Oct. 22, 2024: The Joy Has Faded

Abraham Accords redux; Trump's Nigerian-Lebanese grandchild; Beijing's influence extends to Queens

---

---

The Big Story

Donald Trump tied an apron around his midsection and stepped behind the counter of a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday for a bit of campaign tomfoolery. The restaurant, evidently owned by a local franchisee and Trump supporter, allowed the candidate to man the french fry machine and hand bags of food to customers at the drive-through window. Trump praised small businesses (95% of McDonald’s restaurants are owned by independent operators) as drivers of opportunity. “I love McDonald’s,” said the billionaire ex-president. “I love jobs, I like to see good jobs.” He also made a dig at his competitor, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose claims of having put herself through college by working at a McDonald’s have not been borne out by much evidence or specificity. “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” Trump quipped.

Pretty typical day on the hustings, one might think, though many appeared not to get the joke. Democrat Congressman Brendan Boyle, who represents the area outside Philadelphia where Trump held his event, posted on X that “this is the local McDonald’s that, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, is near where I live and my family and I frequent. They closed their operations today. This whole Trump visit was all staged. The only ‘customers’ were Trump campaign approved people pretending to be customers.” Boyle’s colleague Barbara Lee, who represents Oakland, fulminated that Trump’s visit to McDonald’s has “no logic to it. … He appears to be not well, and he has engaged in some really bizarre types of activities during this campaign.”

A similar tone pervaded media coverage of last week’s Al Smith Dinner, an annual white-tie affair that supports Catholic charities in the New York Archdiocese. Presidential candidates typically appear at the dinner and trade barbs, often sharp, but Harris gave it a miss this year, evidently not to offend her LGBT and pro-choice backers. In her absence, Trump was free to riff and make jokes, some off-color, but nothing out of the ordinary. For example, he noted that he isn’t worried about the “White Dudes for Harris” group “because their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me.” Trump got laughs, and Cardinal Dolan was seen to be cracking up. The other side, however, found nothing funny in Trump’s address. Maureen Dowd, The New York Times’ resident bon vivant, expressed shock that Dolan “suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities” while “Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.” Dowd priggishly lambasted Dolan for not interrupting Trump’s bit and shouting, “Enough!” instead of allowing him to “soil the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith,” who, unlike Trump, “was a man of faith.” The Harris campaign admonished that Trump’s spiel was “incomprehensible” and a reminder of how “unstable he’s become.”

The same bluenosed response was offered a week ago when Trump, at a Pennsylvania town hall, paused the event when two attendees got sick. While paramedics helped the afflicted audience members, Trump instructed his staff to play music from his favorite playlist. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Trump asked the crowd, and then listened to his tunes, dancing in place in his patented bop. The Harris campaign claimed that Trump was “lost, confused,” and in an apparent fugue state, totally zoned out in the middle of a public event. “Hope he’s okay,” Harris posted on X. Saturday Night Live joked that Trump’s setlist can be bought as a compilation called “Now That’s What I Call Dementia, Volume 1.” Numerous experts continue to warn the country that Trump is on the brink of total collapse. “As a physician, admittedly one who hasn’t examined Trump or observed him in person, I find myself increasingly concerned about his cognitive fitness,” frets MSNBC columnist Dr. Kavita Patel, citing Trump’s town hall behavior.

In seeing the scowls and murmurs in reaction to Trump’s evident amusement at the drive-through window, the Al Smith Dinner, and his town-hall dance party with his favorite songs and 5,000 of his closest friends, one wonders what happened to the Politics of Joy. It was scarcely a few months ago that we were told, at the Democratic National Convention, by Bill Clinton no less, that Harris is the “president of joy.” Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker of the House if the Democrats regain a majority, told the gathering that “scripture tells us that weeping may endure during the long night, but joy will come in the morning.” And Oprah proclaimed, according to New York magazine, “So let us choose. Let us choose truth, let us choose honor, and let us choose joooooooy!” Harris’ trademark cackle was supposed to be framed as an expression of her exuberance, but she’s been anything but bubbly lately. “We cannot despair,” she intoned lugubriously to Maria Shriver in Michigan. “Let’s not feel powerless, because then we have been defeated. … We are not one to be defeated.” She has complained that Trump is an “unserious man,” though “the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are very serious.”

