The Big Distraction from You-Know-What

by David Benjamin

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” —Trump

PARIS—Luckily, I was on my way here when Donald Trump’s weekend excursion to Iran broke out. My good fortune amounted to the limited load of available news coverage, analysis and commentary through which I felt obligated to wade. My main source in Paris is the international edition of the New York Times, which usually tops out at less than eighteen pages.

If I were reading the Times back home, the A section alone would be at least two dozen pages, with more Iran war implications peppering the Business, Culture, Travel and even Sports sections.

Even in the truncated Paris version, I scanned a barrage of copy on Donny and Pete’s excellent adventure. In all, I read coverage by fourteen journalists, plus the Times Editorial Board. In one Monday edition, this team extracted quote and comment from 43 different sources in every aspect of the shiny new war, from geopolitics to the average throw-weight and blast radius of a Tomahawk missile.

Of course, no one at the Times, or any other prestigious rag, got around—nor have they yet gotten around—to Trump’s deep-seated and visceral motivation for “obliterating” a girls school in Tehran and other juicy targets. They actually know why he’s doing this, but they can’t say.

It took ’til after eleven p.m. Eastern time on the third day of Trump’s Shiite-storm for any commentator to penetrate Donald’s driving jones. That’s when Stephen Colbert, technically not a journalist, cited the testosterone title of Trump’s Iranapalooza and solved the mystery. “Fun fact,” said Colbert, “Epic Fury is an anagram for ‘Forget Epstein.’”

Next night, Colbert’s fellow late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, expanded astutely on Colbert’s trenchant quip. “The President sent a letter to lawmakers in which he claimed that it is too soon to know ‘the full scope and duration’ of this conflict,” Kimmel said. “Now on Sunday, he said it could last four to five weeks; yesterday, he said it could be more than four to five weeks; today, he said it’s too soon to know, and tomorrow, we’ll be shooting for Christmas, I guess. However long it takes until everyone stops talking about how many times his name is in the Trump-Epstein files.”

Late to late-night war commentary but equally cogent was Jimmy Fallon, who remarked, “Trump added that we’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough. He was like, [imitating Trump] ‘The supreme leader is gone, but people are still talking about the Epstein files, so, there’s still more work to be done. Once they stop talking about that.’”

After more than ten years of watching Donald Trump as a politician, and after more decades observing Trump as America’s foremost phony-baloney and celebrity adulterer (among his numerous dubious distinctions), one wonders why the professional press cannot talk straight about him? Why does the onus of honesty accrue to a midnight crew of rim-shot comedians?

Certainly, veteran reporters for the Times, the Journal, the Post and all those networks know, by now, that Trump is a deflector’s deflector. If any demagogue has ever understood the allure of the shiny object, it’s Donald Trump, a man who has immersed himself in shiny objects, up to and including his three flashy wives. He polished his personal shininess as the “star” of “The Apprentice,” a reality show which, like all of its genre, presented no vestige of any recognizable reality—especially Trump’s pose, after six bankruptcies, as a successful businessman.

Trump has learned how to use the accelerated 21st-century news cycle as a maelstrom of distractions. And there is no distraction more seductive to an ambitious reporter than a war. Any war. Even a phony Wag the Dog war staged for TV and designed for distribution in two-minute YouTube clips.

Since Trump sent off his first barrage of Tomahawks (each of which, when it goes kablooie, costs taxpayers $2.5 to 4 million), the “legacy” media has been asking around—and even asking Trump—what on earth could have motivated him. The answers oozing from Donny, Pete and Karoline Leavitt, the abominable blonde, are contradictory, evasive, euphemistic, puzzling and just plain stupid. None is remotely credible. And yet, except on late-night comedy and SNL, no responsible news source has shouldered the burden of stating flatly what they all know—that Trump’s war is the Big Distraction from You-Know-What.

Lately, I’ve cultivated an appreciation for Times reporter Peter Baker, who’s been allowed by his timid management to serve as the media’s ad hoc Trump-shrinker, insinuating into his coverage the thread of Trump’s abnormal psychology. By deploying these impressions, however cautiously, Baker risks breaching one of journalisms dearest shibboleths, known as the Goldwater Rule.

In 1964, statements by Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater, seemed so goofy that reporters started quoting psychiatrists who were happy to shrink Goldwater’s head without actually meeting or interviewing him. The GOP howled at this intrusion. The ethicists of journalism responded by fomenting the Goldwater Rule, which has since discouraged the use of armchair Freud against hip-shooting politicians.

Today, however, we have a president whose every third utterance suggests profound mental illness. He flouts every established norm of his office, his democracy and human decency. He dispatches masked goons into cities to round up brown people and shoot the white people who get in their way. He builds concentration camps and sends babies there. He spends five minutes of a Cabinet meeting stroking his Sharpie. He calls women pigs and dead GIs suckers. All the wreckage and heartbreak that are piling up, from Minneapolis to Greenland to the Middle East, are side-effects of Donald Trump’s monstrous neediness. If ever there were a moment for the legitimate press to prove its legitimacy by suspending the Goldwater Rule and plumbing the psyche of a mad king, well, we have met the enemy and—in the words of Walt Kelly—he is us.

This is not a hard job.

Trump, after all, has thrust into our vernacular, the psychological term “narcissist”, oft and aptly preceded by the adjective “malignant.” From simple observation, anyone can sum up the pattern of Trump’s behavior in three words: vanity, power, impunity.

In an office that draws egomaniacs like June bugs to a streetlamp, Donald Trump is by far the most pathologically vain—and hence, most insecure guy—to ever attain the presidency. His need for ego stroking and adulation drives him to seek so much power—largely by buying it—that no one who seeks his favor will dare oppose him, and those who dare are fish in a barrel.

As president of the United States, Trump is the world’s most powerful man. He’s unchallenged in his vanity and unchecked in his caprices. He’s untouchable.
But this is America, goddammit. We don’t do royalty. No one’s untouchable. We still have a free press.

Trump can’t just be a king in spirit, because there are “wonderful secrets” in his past that could chink his armor and expose the squalor behind his vanity. It is those secrets, captured in a fourth key word of Trump’s essence—“Epstein”—that serious journalists must bear in mind every time they wool-gather about Trump’s “agenda.” They must understand that, while Trump provides spectacle, fireworks, blood and thunder for them to look at, they should, for one humble moment, fold their tablets, forget about headlines and bylines, close their eyes and ask …

What does the son of a bitch not want us to look at?