The Real Reason Why Americans Approve of Trump’s Disastrous Transition
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
How can it be, you may be wondering, that 55 percent of Americans tell pollsters they approve of how Donald Trump is handling the transition? He has nominated—almost but not quite literally across the board—unqualified extremists. Think about it: These are people who’ve never run these large, complex organizations and who, if they shouldn’t be ruled out on those grounds, should certainly be ruled out on the basis of their way-outside-the-mainstream views and announced goals to all but destroy the agencies they’re going to run; they’re people whose only association with the word “cabinet” should be the ones they select when remodeling their kitchens.
Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kash Patel are just the starting rotation, as it were (and Matt Gaetz, the lone casualty so far). Many, many others are objectionable in some way. Trump’s would-be IRS guy is an auctioneer (seriously) who, in a brief congressional stint, sponsored something called the Tax Code Termination Act. The CDC guy, another former congressman who runs a medical practice and whom Trump proposes to head a 13,000 employee, $9 billion operation, is arguably more anti-vax than RFK Jr. And so on and so on. We could do this with about two-thirds of them.
And people support this. Why?
Here’s a conventional explanation. Because Americans are ready to turn the page. Because Joe Biden is so deeply unpopular that the country is restless to see him and his whole crew go. Because people still think Trump the businessman can make things better.
There’s a little truth in all that. But here’s another explanation. People don’t really know about these Cabinet picks because average Americans just aren’t as read-in to the news as they once were. They watch the news on their phones in 30-second snippets. If they read, it’s headlines and social media posts, maybe. So they know, probably, that Trump nominated Dr. Oz to something or other. But do they know that he has a roughly $30 million financial stake in companies that will be doing business with the very Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that he is probably going to lead? I very much doubt it.
Let me make two points here. First, I don’t think there was some golden age when every citizen, or even most citizens, read all they could about such matters. That’s ridiculous. The concept of the informed citizenry on which democracy depends has always been a challenge. Second, this is not a blame-the-idiot-people column. People are busy. They have lives and kids and bills and passions and hobbies, and they don’t make a lot of time for politics. That’s life.
All this is increasingly a by-product of life in a time of widening inequality, too. If you’re working longer hours to make ends meet, and it’s that much harder to tend to the immediate obligations the real world throws at you, you’ve got much less time to read news and reflect. Just one more reason why a more broadly shared prosperity is so important.
So no, I don’t blame people. I blame the larger culture, which has been almost totally drained of common concern about our civic health. First and foremost, I blame Rupert Murdoch (and to a lesser extent his imitators), whose media properties have injected so much poison and so many lies into our discourse since 1977 that common civic agreement about basic morality in public life has become impossible.
We used to have that—except about sex, which allowed JFK (among others) to survive politically, and about which society was completely hypocritical. But on all other matters, we had a basic understanding about what kinds of actions did and did not reflect our best values, and this was why Richard Nixon had to resign in disgrace for committing far fewer offenses than Trump already has. Everyone, whatever their politics, agreed that Nixon had clearly crossed a line. But that impulse is dead in the United States, and the right-wing media killed it.
I blame the mainstream media, too, for failing too often to fight hard enough to maintain their commitment to that common civic agreement about basic morality. Every narrative and meme that the mainstream media uncritically picks up from the right-wing ecosystem and runs with for the sake of clicks—and there have been thousands of them over the years—has contributed its little share to our civic collapse.
Many mainstream media outlets, starting with The New York Times , still do tons of important work, and we’d be far poorer without their scoops and investigations. But those occasional scoops have been, in my view, more than outweighed by an overall tenor of political coverage that has watched one of our two parties descend into a particularly un-American blend of authoritarianism and cartoonish radicalism without nearly enough alarm bells getting raised. So much of the political media hasn’t reckoned with what’s coming—at least not in a public-facing way with their readers and viewers.
Making matters worse is that we seem to have good reason to worry that some outlets now want to make peace with Trumpism. The owner of The Washington Post (and I think you know who he is), after nixing the paper’s already-written Kamala Harris endorsement, is donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. The owner of the Los Angeles Times is cooking up these new rules promising a more “fair and balanced” approach to the news. ABC is paying Trump $15 million (plus a million to cover legal fees) to settle a defamation claim that came after several ABC and Disney executives made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to meet with transition officials.
It’s chilling. It’s nonetheless true that the mainstream media in general have been pretty aggressive in what they’ve been writing about Trump’s nominees. But that just leaves us with the other problem: No one is reading. Only about 10 percent of people read newspapers anymore, and their online engagement with newspaper web sites averages less than two minutes.
So: Sure, your average American is ready to bid Biden hasta la vista . But that isn’t why people are relatively sanguine about the early days of a coming administration that has the makings of the most corrupt presidential administration ever. They’re sanguine because they just don’t know. They haven’t heard. Or if they’ve heard, they don’t believe it. They still think the checks and balances they learned about in school will sort things out and hold Trump at bay. They don’t realize that Trump & Co. have formulated specific plans to evade or trample those checks and balances, and if they’ve read that , they don’t believe it, either.
I’ll bet you my mortgage that among people who read news, whatever their political views, concern runs much higher. But these days, that describes a rapidly dwindling number of people. You know how pollsters ask respondents basic demographic and attitudinal questions before they get to the substance? I propose that all pollsters start including questions about people’s media habits so we can see, repeatedly, week in, week out, the growing chasm between the informed and the less informed (or, in the case of people who rely solely on right-wing media, the anti-informed).