So which is it? The politics of joy—a phrase that another sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, rode to electoral defeat in 1968 after not running in any state primary elections—or the politics of resignation and gravity? Unfortunately, neither seems really to fit.

N THE BACK PAGES: Tim Crouse’s classic account of the 1972 presidential campaign previewed the media wasteland we live in today, writes Armin Rosen

---

The Rest

→A core success of Trump’s foreign policy as president, attested to even by longtime State Department hands, was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and a number of Arab states, including Sudan, Morocco, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Biden administration paid lip service to the concept of the accords but in practice sought to undermine them by re-empowering Iran and by insisting that bilateralism between Israel and Saudi Arabia was unacceptable unless accompanied by a deal that included the Palestinians. Biden’s foreign policy has hewed closely to that of Obama’s in seeking to orient the balance of power in the region toward Iran. This week, Trump announced that reviving and expanding the Abraham Accords will be an “absolute priority” of his presidency should he win reelection. Putting Iran back in its cage will likely make the region safer by starving Hezbollah and what’s left of Hamas of munitions and support.

→News that Trump will soon have a half-Lebanese grandchild seemed to delight a reporter from Al Arabiya, the Saudi state-owned news channel. Tiffany Trump, the least famous of Donald Trump’s children, who married into the Lebanese Nigerian Boulos family in 2022, is pregnant with her first child. Asked by reporter Nadia Bilbassy-Charters how he felt about having an Arab scion, Trump responded that he is “happy about it. I have many friends who are Arab, as you say. … They are smart, very warm people” The Boulos family, like many Lebanese, left the Levant following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and settled in West Africa, where they became the primary importers of motorcycles for the Nigerian market.

→Reports that Harris’ ghostwriter plagiarized other sources for her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, were matched by further news that Harris also copied her 2007 congressional testimony in support of federal loan cancellation for prosecutors from another witness. While Harris might not have known the details of her ghostwriter’s “process,” word-for-word borrowing of someone else’s speech seems overt. Now, in another curious instance of confusing provenance, it appears that Harris attended the Hastings College of the Law—now UC Law San Francisco—under the auspices of a 1969 program called the Legal Education Opportunity Program, which seeks to make legal education “accessible to those who come from disadvantaged educational, economic, social, or physical backgrounds.” How Kamala Harris, the child of two successful university professors, was ever “subject to significant adversity” such that she qualified for a program for the socially disadvantaged remains shrouded in mystery.

→Everyone knows that the United States is no longer a world-beater in manufacturing, but it used to have a number of large manufacturing companies that were at least domiciled here, even if some factories were abroad. In 1999, explains The Wall Street Journal, 4 of the 10 most valuable U.S. companies were manufacturers. Today, none of the top 10 are. Intel and Boeing, once superstars of innovation, are lagging badly. Boeing’s “woke” policies are blamed for the engineering mishaps that led to two fatal crashes, though its reliance on software fixes rather than blueprint redesigning may be more to blame. Intel is now reliant on government subsidies to compete with Taiwanese chip giants. The fall of these giants is a bad sign for American national security, which, as was demonstrated during the COVID-19 crisis, is heavily reliant on foreign suppliers for even our basic needs.

→Queens Congresswoman Grace Meng has long been politically tied to Chinese American “hometown associations.” These groups, as The Wall Street Journal reports, function as fraternal organizations that tie Chinese immigrants to one another and their regions of origin, and have become important sources of votes and campaign contributions. But the significance of the associations has not escaped the notice of Beijing. A group that Meng has close ties to, the Henan Association of America, has now been linked to a Chinese Communist Party initiative called the United Front Work Department, which seeks to spread CCP influence through overseas networks. Meng, whose father Jimmy was a New York state senator who went to prison for taking bribes, was the officer of the Henan Association. Grace Meng is quickly downplaying and burying her long ties to the group.

