Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump climbs into a garbage truck, October 30, 2024, as he arrives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Going into the 2000 presidential election, the Republican establishment tapped Texas Gov. George W. Bush to beat Al Gore. But the 54-year-old scion’s first electoral test, in the New Hampshire primary, threatened to inscribe him in the annals of history as an obscure loser, when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) upset him by 18 points. The stakes for the next contest, in South Carolina, couldn’t have been higher.
Eight years later, during McCain’s next presidential campaign, a Vanity Fair reporter named Richard Gooding traveled the Palmetto State to learn how that primary had gone down. He told the locals that he was there to learn about dirty politics. “Over and over, that provoked pride: ‘You’ve come to the right place!’”
Gooding learned that Bob Jones University had functioned as the Bush campaign’s de facto headquarters. Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition was a key ally, having “pledged to [Karl] Rove,” a source told Gooding, “that he could deliver.” The stakes for the Christian right were as high as they were for Bush. Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential run had crashed and burned; their churchy crusade in 1998 against Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadillos saw them blamed in some quarters for Republicans’ reversals in the midterm elections. This primary was their bid to prove to the party that they were not political paper tigers.
What followed next became infamous: one of the most vicious campaigns in modern history. “I make a lot of things happen behind the scenes,” a Christian Coalition operative who later became its president boasted with false modesty. “We had some fun during that primary.”
There were the flyers on windshields announcing that McCain had sired a “Negro” child (his adopted Bangladeshi daughter made the smear seem credible). The push polls asking voters if they knew McCain slept with prostitutes and gave his drug-addicted wife VD, or that he betrayed his comrades as a prisoner of war. Whispers that he had been brainwashed in North Vietnam and was running as the Communists’ Manchurian candidate. A talk radio host told Vanity Fair that this stuff was all his callers wanted to talk about.
You probably know about that. You might not know, however, what happened when McCain responded with an ad that said Bush “twists the truth like Bill Clinton.” Thereupon, the bigfoot national journalists who had descended upon the state finished what Karl Rove started. They pivoted to one of their all-time favorite tropes, that “both sides” were “exchanging blows.” From their fainting couches, they editorialized that for McCain to call Bush a liar, to compare him to the figure Republicans hated most, was dirty politics.
In America’s finer newsrooms, they call this fairness, objectivity, balance.
McCain, a politician who was so solicitous of elite journalists that he might as well have been a Washington Democrat, pulled the ad in response—which only kept the story alive. The underground smear campaign against him, naturally, continued unabated, and was never directly tied to the Bush campaign, which was precisely the point. As Ralph Reed once said of his tactics, “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.” And lo, on election night in South Carolina, Bush was politically born again, with 53.4 percent of the vote.
Nine months later in Florida, when the real cheating began, media gatekeepers played the exact same role (you can read about a key moment here). They followed their first sacred commandment, so sacred it might as well be chiseled on stone tablets: Thou shalt balance the sins of #bothsides.
In America’s finer newsrooms, they call this fairness, objectivity, balance. It is actually bias—definitionally so. One side behaves like Boy Scouts and the other lies and cheats without remorse, but when you have to assign blame on “both sides,” the side more willing to lie and cheat will always have the advantage. Imagine a boxing match where one contender’s strategy is to consistently hammer his opponent in the nuts. A time or two, maybe even accidentally, the other guy strikes this palooka in the kidneys. The referee, in the interest of “balance,” calls an equal number of fouls on both guys.
Who would you bet on to win?
WE SAW A TEXTBOOK CASE OF THAT in the past week, in the final round of a presidential election where the stakes are merely whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall fade from these United States. But there was a twist at the end that could just save democracy and give the self-appointed guardians of the discourse their comeuppance, all at once.
Appropriately for my boxing allegory, it started at Madison Square Garden, when bro-comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” somehow reached the public’s attention, against stiff competition from an endless train of equally or more offensive hate speech. It was a comment that recalled to Puerto Ricans what happened during Trump’s first term—the island being neglected after Hurricane Maria, Trump throwing paper towels at desperate residents, and ultimately the disrespect heaped upon them.
Then, poor old Joe Biden squeezed out a half-coherent response: “The only garbage I see out there is his supporters”—or, possibly, “his supporter’s”— “his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
With admirable devotion to the core rites of their faith, the priests of the media caste set to work balancing the scales.
Axios: “Biden sets off election firestorm with ‘garbage’ comment.” Politico: “Biden sparks a firestorm on the right over ‘garbage.’” NBC News: “Biden sets off a firestorm with his response to Trump rally comedian’s Puerto Rico comments.” Both The Washington Post (“Biden ‘garbage remark’ has Harris seeking distance”) and The New York Times (“Biden misstep delivers grist to Harris foes”) put the story on the front page, in the prominent upper-right-hand spot.
This ambiguity was manna from heaven for the media. It was a way to keep the story going.
Note how the newspapers snapped into the identical storyline, their favorite Mean Girls narrative about those woeful Democrats ever unceasingly in disarray. They could have framed it in so many different, equally “objective” (or if you prefer, subjective) ways. For instance, the headline could have been “GOP Seeks Distraction From Trump Bigotry in Final Days.” Or “GOP Launches Misdirection Campaign; Inadvertently Delivers Democrats Platform to Feature Trump Racism in Final Days of Campaign.”
