Buying Into Trump’s Dealbreaker Frame

Endlessly, George Lakoff has tried to pound into the liberal mind the importance of framing. In politics, he who creates the frame wins.

What frame has Donald Trump created for himself and sold to his base? He is the champion of the “forgotten,” the new majority minority. He is the embodiment of anti-establishment that believes all progress in the liberal sense is a zero-sum game, that every right gained at the margins diminishes the rights held at the center.

His base likes his boisterous, rude, crude insults and threats. He wants to be seen as tearing down the fabric of a society that since FDR has successfully become increasingly inclusive. He sold himself to them as a dealmaker, one that will scrap all the “bad deals” (i.e. all deals ever made by Democratic administrations) in favor of new, “better” deals. He is the dealbreaker, and they cheer him on as he shatters every alliance.

It is important that the free press portray accurately what actually transpires when Trump is confronted by longstanding allies and the deals and treaties we have in place with those parties. It is disconcerting that both the New York Times and The Daily Beast chose to run headers that indicate that they have bought into Trump’s self-portrayal as deal-buster at this weekend’s G7.

The reason I focus on headers is because they often are all the reader will see of an article. In the age of information overload, people scanning headers on a newsfeed will click into a few articles at best, but all the headers that reader sees go into the “wet cement.” The impression is there.

Here are two headers that give a false impression of the effect of Trump’s behavior on the G7 proceedings.

This from The New York Times on June 9.

Trump Shakes Up World Stage in Break With U.S. Allies
By PETER BAKER

At a moment of tumult over trade and nuclear security, President Trump is making friends with America’s enemies and enemies out of America’s friends.

This header portrays Trump exactly as he wants to be seen. He has not shaken up anything. He would like to think he did, but Trudeau, Macron, and Merkel stabilize what he would like to upset. I am not linking to the story. Just sharing the header and lede that came in the morning email. I have no problem with the lede, but that header…. nuh-unh.

This from The Daily Beast June 10.

Trump Upends G7 With ‘Fits of Anger’ at Trudeau
The president ignites a new personal rivalry with the Canadian leader even as he sets off to make nice with North Korea.

Here’s another header that caters exactly to the image Trump wants to present of himself. Again, not linking to the article. This is about the header. It sets the stage. That is what creates the impression. In fact Trump has neither shaken up nor upended anything. The stabilizing influences, Merkel, Marcon, and Trudeau, prevailed. Trump is the one who is isolated (and thereby isolated us).

The true leaders, Merkel, Macron, and Trudeau, made it clear that they and their constituents could easily move forward as a G6 without the United States. Certainly other big economies like India and Brazil might be ripe for membership. Trump, on the other hand, has indicated a preference to go forward as a G2 with Russia.

The toddler with the hammer has not shattered anything except the trust of our longtime allies – and that should be enough to set off bells and whistles. Tantrums are not manifestations of power. They are warning signs of instability. Trump has made us the dispensable nation.

The media should stop catering to the image Trump wants to create and present the real picture. The rage and chaos he seeks to portray feed his base. That, to them, is “winning.” Stop writing headers that create the impression that this behavior is effective. It is destructive. It is dangerous.

Some of the damage is rolling in. Read Krugman’s thread.

It's normal to feel that people you disagree with politically are offering bad solutions to our problems. But Trump has brought something new: his policy agenda is almost entirely directed at problems we don't have — problems that exist only in his warped imagination 1/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 10, 2018

You know that embarrassing feeling when your toddler has a tantrum in public, and you have to apologize to neighbors? Americans feel that way: Our toddler has just had a tantrum at the G7 summit. Sorry, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Japan, Italy https://t.co/cjDEyu2due

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) June 10, 2018

Observations on G7:
1) Trump supporters & more will love this.
2) Others will fill leadership void left by America, to our detriment.
3) Only explanation for his plea to allow Russia in is they got goods on him.
4) I still love Merkel photo. https://t.co/6FVnsdDfTf

— Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) June 10, 2018

France's president is warning Trump that the U.S. could lose its closest allies pic.twitter.com/K2dzfRLzVx

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 9, 2018

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She Said; He Said ….

Even those on the international space station know by now what Meryl Streep said at the Golden Globes last night.

Thanks to the New York Times, here is the transcript of Ms. Streep’s speech.

Television

Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech

By DANIEL VICTOR and GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO JAN. 8, 2017

Here is Ms. Streep’s speech:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

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Aside from those of her fellow actors for illustrative purposes, Ms. Streep did not mention a name, but no sooner had these words left her lips than the Twittersphere lit up with predictions of what the minority PEOTUS would tweet in response. They were amazingly accurate indicating either an especially large psychic population or a particularly predictable thin-skinned, short-tempered, self-centered individual.

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump

Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump

Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him…….

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump

“groveling” when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!

Their words speak for themselves. For the record, kindergarten kids know “mocking” when they see it. We all know what we saw. More gaslighting from the unpopular minority guy.

As we move toward the inauguration, we do well to remember that the weakest sense for bullies is their sense of humor.  So, just for fun, here’s Andy Borowitz!

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Oh, The Things You Will See … Or Not

I had a friend, years ago, whose father suffered what was diagnosed as hysterical blindness. Nothing was wrong with his eyes according to top ophthalmologists. Yet he stumbled along, tripping on furniture while never, mysteriously, over the dogs he loved. His only son, my friend, was a rising artist bringing more wealth to an already affluent family. He was gay at a time when and in a culture where being gay was not only not cool, it brought shame and social alienation similar to that incurred by mental illness in the family.

The parents lived in the main house, and my friend erected a loft two stories high on the other side of the garden where he occupied the first floor and worked on the second under a skylight. He came and went as he pleased and entertained friends as he wished. Was it perhaps my friend’s independent life that precipitated this blindness of his dad’s?  It occurred shortly after the loft was completed. Were there things the dad simply could not allow himself to accept and see? Is that why he blinded himself?  One can only speculate. We will never know. The father is long gone, and the son succumbed before there were effective HIV-AIDS medications.

How sad and ironic, in the wake of this election, when the unfairly maligned Clinton Foundation, which works assiduously to eradicate HIV-AIDS and preventable blindness, that Americans need to be warned not to succumb to a self-disciplined form of viral blindness that can spread via mass media.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

Naked

Already Happening: Media Normalization of Trumpism

His polls numbers will…improve. The international community will…come around. Melania and Ivanka will be…unorthodox but charming. Brace yourselves for a huge media fail.

Joy-Ann Reid

11.27.16

In the children’s short story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” by Hans Christian Andersen, what kept the fiction of the naked emperor’s sartorial splendor alive was nothing in particular about the emperor. True, he was vain and plainly foolish; easily tricked by the false flattery of swindlers into paying a kingly sum for a cloak so fine and magical that only the wise and true could see it. But it was the people of the kingdom, including his trusted advisers, who maintained the absurd notion that he was splendidly clothed, because none – the emperor included – wanted to admit that they were so unworthy as to not see the bright colors and fine threads.

Only the characteristic bluntness of a child, who proclaimed the emperor’s nudity as he paraded through the streets humiliating himself and his kingdom, threatened to break the spell. But when the boy spoke out he was quickly rebuked by his father, who assured the gasping public that the child was clearly soft in the head. So powerful is the compulsion to normalize the powerful.

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