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Stop Blaming Foucault, by Ari Gandsman

It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

We Are All on the Bus

Timothy Crouse’s brilliant book about the servile self-importance of political reporters, ‘The Boys on the Bus,’ describes a disease that now infects the entire country

By Armin Rosen

A single usage of “star-studded” was simply not enough to portray the majesty of a Kamala Harris campaign event with Oprah Winfrey, according to a Sept. 20 article in The Washington Post. “A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusiasm and energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign turned somber as host Oprah Winfrey introduced the mother of a woman who died after waiting for health care in a state that has banned most abortions,” the report began. Several paragraphs later, readers learned that the event kicked off with “a star-studded opening as Winfrey called out other celebrities who were joining virtually—Jennifer Lopez, Bryan Cranston, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Meryl Streep among them.” The average age of the aforementioned stars is 64, once Oprah is factored in.

After leaving the undignifying grind of daily television way back in 2011, Oprah has remained at the rarefied upper summit of senior cultural figures, where she continues to embody national conscience and moral authority. She is the Eleos of the American Olympus, dispenser of compassion and mercy at the steep price of a full and honest public reckoning. Tim Walz, who has repeatedly stretched the truth about his military career and his travels in China, would have been an awesome Oprah guest. The same goes for Walz’s boss, who during her four months as a presidential candidate has carefully evaded any hazardous unscripted moments with the press. In the midst of their breathless coverage of a fake Oprah interview, The Washington Post writers—the article somehow carries the credits of two reporters—were too awestruck or subservient to note its obvious fakeness.

Would it really make that much of a difference if the paper took some other, less fawning approach, or showed even the slightest bit of skepticism about an overly stage-managed Democrat’s internet pageant of Clinton-era celebrities? In The Boys on the Bus, the classic 1972 study of that year’s campaign press, Rolling Stone writer Tim Crouse recounted the media’s powerlessness, and its interrelated lack of self-awareness and basic curiosity, in the face of a Nixon-level image-making operation. Today The Boys on the Bus is often remembered as a nostalgic chronicle of the fading glory days of American journalism. But it is really about the political media’s discovery that it might not really matter that much—that it isn’t a mighty tribune of democratic accountability, but a submissive player in someone else’s drama.

"Nixon's advisors had the revolutionary idea that they could run their candidate from the safety of a television studio, thereby eliminating the meddlesome press,” Crouse wrote. The incumbent, who would go on to win 49 states and 60% of the vote, correctly realized that Americans “would believe the version of Nixon that they saw on TV, rather than the version the reporters presented, secondhand, in the newspaper.” The president blazed a new trail for national candidates by holding infrequent press conferences and interviews during the 1972 race and barring the media from many of his campaign events. Journalists completely ignored the interesting things they did get to see, like Nixon supporters beating up anti-war activists at a rally in Long Island. Once Nixon “discovered … he could use television to get around the press,” he barely seemed to campaign at all. Crouse wrote, “Nixon fed the reporters a phony campaign, and many of the reporters ate it up.”

Many, but not all. The Washington Post’s David Broder, perpetually concerned over the ever-eroding status of consensus institutions in America, “sensed that Nixon was trying to kill off that most sacred of institutions, the Presidential election,” wrote Crouse. “The president campaigns as a candidate, not a touring emperor,” Broder wrote wishfully (and incorrectly) during the stretch-run of the 1972 race. Only a small minority of hacks joined this quasi-resistance. Crouse recounted how the White House press corps delighted in Des Moines Register reporter Clark Mollenhoff’s embarrassment at the hands of press secretary Ron Ziegler—in a tense media briefing, the journalists sided with the arch-Nixonian former public relations executive when he told a series of obvious lies about Mollenhoff allegedly having mangled Ziegler’s admission that the campaign financed the Watergate burglary.

