Wednesday, April 24, 2024

THE MEDIA IS EXALTING TRUMP BY TELLING US HOW MUCH HE'S BEING HUMBLED

In The New York Times a few days ago, Maggie Haberman told us that Donald Trump is being humbled by his experiences in criminal court:
For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little....

The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness, one he rode from a reality-television studio set to the White House.

...the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict.
Now that the trial is underway, Jessica Bennett of the Times tells us the same thing:
... as Trump’s lawyers argued in opening statements, Trump is not merely the former president and presumptive Republican nominee. “He is also a man, he is a husband and a father,” one of them said. “He’s a person, just like you and just like me.” It was an attempt to humanize him — and yet all I could think, in that dreary courtroom, with a sour smell and a broken overhead clock, was that this is going to drive Trump mad.

For the next six weeks, four days a week, seven hours a day, including meals and coffee and bathroom breaks, Trump will be treated like an ordinary New Yorker, forced to sit in a drab 17-story municipal building.

Inside the court, the chairs were uncomfortable. It was so cold that reporters were bundled in heavy coats and scarves. (Trump wasn’t wrong when he complained, “It’s freezing.”) The speckled linoleum floors were drab, the fluorescent lighting was harsh, the rumpled shades were drawn. It was hard to see and hear. The monotony made my eyes droop....

Court let out early Monday, after the judge explained that an alternate juror had a dental emergency. You could just imagine Trump seething at the thought of his time dictated by a root canal.
Last week, Marc Caputo, one of the anti-Trumpers at The Bulwark, tweeted this:


Today, Caputo writes:
TRUMP HAS MADE NO SECRET of his annoyance at being stuck in court. Forced to sit quietly and deprived of his steady stream of caffeinated Diet Cokes, which at Mar-a-Lago are served to him with regularity by ever-attendant waitstaff, Trump has been caught micronapping at the defense table.

“I’m catching up on my fucking sleep ’cause I’m bored,” he told one source.
If I despised Trump as much as The Bulwark's writers and editors say they do, I wouldn't have included that "catching up on my fucking sleep" quote, which is Trumpworld spin designed to portray the boss exactly the way he wants to be portrayed: as an angry alpha male who's too important for this kind of treatment. But even without the quote, I'm afraid that all this coverage, far from humiliating Trump, actually exalts him.

To make an obvious point, when an ordinary person is on trial, even in a high-profile case, we don't dwell on how uncomfortable the chairs and the building temperature make the defendant feel. We don't even do much of this for famous defendants -- did anyone ever tell us what O.J. Simpson's favorite mid-morning pick-me-up was, and add how noteworthy it was that he was being deprived of it?

Many people go to court and are forced to comply by courtroom rules. (I could add that many more people go to work and are forced to comply with workplace rules.) When the press tells readers that enforcement of courtroom rules is extraordinary in Trump's case, the message is that Trump is extraordinary.

It's probably unreasonable to expect reporters to avoid this kind of coverage, and obviously their audiences want it. But maybe the press needs to remember that what would really make Trump seem no better than an ordinary citizen would be treating him like an ordinary citizen -- in others words, like a person who just has to suck it up and accept the way things are done in court.

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