Most serious political journalists, at least the few that remain, have read the late Richard Ben Cramer’s landmark 1992 What It Takes, a dense and rewarding 1047-page examination of the 1988 presidential campaign. Since that publication, no political book has touched Cramer’s exhaustive (and dispassionate) look at presidential politics 37 years ago, and it’s likely, given the current rush to write and release books as fast as possible, no author will top it.
The only writer I can think of that’s up to the task is Christopher Caldwell, whose essay in the Claremont Review of Books, “Speaking Trumpian,” written just after the President’s victory in November, could serve as a chapter of a 2024 campaign book, even if it’s not released for several years. (It’s not incidental that Caldwell never, in his lengthy article, never uses the word “I.”) Like Cramer in ‘88, I’ve no idea if Caldwell voted for Trump or Kamala Harris (he’s generally conservative, but isn’t a cipher for anyone) and that’s one virtue of his Claremont article; no other writer has produced such an original take on Trump (the good and bad) and it’s a shame so few people will read his account of the campaign from Biden’s disastrous June 27th debate until Election Day. That’s not a knock on the estimable Claremont Review of Books, just current reality, as the quarterly’s circulation is just 14,000.
A few excerpts: “Trump is about to change American life because he reflects American life… What was going on in the Trump campaign was a kind of dissident art—and it thrilled people in the half-aesthetic, half-liberationist way that dissident art does, imparting a rebel energy to everything they did… There’s nothing stupider than the assumption that political campaigns are mostly clashes between the candidates’ positions on ‘the issues’… [Trump] milked [his assassination attempt in Butler, PA] occasionally, but he was in general less boastful about surviving a bullet to the head from a high-powered rifle than Biden had been in 2020 about standing up to a bully named Corn Pop at a poolside in Wilmington, Delaware during the Eisenhower administration… For all his inaccuracy and exaggeration, Trump’s supporters find him authentic and sincere—perhaps the only authentic and sincere politician they have ever seen.”
It’s an indictment of today’s mainstream media that Caldwell doesn’t have a twice-weekly forum at a newspaper/website that people read. It’s difficult to predict what Caldwell would make of Trump’s first week in office—the withdrawal from WHO (and, one hopes, within a year, the United Nations), jettisoning of federal DEI mandates, rescinding Biden’s bigoted ban on menthol cigarettes, the J-6 and Ross Ulbricht pardons and the hiring freeze at federal agencies, just for starters—but it wouldn’t be dull.
At The New York Times—which has seen the departure of two more liberal columnists, Charles Blow and Pamela Paul, in perhaps a sign that management at that paper is at least slightly modifying its extreme Democratic Party bias—Bret Stephens (who has retreated already from his #NeverTrump disengagement) was flapping his crusty wings over the confirmation of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Stephens is opposed, as are many, to Hegseth because of the drinking and philandering charges leveled against him. But instead of mere irritation, he sounds like a crybaby. He writes: “In December, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published a devastating expose on Hegseth. In a different era (say, 10 years ago), the article would have destroyed his chances. [He omits that Mayer’s long campaign against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife have amounted to nothing.] Instead, it resuscitated a candidacy that, for a brief moment, looked dead on arrival in the Senate… That doesn’t mean journalists shouldn’t do our jobs. It just means that, in this moral and intellectual climate, we shouldn’t expect it to make a whit of political difference.”
In this “intellectual climate.” One might think Stephens’ column was a parody—like so much of what’s posted on social media—but Stephens, whose work I often like, isn’t a funny guy. He’s serious, which is more damning since it was his paper—above all others (because it still has a patina of respectability, and is still used as a cheat sheet by TV stations)—that propped up the frail, bordering-on-senility condition of Joe Biden several years ago. That means, to throw it back in Stephens’ mug, that journalists weren’t doing their jobs.
The Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, a DNC I’ll-get-the-Starbucks-order-for-you shill for years, had a front-page story about Trump’s quest to inject royalty in his administration. His beef: “At an event with supporters at Capital One Arena, he introduced his relatives one at a time, as if presenting the royal family.” So what? Trump is pompous and has no shortage of ego, but it was Inauguration Night and he was celebrating with friends, an event that’s already forgotten, given his rush of activity in the succeeding days.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023