But you can almost hear an executive editor’s response to a proposed headline like that. Hear it in the voice of Wallace Shawn from The Princess Bride: “Inconceivable!”
Note, too, the uncanny convergence on that single word “firestorm” as the descriptor. Do they meet at some Skull and Bones–like secret underground vault to hash this language out?
Finally, note the textbook denial of agency. After all, this alleged “firestorm” is one they themselves conjured into being, by choosing to accede to the Republicans’ predictable ref-working. They could have simply ignored that. After all, anyone not in a coma—even people whose job is writing headlines for Axios—knows dehumanizing language like the comedian’s is so routine from Trump and his surrogates that someone was able to work up a supercut of selected examples within hours.
The media took the opportunity to extend the scandal by narrating the Great Apostrophe Perplex. Had Biden said “supporters” or “supporter’s”? Render it the first way, and it’s a blanket condemnation of half the voting public, and the next “his” refers to Donald Trump. Put in the apostrophe, and the supporter being referred to is singular—the comedian, Hinchcliffe—and the “his” refers only to him.
The person at the White House who prepared the transcript supposedly had it without the apostrophe first, then had to change it under “pressure.” I mean, really? Could there be any job more challenging than coming up with an agreed-upon transcript of the mumbles of Joseph Biden at this late date? You don’t have to be a fan of those perceptual puzzles, where the drawing changes back and forth from a rabbit to a lady when you stare at it, to find the question ultimately undecidable.
This ambiguity was manna from heaven for the media. It was a way to keep the story going, to keep producing headlines that boil down to: Did you hear that Joe Biden just hit Trump supporters in the nuts??
A POLITICAL PUZZLEMENT HAS LONG CONSUMED my household, and recently out into the agora (our condominium’s courtyard): Why, when it seems so statistically unfathomable, do so many major elections, like this one, shake out to be nearly 50-50? Political scientists have a theory: that each party follows political signals to devise messages to please a notional “median voter,” prioritizing rhetoric that might motivate that voter just barely into your column without saying anything too bold that it risks losing two voters for every one gained. But that obviously doesn’t make any sense this year, or maybe any year since the dawn of the Reign of Newt Gingrich. They’re eating the dogs! Abortion is Auschwitz! Not exactly the stuff of electoral sail-trimming.
The consensus that’s been reached on our lawn chairs is that elite political media, consciously or unconsciously, work to make it this way. That our vaunted “horse-race journalism” is not merely descriptive but actively distorting, the better to stage riveting photo finishes. Maybe true, maybe not. But it’s certainly a theory that fits all the fact. Scandals are a magnificent tool to do it.
But this time, when it comes to Garbagegate, the scandal begins and ends with themselves.
Elite media have made their closing argument this silliness about Biden, instead of something of genuine importance, like Donald Trump calling for Liz Cheney to face a phalanx of rifles, House Speaker Mike Johnson signaling Republicans will gut the Affordable Care Act, or the revelation from supposed “journalist” Michael Wolff, which he’s kept to himself since he learned it in 2017, that pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein described Donald Trump as his “closest friend.” Since these other topics don’t balance the scales between the sins of Republicans and Democrats, they can’t make the front pages: Inconceivable!
Voters often display an admirable habit of ignoring media nonsense like this, choosing reality instead.
But here’s the twist: Voters often display an admirable habit of ignoring media nonsense like this, choosing reality instead.
With the revelation of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, media titans affected to speak for a nation they assumed were as disgusted as they were. Sam Donaldson of ABC said “his presidency is numbered in days”; Jacob Weisberg of Slate called Clinton “toast”; and pundits reared up in a mighty roar that Democrats would face a rout in the 1998 midterms, on the principle, as Cokie Roberts of NPR primly put it, that “people who act immorally and lie get punished.” Instead, Democrats gained five seats in the House, as voters were really disgusted by the detour into prurience.
And when the White House was rounding the bend into war in Iraq in 2003, a New York Times editorial signaled for the herd that it was time for “military force” to end Saddam Hussein’s “game of hide and seek” concerning (actually nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction; Newsweek added (in a news article!) that it was “up to U.S. armed forces to stop [Saddam] before he can achieve notoriety for all time.” But the Columbia Journalism Review did a survey of dozens of newspapers and found letters to the editor favoring peace over war by a ratio of 2-to-1, and that only one, the Odessa (Texas) American, got a majority of pro-war letters.
“The public was fine, the elites were not,” an unnamed Clinton White House adviser told the Washington Post of the 1998 electorate’s vexing insistence on taking matters into their own hands. What those elites didn’t count on this year was actual Puerto Ricans who don’t share their obsessions. They didn’t see the media’s elevation of Biden’s comments, so when Trump tried to capitalize on them by driving around in a Trump-branded garbage truck, these voters viewed that as piling on. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with [the comic’s original joke], what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” asked one Pennsylvanian first-time voter in a brilliant HuffPost dispatch.
Breaking en masse for Kamala Harris, Puerto Ricans just might be the ones who end up confounding that elite media’s desperation to end this race in a photo finish. If they do, they will have proved once and for all that the most malodorous garbage during this campaign was the stuff those elite journalists kept trying to shovel in our face.
