The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy

After Trump

Robert E. Gutsche, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000577198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume examines the effects of Donald Trump's presidency on journalistic practices, rhetoric, and discourses. Rooted in critical theory and cultural studies, it asks what life may be like without Trump, not only for journalism but also for American society more broadly.

The book places perspectives and tensions around the Trump presidency in one spot, focusing on the underlying ideological forces in tensions around media trust, Trumpism, and the role of journalism in it all. It explores how journalists dealt with racist rhetoric from the White House, relationships between the Office of the President and social media companies, citizens, and journalists themselves, while questioning whether journalism has learned the right lessons for the future. More importantly, chapters on liberal media "bias, " the First 100 Days of the Biden Presidency, gender, and race, and how journalists should adopt measures to "reduce harm" hint as to where politics and journalism may go next.

Reshaping the scholarly and public discourse about where we are headed in terms of the presidency and publics, social media, and journalism, this book will be an important resource for scholars and graduate students of journalism, media studies, communication studies, political science, race and ethnic studies and sociology.

Part I Trumpism and Its Attack(s) on Journalism Fear, Phobias, and Fighting “Bullshit”

1 The Politics of Fear After Trump

David L. Altheide

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205739-3

Introduction: Fear and Truth After Trump

Donald Trump rewrote the book on presidential politics. The former President followed a mediated script and narrative of destruction and salvation: he destroyed the role and institution of a democratically elected President with media logic and the politics of fear and promoted himself as the salvation for the country. Donald Trump’s destructive romp through the United States’ democracy rested on at least four factors. First, a cultural context of popular culture, commercialism, fear, and entertainment valuing celebrity. Second, mass media and related information technology to systematically promote entertainment, drama, conflict, and fear. Third, a barrage of fear-inducing events, issues, and crises. Fourth, digital media that are instantaneous, personal, and visual that require participation, limited interaction, and a sense of validation and community emotional support.

Fear is a hot commodity in American life. And most anger is based on fear (Thagard, 2018). Fear resonates through many American issues and policies, whether in politics, criminal justice, immigration, gun control, or health. My research (Altheide, 2017) on propaganda and the politics of fear convinces me that Pogo had it right when he proclaimed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” President Trump accelerated a fear-laden narrative that was initiated decades earlier and enflamed by hot propaganda after the 9/11 attacks. The politics of fear refers to decision-makers’ promotion and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk, and fear in order to achieve certain goals. More recent episodes of the politics of fear includes images of caged crying children at the Mexican border during Trump’s time in office and aggrieved survivors of victims allegedly killed by undocumented people that Trump propagated to win his anti-immigration policies (ABC, 2018). My colleague, Robert Snow, and I foretold the rise of entertaining and outlandish politicians 42 years ago (Altheide & Snow, 1979) when we examined how the shifting media and popular culture landscape were changing audience expectations and drastically altered major social institutions, including politics, news, education, sports, and religion.

And, my book, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (Altheide, 2017) examined in detail how fear and our entertainment-oriented media culture set the stage for Donald Trump’s election. In 2016, Donald Trump garnered key Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by the margin of a Sun Devil Stadium sellout of 70,000. Notwithstanding that he lost the popular vote in 2016 by some seven million votes, he received nearly 63 million votes despite racist and bigoted rants against minority groups, boasting about sexual assaults, gloating about not paying income tax, and demeaning political opponents of all persuasion. Many of these voters expressed fear-based anger about events and issues filtered through entertaining media.

Donald Trump pushed the buttons that launched numerous destructive acts against democracy and civility even after his 2016 candidacy and for four years in the White House. He promoted himself without regard for conventional norms and practices and blasted away at what were ideological fault lines into explosive political fragments, resulting in so much dissensus that numerous legislators did not recognize the newly elected President Biden, nor would they agree to take a potential life-saving vaccine because it had been associated with a politicized virus, COVID-19. During his four years in office, President Trump told numerous entertaining conflictual lies through conventional and digital social media (Tomasky, 2020). His thousands of tweets promoted a seething, evolving narrative that American history and social issues were a series of conspiracies by government officials, scientists, and news media – what he called the “fake news” – to protect undeserving and illegal minority groups, immigrants, and international agents at the expense of the “true” Americans whose just desserts were frittered away on radical/liberal/Communist/satanic projects. Trump’s self-promotion and lies grabbed attention, received extensive responses and denials, and sustained a deviant identity that was either detested or cherished by audiences with disparate ideologies (Merkovity, 2017, 2018).