Today’s journalists continue to believe it’s part of their job to aid in especially brilliant-seeming strategies of media evasion. When Harris at last sat for a series of easygoing conversations with podcasters and personalities who openly supported her candidacy, The New York Times’ television critic congratulated the vice president for her “whirlwind tour of talk shows and interviews,” which “revealed the kind of persona she wants to present as she seeks to become the election’s main character.” When Harris finally sat down with 60 Minutes in early October, the country’s leading television news-magazine helpfully shuffled around answers and questions to create a false appearance of coherency.

Crouse sensed the media industry’s gluttony for its own humiliation and its strong professional instinct toward toadying to the powerful, qualities so deeply ingrained that they could manifest without conscious intention. “He didn’t look like a man bent on distorting reality,” wrote Crouse of an NBC producer who exaggerates an obviously “stage-managed” floor demonstration at the Democratic convention in Miami into a “balloon extravaganza” for the viewers at home, loaded with “shouting and flashing images.” Even the best of the reporters Crouse covered weren’t mentally or morally strong enough to resist the basic conditions of the job. “In the world of straight, ‘objective’ journalism, the more freedom you gave a reporter, the more he censored himself,” Crouse concluded, with even the above-average reporters stalked by fears of straying from the pack, getting something wrong, or being banished to the “Zoo plane” with the rest of the B-listers and undesirables. “Freedom scared a reporter out of his mind,” wrote Crouse. The entire media constantly sleepwalked into obedience—which meant the media would eventually have no choice but to make obedience a professional virtue.

***

The Boys on the Bus is the story of the eclipse of American journalism's civic purpose, something that even happened within the minds of the journalists themselves. The political class’s mastery of the media and its tribal neuroses could only be revealed, or even perceived, by someone socialized outside the tribe, in this case a 25-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer and alternative press correspondent with no real ambition to join the journalistic establishment. Crouse’s book secured him a still-durable place in American political-literary history. But his one other major work of note is a revival of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, which is about as far away as one can get from the industry whose problems he so witheringly diagnosed.

The Boys on the Bus is a damning psychological profile of the American journalistic profession, whose mentality is revealed to have remained appallingly stable over the past five decades. Crouse identified the insecurities that make journalists so seamlessly manipulable. The “feverish atmosphere” of hacks swarming George McGovern’s primary campaign “was somewhere between a high school bus trip to Washington and a gambler’s jet junket to Las Vegas, where small-time mafiosi were lured into betting away their restaurants.” By the end of the campaign, the reporters tailing McGovern “had a very limited usefulness as political observers … for what they knew best was not the American electorate but the tiny community of the press plane, a totally abnormal world that combined the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigors of the Long March.”

The media organizations Crouse observed were blighted with self-regard, with the television networks in particular viewing themselves “as omnipotent and sacred institutions, like the presidency.” For journalists, proximity to the presidential campaign, or a feeling of participation in it, became an unhealthy source of professional and even personal meaning. Crouse made a series of blood-curdling observations about one Baltimore Sun writer: “He bitched incessantly about everything—the food, the accommodations, the staff, the press operation, and the campaign in general—but he obviously reveled in all the rituals of the campaign … more than anyone else in the press corps, he seemed to derive his whole identity from being a campaign reporter. He seemed to love the dozens of ways in which the campaign made the press feel important; they had special phones set up for them at every stop, they had entree to backstage areas, they were men apart.”

Journalists have always been an insecure bunch, for reasons so freakishly consistent across time that they can only be endemic to the profession. Since the dawn of the modern national media, journalists have suspected they are trivial people engaged in an activity whose essential pettiness, and even its unseemliness, must be hidden from the public at all costs. As Crouse recounted, the political scientist Leo Rosten had already figured out the Washington press’s inferiority complexes way back in the mid-1930s. Political journalists have long suspected they are mediocrities huddled at the feet of people of actual genius and action. In order to make their jobs palatable to themselves and justifiable to the wider society, the hacks have needed to make the chasmic distances between themselves and their subjects appear as small as they can get away with.

