REASON(S): American madness, American Babel!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2024

The winner gets something right: Our American madness was on display on yesterday's Meet the Press.

In our view, the post-"democratization" madness was general over the hour-long program. In this morning's New York Times, the highly astute Peter Baker describes one part of the mess:

Trump Signals an Aggressive Opening, Threatening ‘Jail’ for Cheney and Others

[...]

Asked if he would consider pardoning “everyone” who attacked the Capitol, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah. But I’m going to be acting very quickly.” Pressed, he added, “First day.”

He did say “there may be some exceptions,” those who were “radical, crazy.” But asked about those convicted of assaulting police officers, he defended them. “Because they had no choice,” he said. And he suggested those convicted were being mistreated. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open,” he said.

In fact, only a handful of Capitol riot inmates are left in the Washington jail and most of those are serving significant sentences for violent crimes...

Full disclosure! Much of the quoted exchange wasn't included in the edited TV interview. The full interview was substantially longer.

(Tape of the full interview can be seen here. As far we know, the full interview hasn't been transcribed.)

In that part of his report, Baker is quoting statements by Trump which didn't make it to air. Some of the statements can't be found in the official Meet the Press transcript.

In full fairness, we'd have to say this:

Baker's account may misstate what the winning candidate meant when he said, "They had no choice."

All in all, possible errors like that may emerge—will almost surely continue to emerge—from our rapidly growing American Babel, in which different tribes tell vastly different stories about the era's key events.

It's possible that Baker, who's quite astute, misread that one remark by Trump. Then again, yesterday's madness included this:

As for birthright citizenship, Mr. Trump said that he would try to reverse the constitutional guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen regardless of the status of their parents. Most legal scholars have said the president has no power to overturn the right to citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States.”

[...] 

“We’re going to have to get it changed,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”

He repeatedly said falsely that “we’re the only country that has it.” In fact, the World Population Review lists 34 other countries and territories that also have unrestricted birthright citizenship, including Canada and Mexico.

Is that really possible? Is it really possible that a former and incoming president could be so flatly wrong about such a basic factual claim? 

We'd have to say that it is possible, and we'll also add this:

If the winning candidate really was wrong, citizens of Red America will never hear a word about it on their nation's "cable news" programs. 

Over here, in Blue America, his error will be reported and discussed. So it goes, this very morning, in Baker's report in the Times. (This link is offered in support of Baker's assertion, for those few inclined to click.)

Blue Americans will hear about the winner's howler. Red Americans won't. 

In our view, the madness was general over the (unedited) length of the winning candidate's remarks. But then, the madness has been general for quite a while as our American Babel keeps growing.

Why would anyone have voted for Trump in last month's election? Many of us in Blue America are still trying to puzzle that out. Last Tuesday morning, one of our major tribunes made a basic factual error as he reviewed the scene.

Speaking with the Washington Post's Gene Robinson, that major tribune said this:

There is a lot of talk about the Democratic Party has to re-examine everything they've done. And I've talked about massive gains in Texas, in Florida, in middle America—that is true. But there is another side of that...When everyone talks about the rise of the far right and everything else, Donald Trump got less votes in 2024 than he got in 2020. 

That was Joe Scarborough, speaking to Gene Robinson on the December 3 Morning Joe. Robinson never corrected the factual error. Can anyone here play this game?

Nationwide popular vote, Candidate Trump
2020: 74,223,975 votes
2024: 77,289,122 votes (and counting)

Sad! Even as votes keep trickling in, Candidate Trump has gained more than three million votes over his previous total. (He has received fourteen million more votes than he got in 2016.)

By way of contrast, Candidate Harris has received roughly six million fewer votes than Candidate Biden did in the 2020 election. Those are the kinds of basic facts we Blues might want to explain.

That said, can anyone play this game? Trump was already 2.9 million votes ahead of his previous total when Scarborough made his misstatement. On the most highly paid ends of the game, does anyone try to get clear on the most elementary facts before they start delivering their pronouncements?

Everyone makes mistakes at some point. Does Scarborough's latest factual error really make any difference? 

We'll answer your question with a gloomier question. Does anything really make any difference at this late stage of the game?

We're all inside a Babel now—a modern American Babel. We're living inside the comically awful, shattered remains of a formerly very large nation.

On this morning's Morning Joe, Vandehei and Allen described their most recent column at Axios. In it,  they describe the basic reality of this new American Babel. Their description starts like this:

Shards of glass: Inside media's 12 splintering realities

You can't understand November's election—or America itself—without reckoning with how our media attention has shattered into a bunch of misshapen pieces.

Think of it as the shards of glass phenomenon. Not long ago, we all saw news and information through a few common windows—TV, newspapers, cable. Now we find it in scattered chunks that match our age, habits, politics and passions.

Why it matters: Traditional media, at least as a center of dominant power, is dead. Social media, as its replacement for news in the internet era, is declining in dominance.

What comes next: America is splintering into more than a dozen news bubbles based on ideology, wealth, jobs, age and location.

This means where you get your news, the voices you trust, and even the topics and cultural figures you follow could be wholly different from the person sitting next to you.

That last sentence doesn't quite scan—but then again, so what? The reality they're describing is discernible, and it's extremely basic:

"So instead of Red America and Blue America, we'll have a dozen or more Americas—and realities," the gentlemen say as they continue. "This will make understanding public opinion, and finding common agreement, even more complex and elusive."

For today, and for the rest of the week, we'll stick with the two Americas, Red and Blue, and with their "cable news" realities. We'll spend the week trying to answer a question which has been prevalent across the Blue American landscape:

How could anyone have voted for Candidate Trump? Could there be any understandable reason for casting such a strange vote?

Why would anyone have voted for Trump? When we Blues can't even imagine an answer to that basic question, that suggests that we ourselves are part of the madness—that the madness is also in us.

To the extent that we bother to watch, we Blues are able to see the madness as it appears on the Fox News Channel. Are we able to see the madness as it surfaces within us?

Why might someone have voted for Trump? Why might someone have voted against our own Candidate Harris?

In our view, the possible answers are legion, and they're blindingly obvious. That said, for one of Blue America's thought leaders, the only possible answer was this:

It must be that at least half of America is "just deeply racist."

In our view, it doesn't help when we ourselves, we Blue Americans, let the madness rise within us. In full fairness to the winning candidate, we're therefore forced to say this:

In the Meet the Press interview, as it aired, the winning candidate in this year's race named two major reasons why he won.

We think his statement made obvious sense—though we can, and we will, cite other possible reasons. It seems to us that there are quite a few reasons which may explain, or may help explain, why he got all those votes. 

He made a lot of nutty statements as he spoke to Kristen Welker. Many of his nuttier statements were edited out of the interview as it was shown on the air.

That said, we think he was probably right about the two reasons why he won. Tomorrow, we'll start with the two reasons he named, and then we'll move on from there.

Tomorrow: The winner cites two reasons