Election 2020: “Kill the Messenger”
There was no transition team when Candidate Donald J. Trump was sworn in as America’s forty-fifth President. In the world of show biz and real estate tycoon play-acting there is casting, not transition-building: ‘Tear up the script so the show can go on.’
Why put people “in position” when casting is yet to be done? Why assume roles when appearances haven’t been reckoned? In this world one does not so much as show up or advocate showing up, but audition for an as yet-to-be -decided role. For those interested In governing and regulation, auditioning for a pretend walk-on role is anathema. So be it: America’s governance is off stage right now. Even the nation’s chief epidemiologist is characterized as “being sidelined.”
Now…in America…during a global pandemic.
But “we” know all this. Which brings “us” to the voting booth.
I
For four years this election has conveyed a tone of ‘kill the messenger.’ We got a glimpse of what Trump thought about the mantle he was inheriting when during the inauguration he described his country as chaotic, dismembered, frail. Convincingly Trump played the role of “messenger.”
The rest is a parade. The rest is “kill the messenger.”
To play this game one needs to start with the recipient not with the message. Sorry, Joe Scarborough: it’s not about the message but about the audience (1). Specifically, the size of the audience. And your director of communications (2) is resisting playing the role of deceiver. So we have the first taste of the new administration: a contentious West Wing meeting about the size of the crowd at the inauguration. The first taste of “well-mannered chaos.”
But hold on: in less than 24 hours after this meeting designed to spin crowd size, secretaries filed papers to form Trump’s Re-election Campaign. Next parade stop: November 3, 2020.
II
Arguably, Democrats have abetted the grimness of ‘kill the messenger’ by focussing on campaigning against Trump as if to say, ‘things will get better with him gone.’ This a reductionist political strategy, used to remove an incumbent: ‘things will get worse if you re-elect Trump.’
Unfortunately, for Democrats, the task of cobbling together an audience has been short-circuited by careerist and corruptible Republicans. The mic has been shut off. “Pointless meetings” boycotted. In the ‘kill the messenger’ game, Democrats have displayed that “they are poor losers.”
And so we find our country clinging to our “last life raft:”
Vote.
III
One aspect of the game “kill the messenger” is the ruse of willful blindness. To adroitly kill the messenger is to avow that there is no messenger. Short of denial this strategy is to position oneself as caring for the higher “good.” Therefore, “we” don’t see what “you” are talking about. Call this ‘exclusion by a higher power.’ We’re being kicked out of the Garden.
The evidence for this stratagem is a trending trope “betterment,” that one hears during polite engagement with Trump supporters,
When asked how she can square her evangelical Christian principles with Trump’s behavior, a young graduate of Liberty University recently said on “All Things Considered” “I have thought about this a lot. I know that he has acted badly and said things that don’t show good character but I want a BETTER life for everyone and I think President Trump wants that too. I think President Trump can do that, so I am voting for him for President.” (3)
Or this from a recent letter to the NYTimes (4): “I (along with the vast majority of Americans) hope and pray for the betterment of every single person of every race, color or creed in our country.”
Take away the insouciant ‘nothing exists outside my experience’ and what’s revealed are appearances-at-work: “don’t stop the show.”
IV
Another, perhaps the most perverted aspect of the game of ‘kill the messenger’ is the collapse of reality. Gathering the audience is one aspect, asking the audience to applaud on cue is another. In this world, timing of the “gathering” is critical. In this staged chaos, audiences attend costuming and posturing. Think lots and lots of flags and hats.
As recorded in Sarah Kendzior’s recent memoir-analysis, we are left to contemplate an Orwellian world. Sharing with her daughter her first encounter with “1984,” when she was 5 (in 1984), Kendzior writes,
I felt the same sense of wonder about “1984,” and I wanted to read it so that I could see if any of this Orwell guy’s predictions panned out… I was intrigued that someone had worried enough about the future to invent his own fictional version. I wondered what had happened in the past that was so horrific that it compelled him to imagine a world of lies and control. (5)
A world where information and Trump’s dissembling supplants truth; where an imaginary future is invoked to lay bare the horrors of the present. A world where “betterment” perverts compassion.
Hear the off-stage prompt by Ivanka Trump to the recently unemployed: “try something different.”
“Kill the messenger,” indeed.
October 28–31
1- “It’s not about which candidate can win but what is the message,” Joe Scarborough, promo clip for “Morning Joe,” 2019, MSNBC
2- For a behind-the-scene account of the inauguration audience spin White House meeting and Sean Spicer’s ‘audition,’ read Omarosa Manigault Newman, “Unhinged,” 2018
3- “All Things Considered,” NPR, October 29
4- John L. Schilling letter, Opinion page, NY Times, October 20
5-“Hiding in Plain Sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America,” 2020, p. 127
For additional reading on Orwell’s “1984”, see Lionel Trilling, “Orwell on the Future,” book review, June 19, 1949, The New Yorker