The journalist’s fear that they are in fact a kind of glorified interloper within the vastness of history makes them pitifully easy for politicians to capture. Ever on the lookout for shortcuts to professional aggrandizement, journalists are impressed with spectacles and pseudo-events that are thrown specifically for them. Often they have no awareness that this is happening. In one of countless episodes in The Boys on the Bus that encapsulates the effortless victory of public relations over journalism, the media covering the Republican National Convention is shocked to discover that the entire thing is scripted, right down to the standing ovations. Republican communications staffers mistakenly delivered copies of the script to various media organizations covering the convention, and a panicked RNC aide even attempted to physically rip the document out of the hands of a BBC journalist. The controversy had no discernible effect on the election.

Today, it seems absurd that any journalist was surprised at the script's existence, or that they could possibly believe they were attending an event where anything spontaneous or unpredictable would be allowed to happen. But back then, Crouse wrote, members of the White House press corps often “forgot they were handout artists and convinced themselves they were somehow associates of a man who was shaping epochal events.” The Boys on the Bus teems with examples of politicians telling journalists how important they are as a method of neutralizing them. The Kennedy administration “made the reporters feel like part of the staff, like cherished advisors or bosom friends.”

These kinds of delusions endure, and it has long been obvious that journalists are the witting and unwitting mouthpieces of sophisticated messaging operations. Crouse fell for one such maneuver, and had the rare integrity and presence of mind to share it in detail. At the Democratic convention, Crouse agreed to help a political strategist friend of his relay a scoop to an anchor for NBC News stationed on the convention floor: Ted Kennedy was going to appear on television to deliver a statement from Massachusetts at 11 p.m.; California Sen. John Tunney, a client of Crouse’s friend, was close with Kennedy, and could appear on NBC to preview his announcement. Every element of this was nonsense. In reality, a group of “bored reporters” had invited Kennedy’s press secretary for a late dinner at a Hyannisport fish house, which someone misreported as being a press conference by Kennedy himself. It’s entirely possible some of these misrepresentations were deliberate, and that Crouse’s friend lied to him in an inevitably futile attempt to get his man on prime-time TV.

Years later, journalists would become errand-runners for foreign intelligence agents, partisan strategists, terrorist groups and conspiracy theorists. Errand-running is one of the most respected journalistic practices of our time—The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Donald Trump's alleged collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election, a notion that originated with a DNC-funded dossier written by a former British spy who got much of his information from people who themselves turned out to be Russian regime operatives, people who often found that lie-peddling to Anglophone political creatures made for an easy and lucrative career. In October of 2023, the Times was one of the first publications to break the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s claims of the Israeli destruction of Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital and the deaths of the hundreds of civilians sheltering inside. In fact a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had hit the hospital’s parking lot, killing perhaps a couple dozen people and leaving the building intact. Errand-running had become a journalistic folkway by then: If important-enough terrorists claimed something, it became news automatically, even at The New York Times. Luckily Americans now know better than to automatically believe much of anything from the press. Earlier this month, Gallup reported all-time lows in public confidence in the media, with 69% of respondents having low trust or no trust in what they see and read.

In Crouse’s day, it was at least possible to think of the press as a genuinely independent entity. Newspapers were still fundamental to the civic identity of places large and small—Crouse mentioned that Newsday arrived in seven of 10 Long Island driveways every morning in 1972. The industry was confident enough in itself to tolerate oddballs and dissenters along with pathological liars and assorted weirdos. Times political star R.W. Apple made ludicrous claims about killing Viet Cong militants while on assignment; Robert Novak comes off as a fascinatingly tortured character, personally opposed to “anything good-looking, anything fashionable, anything slick.”