President Trump broke treaties, slashed social services support, praised racists and white supremacists, and sanctioned crude and uncivil discourse attacking minority groups and immigrants. He would deny that a world pandemic was destructive, even after admitting during a recorded interview that it was deadly. His refusal to concede losing the 2020 election and urging of his followers to “stop the steal” and “fight like hell” resulted in an insurrection attempt and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. Trump’s followers obeyed, denied that he lost the election, and many supported the Capitol siege. Indeed, as late as April 26, 2021, Trump denied the deadly destructiveness of the insurrection attempt: “It was zero threat right from the start… . Look, they went in they shouldn’t have done it … and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards… . [T]hey had great relationships,” he said (Stracqualursi, 2021).

The 2020 U.S. presidential election was the first election in U.S. history without a peaceful transfer of power. Accordingly, President Trump broke the mold and shattered any notion that the United States of America was an exceptional nation, struggling to live up to ideals, and was not subject to widespread beliefs by laypersons and social theorists alike that autocratic power and anti-democratic outcomes were inevitable. American exceptionalism – originally stated by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th Century and widely debated since then – holds that the United States’ unique history, location, lack of sustained class warfare, a solid middle class, mistrust of strong central authority, and shared basic democratic values promote institutions that celebrate individualism and preclude destructive hegemony at home and empire building and conquest abroad. Donald Trump unleashed and directed crude nationalism, petty bigotry, and xenophobia against global efforts to curtail climate change, nuclear proliferation, and human rights. With vulgar language, he seethed dis-information, rejected facts, science, and entrenched into his followers values about progress, equality, and disqualified election results (Starr, 2019).

The United States citizenry was fractured months after the 2020 election like no time since the Civil War. There have not been so many efforts to restrict voting since the racist Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction. Many citizens who identify with the former President refused to cooperate with the most remedial public health policies aimed at controlling the deadliest pandemic in 100 years. Some congressional representatives did not wear protective masks, which many Trump supporters viewed as a Democratically inspired hoax against the former President. Indeed, when Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, was vaccinated and urged “all Americans to get vaccinated as soon as they are able,” she was ridiculed by one pandemic denier, who said, “I was hoping you were above this kind of virtue signaling” (Chapman, 2021). And into Biden’s first term, Republicans, who lean toward supporting some basic social programs offered by Democrats, fear the Republican fallout that could come from crossing a former President who received 74 million votes in the 2020 election (Russonello, 2021).

In fact, Trump declared war on the ten members of the U.S. House of Representatives and seven members of the Senate who voted to impeach him on the charge of inciting an insurrection. Representative Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach him in 2020 doomed her future as a Republican leader. At Trump’s directive, Cheney was removed from her position as the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. Trump referred to her as “a bitter, horrible human being” (Gillman, 2021). Out of fear for their own political future, Republicans turned on her and would not even be present for her speech defending herself against Trump. They feared retaliation from the remainder of the GOP. But Cheney was steadfast in her statement:

Millions of Americans have been misled by the former president. They hear his words but not the truth… . This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans… . Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar. I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.

(Bailey & King, 2021)

This violent subjectivity thrived on social media and was profitable for Fox News, Facebook, Twitter, and other propaganda outlets. Digital media provided community for believers and fulfilled a desire of many voters for shared communication opportunities, a reaffirmation of values, and trust. Trump supporters trust him even when they do not agree with certain words and deeds. As with so many constructed media realities, the issue turns on identity and how the symbolic meanings connect individuals to political agendas and personas. This relationship will be examined in the following materials about how media logic and the politics of fear were used by Trump and propagated throughout journalism during – and after – his term in office.

The Media Logic of Donald Trump

Donald Trump was a natural experiment in digital media logic. The emergence and abuse of digital social media by the autocratic Donald Trump and his handlers’ political and digital assault on facts, truth, and trust placed democracy in the United States and the Western World in crisis. The mass and digital media operate according to media logic or the way in which the grammar, syntax, and symbolic repres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: How Trump Tested the Press, They Failed, and We Wonder, “Now What?”
• Part I Trumpism and Its Attack(s) on Journalism: Fear, Phobias, and Fighting “Bullshit”
• Part II Journalism’s (Failed) Responses to Trump: From Dis-information to Social Distance
• Part III Journalism and Politics in Opposition to Trumpism: From Bashing to Biden
• Part IV Journalism’s Ideological & Practical Crisis: From Norms to “New, New, New” Journalism?
• Index