today's boutique small-sectors-sought "journalism" of the type hawked on cable TV news, much of the Internet, and many of the most prominent newspapers, within opinion and even news pages.

Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow, Taibbi notes, are working very hard to turn us into ideological teams battling other ideologues that they describe as dishonest, loathsome and even downright dangerous to the future of our nation.

A key theme of Taibbi's book is the secret for success --  in today's broadband Internet world -- for media is to make us very angry and resentful. THEY WANT US TO BASE OUR POLITICS ON WHO WE HATE (emphasis intentional). Whether it's Fox News rallying the new Trumpian conservatism (and that gets the highest ratings) or MSNBC rallying progressives, or CNN clamoring to accommodate the outrage from anti- and never-Trumpers, they are all satiating their audience with fear and outrage, 50 percent of it subtle, the rest more blatant.

This has spread to major newspapers. The New York Times and Washington Post have become opposition media to the current administration and the majority of the Republican Party. There exists print media as pro-Trump and Republican as the aforementioned are pro-Democrat, but they are less influential than the Post or the Times. Fox News Channel is still the major engine for movement conservatives.

This is how Taibbi, who writes for Rolling Stone, describes "outrage media" and its red and blue armies and officers such as Hannity and Maddow, etc. Taibbi is no conservative. In fact, I see him as a man of the left, and I doubt he would disagree. Another theme of "Hate Inc." is all this back and forth rancor and fearmongering that triggers we corporals and privates of social media and cable news watching distracts us. Here's another key theme of Hate Inc. -- that outside of high-emotion issues (abortion, anthem kneeling, the Russian collusion pitch, illegal immigration ...) the parties are not too different on economic issues, foreign policy, defense, and criminal justice.

This places Taibbi in what I would describe as a reform progressive movement that while opposed to conservatism, Trumpism -- Glenn Greenwald and Krystal Ball are pundits who fall into this category -- frequently annoy conventional liberalism with their criticism of establishment pols such a Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. The previously mentioned "hot-button" issues, Taibbi argues, are embraced by an aging media which struggles in the post-Sept. 11 Internet world for customers, readers and watchers.

Finding a theme that heats up an audience and builds circulation is the primary goal, rather than any consistency in doctrine. Taibbi notes that many media organs were tolerant of, even friendly toward Donald Trump, during the 2016 presidential race. One example is Morning Joe on MSNBC, and its media star Joe Scarborough. Once Trump won the election, wide swaths of the elite media, sensing anger from their loyal consumers, moved to a far more consistent negative portrayal of the president. It's a marketing decision that continues today. A similar example is right-wing media often swallowing with enthusiasms the many inconsistencies of President Trump, as well as many rightists  cheering his budget-busting economic plans.

Taibbi, I would argue, would see that even despite this constant media rancor, and assorted hyped party-versus-party squabbles prior to passage, that the Covid-19 stimulus package just released is still far from providing reasonable economic security to the many millions either thrown out of work or bankrupted by the crisis. It's a middle-of-the-road package that fits within approved economics of the major parties, which enjoy sizzling the steaks but then share the barbecued meat equally.

It wasn't always this way for the major media. In the old days, Taibbi, argues the main problem with media was that it had a "fairway" of accepted media debate. Stepping out of the "fairway" resulted in a consensus that the viewpoint was out of the mainstream; adherents could be compared to "John Birchers" or "communists." "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" were more cordial.

While the loss of media gatekeepers, thanks to the Internet, has widened the fairway beyond what anyone envisioned several generations ago, the establishment, at least within the Democratic Party, can quell an uprising. Witness how quickly Bernie Sanders went from solid front-runner to has-been and Biden from has-been to presumed nominee a month-plus ago or so. I'm not spouting any conspiracy theories. It's just a fact that in today's Democratic Party if a candidate like Sanders gets too close, the party leadership will mobilize, convince candidates to drop out, thereby providing the majority that any front-runner would have in a two-person race against a socialist.

"Hate Inc." is a fascinating read. I enjoy Taibbi's intellectually rambunctious and snarky style. The book was originally a series of online posts and it has a going-here going-there style. It travels across the world, to Vietnam, Afghanistan, ... even to England long ago where Taibbi describes how minor disturbances in locations were hyped as a major safety danger. Over-hyping is another theme of the book, though. If an issue can get the masses angry, or at least enough of the masses worked up, they may forget about their real problems. Taibbi is quick and snarky in criticisms of colleagues, but he is honest enough to criticize himself as well.

I think enough of us from all sides of the ideological aisles who are skeptical of pols and major media will find "Hate Inc." a read worth pondering.