But Crouse sensed the ultimately pathetic and compromised nature of everything and everyone around him, a rot that extended to people he genuinely liked. One of the more striking sections of the book is Crouse’s treatment of his Rolling Stone colleague Hunter S. Thompson. Today Thompson is thought of as the ultimate journalistic rebel, an icon of total integrity and a renegade too courageous and too cool for his stupid, oily professional peers. Crouse peered a little closer, and saw that Thompson was just a different species of conformist.

Crouse reported that Thompson’s immortal verdict that Nixon’s impending reelection proved “we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable” was much admired among the 1972 campaign journalists, who wished they could also have been so honest. “But they were also keenly aware that you could not sway millions of Middle Americans by sneering at used car dealers,” Crouse wrote. There was apparently a time when the media experienced real inner conflict over the perceived concerns of middle America. Thompson, openly scornful of the majority of his fellow citizens, “could say what he liked because he was talking to his own people … and who was Thompson speaking to? A Chicano welfare lawyer, or perhaps a very hip college student.”

An incipient elitist, Thompson was telling the future liberal-managerial coalition exactly what it wanted to hear, and he channeled—and in some sense helped invent—the beliefs and sensibilities of the rising generation of squares. By the time of his 2005 suicide, Thompson had drunk himself into irrelevance and become one of a million sources of rote anti-Bush screeds. Of course Bush was a deserving target, and most writers, including some very good ones, will never have a 10-minute run of originality, never mind the 10-year one Thompson had. Still, in 1972, somewhere near the height of that run, a sharp 25-year-old could sense that even someone as liberated as Thompson was never as free as he appeared, or as free as he thought he was.

***

The amalgam of the PR industry, political spin-doctoring, and mass neurosis that Crouse described could hardly be contained. In the 52 years since his book appeared, the hacks have marched out of the pages of their newspapers and magazines, most of which are dead or irrelevant by now, and colonized the normie world. A modern-day reader of The Boys on the Bus greets passages like these with queasy self-recognition: The campaign journalists “began to realize how much they liked the way of life, the womblike protection of the plane … They were tired, cross, and so overworked that they could not stand another second of the campaign, and yet they wanted it to go on forever.” That’s all of us now, obsessed with a permanent election that everyone hates.

Politics is one of the great American growth industries, with nearly $16 billion in projected spending on federal races alone in 2024 and over $100 million in small donations going to the two major party presidential candidates. If Americans really despised the hyperpoliticized state of our culture, we wouldn't fund it out of pocket. We wouldn’t constantly make celebrities out of politicians and politicians out of celebrities. In such a utopia, one where tens of millions of people no longer needed politics for entertainment and a sense of self-worth, political podcasts would exist only for the obsessed and the unwell, Tucker Carlson would not be able to sell out an arena tour, and the Taylor Swifts of the world would realize that they can only demean and diminish themselves through endorsing any politician for any reason. That utopia is far away though. We have chosen a different way to live.

What makes the journalists of The Boys on the Bus such recognizable American characters, and the thing that links their outlook with the obsessions of the present era, is that they reflect the schismatic American attitude toward power. Power both repulsed and titillated them, as it repulses and titillates us. Power is gross, the domain of Richard Nixon-like gargoyles and the total antithesis of the Hunter S. Thompson ethos. Yet the Puritan association of power with virtue remains impossible to fully break, and it demands obeisance toward the alternatively hopeful and oppressive moralism of which Oprah and perhaps even Kamala Harris are inheritors. Meanwhile Donald Trump embodies the more atavistic American power ideal, promising retribution on behalf of the nation’s scorned and now quasi-militarized used car dealers.

The truly damaged—and there are a lot of us—consider it a privilege merely to witness these grotesque rituals of American power, and we hope to aid in their final completion every fourth November. “It would be a good while before any of them would again discover the same irresistible combination of camaraderie, hardship, and luxury,” Crouse wrote as he watched the McGovern press corps scatter to their home newsrooms the week after election day. “They now had to go back to paying the dues which would earn them another campaign in 1976.”

Much of the country now shares their mentality. Even as votes are cast, the sickest and truest parts of ourselves can’t wait to run it all back again.