How we got here

Yours truly being interviewed by PBS ‘Frontline’

Three years ago I sat down with PBS ‘Frontline’ and talked about the Trump era and how it came to be. If you’re interested, here is the link to the hour-long interview.

I do my best to explain why the craziest people in Washington, DC, are given the overwhelming amount of attention across America’s broken political media industry. The American media rewards America’s extreme politicians. That is why we are here today. I talk about the moment when Republican Congressman Joe Wilson yelled, “You lie!” on the floor of the US House of Representatives during President Obama’s 2009 State of the Union.

The situation is much worse than it was three years ago. The American people will be abused further by a MAGA House majority that comprises the most extreme Congress since the Civil War.

The singularly most toxic manifestation of its power is the creation of a Jim Jordan-led conspiracy theory committee, inspired by Congress’s Church Commission of the 1970s that looked into FBI abuses. This committee will have the power to issue subpoenas even when they overlap with “ongoing criminal investigations.” It won’t just be a travesty that attacks the civil liberties of American citizens, but also the first congressional committee in America since the loathsome House Un-American Activities Committee to take up the unfinished work of the Salem witch trial prosecutors. The Jordan committee will chase conspiracy theories and intimidate American businesses into towing the MAGA line and donating to the MAGA cause —or else. It will be an abomination, but it will be sensational and entertaining for those Americans who make up the micro-audience of the billion-dollar conflict industry that metastasized from the wreckage of the Watergate era of investigative journalism.

What has replaced it is an access journalism model that finds profit in partnership between media companies and newsmakers. It fulfills the needs of these two adversarial interests by aligning their conflict into a business model that makes billions from insanity that withers the most important institutions in the country with cynicism. Case in point:

Chuck Todd didn’t give an inch in this interview. He defended — as best he could — a boundary line that separated an old era from a new one. The old era was one in which it was shocking for White House officials to brazenly lie. The new era is one in which it is shocking when the truth is told. Chuck Todd fought until the end. The total surrender of the American media to the lies wasn’t the fault of Chuck Todd, who died with his boots on, but rather to The New York Times, which eight years later, has declared that there is no problem with it by publishing the words of Kellyanne Conway, America’s most dishonest person who isn’t named Trump.

The result has been the collapse of trust between the American people and nearly every important institution in the country. The vast sea of distrust is a product of selfishness, insipid stupidity, ignorance, arrogance and relentless disregard for the truth by America’s political and media class. It has destabilized American democracy over the last two decades through failed wars, economic collapse and economic inequality that rivals the peak of the gilded age.

Soon this era will begin to give way to the era of reform and renewal that will inevitably follow. Before it does though, American politics, and therefore the American media, will break some more. Things will continue to deteriorate and get worse until the moment of disruption occurs when better is placed as both a direction and choice in front of the American people.

There are three stories that are deeply linked that I will write about over the next couple of days. I believe that they will have enormous political implications over the next months as the country begins to think about the next presidential election.

The first story is about the looming trial of Sam Bankman-Fried. He committed one of the largest financial frauds in world history in the plain light of day, while being celebrated by presidents, prime ministers and the media as the world’s first trillionaire.

Cover photo by Spencer Heyfron

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Sam Bankman-Fried share the stage at the Crypto Bahamas conference in May 2022

Bankman-Fried spent tens of millions of dollars on illegal campaign contributions to members of both political parties. While this aspect of the SBF story has been under- reported across America, it is a major cause for concern and worry in Washington, DC, for scores of elected officials who took the stolen money from one of the greatest con men in history.

This story by Theodore Schleifer of Puck News is an astonishment. It is the chronicle of a criminal in his gilded cage at the edge of the end of a gilded and corrupt era in which America’s elites became so completely deluded that they detached from reality.

The second story is tied to the revelations that President Biden has mishandled classified information, resulting in the appointment of a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The political implications of this story cannot be overstated as they arm the MAGA extremists with a weapon of political mass destruction that has been sorely missed by the MAGA extremists.

In the ‘Frontline’ interview, I talk about Bill Clinton’s most enduring legacy, which is that no matter what depravity or act of corruption occurs, half of the country says, “But Bill Clinton did it.”

That will now be replaced by “but Joe Biden did it,” as two factions circle each other in yet another election, hurling charges of malfeasance and hypocrisy at each other.

The third story is around the health of Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. The war will enter a dangerous new phase when spring arrives 10 weeks from now. The chances for escalation and disaster will grow as Russia’s military disaster unfolds.

My ‘Frontline’ interview helps to explain how we arrived at this hour. It represents my worldview, and will help to make sense of what I write about over the next few days.

Happy Sunday.