In sum: The transition approval is more proof that the right-wing media has won. Disinforming is the new informing. And it’s spreading to more and more mainstream outlets. The only question, which more and more of us are asking, is when the liberal establishment in this country will wake up and tackle this problem.
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Couldn't agree more.
Are we ever going to get back to living in a sane shared reality, or is the American Experiment basically on its way to the dustbin of history?
They left out the largest part of the problem. The much more massive left wing media. Purveyors of half truths, disinformation and hate.
The article this seed is based on is proof of that.
So anything you don't agree with is left wing?
Case in point.
The very media that gaslit people into believing Biden was mentally capable of holding office.
Your words not mine
Oh yeah and their useful idiots ate it up with spoon.
So name a news media source you don't agree with that isn't 'left wing'.
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Why would an actual news source be something with which one can agree or disagree?
How do we not understand that the element of "agree or disagree" is, in fact, the problem?
Actual news is composed of facts. It is written objectively. If done correctly, the reader cannot tell the political opinions of the writer.
The idea that we have "news" sources that require agreement or disagreement is the problem.
Anyone saying that these picks are unqualified and extreme is ignorant and uninformed. We need to look no further than the clown show that Biden assembled and let loose upon the American people. The damage caused by these morons will take years to undo.
corrupt cavalcade of unqualified extremists
Talking to people in my area, this is one of the main reasons for voting for Trump, because that is their view of the Biden administration.
Make the case that Hegseth, for example, is qualified to run the DoD.
I would never claim a cabinet is perfect, but you paint a pretty terrible napkin sketch of the catastrophe unleashed by the Biden cabinet picks. Did you have something real in mind?[✘]
[✘] As far Hegseth is concerned he is far more “qualified” to run Defense than Obama was to be President and be over Defense. Military veteran, Princeton & Harvard grad. Obama had no military experience. None.
I’m sure you’ll disagree, which just further reinforces my point.
a little preview of the next 4 years. criminals, corruption, conflicts of interest, and chaos. republicans are unable to govern and trump is a lame duck before his term even starts.
That's was the last 4 years.
For the NEXT 4 years we just have to look back at 2017 - 2021. Liberals and Democrats crying and complaining about everything from the way he parts his hair to what hand he wipes his ass with. All the while fabricating hoax after hoax to try to unseat a duly elected POTUS.
The sad thing for the taker party is they are going to have to wait 2 years for endless investigations, and a chance to impeach the bad orange man.
your check might be a little late this month, LOL ...
What the left and Democrats don't understand is that THEY set the precedence for any possible investigations onto their actions. I doubt that any investigations we see will be based in the same type of fiction we saw from the Democrats but that fiction will be used as the root cause and justified. Unlike those we saw from 2017 - today.
And that's all at the hands of the Biden Administration and Democrats. They sent billions overseas already and the latest bill sent more. Sad that they see the US as a lower priority than a country where the POTUS received payments from.
To what criminals, corruption, etc. do you refer?
as soon as trump capitulates to putin, maga becomes russian collaborators running loose in america ...
whoever his traitorous hero tells him they are ...
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not by maga, but then, who cares ...
... right back at you.
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Still can't take you seriously.
... not exactly surprising.
Criminals, corruption, conflicts of interest and chaos?
Like who and what?
Again, who and what?
It's like you've been brainwashed and live in a completely backwards reality.
Every case brought against Trump was based on evidence, and none of it was fabricated. He should be in prison right now, especially for his attempted coup. But let me guess, you probably don't believe he tried to take power after losing in 2020, do you?
it’s amazing to watch this play out. Yesterday, the Wall Street journal authored a major story with 50 some Biden admin sources detailing how the administration covered up his mental incapacity for years and made presidential decisions for him. While the country unknowingly operated without an actual president, the msm not only uncritically ran stories promoting his fitness (more energy than a 30 year old!) but attacked anyone suggesting the president was deteriorating as a conspiracy theorist, even an independent counsel. The reaction to this incredible news? Attack Rupert Murdoch amid his network for misleading Americans. Unbelievable.
Oh I think they knew.
I think Half the country definitely knew and spoke the truth, 25% knew and lied about it, and 25% believed Biden was as sharp as ever. watching the second and third group complain about Fox, trump and propaganda is something else. Talk about a log in their eye…
Which just makes it that much worse.
The world knew. And took full advantage.
Indeed. It is unbelievable, so let's not believe it until we've done more research ourselves. This is just another reason for all of us to be skeptical of sources with a clearly partisan bent one way or the other, including those owned by Mr. Murdoch and many of the mainstream outlets and online partisan grist mills. They really aren't that difficult to spot.
This from the seeded article is absolutely true:
Absolutely true. But we must overcome this somehow in todays world where most of what we consume now is more aptly characterized as "views", not "news". We can start by turning what little time we have for news consumption to less biased sources like Reuters, C-Span, Border Report, CRS Report, 1440 Newsletter, The Flyover, Daily Business Review, Investopedia, Independent Voter Network, The Economist, USAFacts, USA Spending, or the like. One can check potential source bias with Factcheck.org, or Media Bias Fact Check, both pretty reliable.
You will note that many sources used in this venue by many of the regulars, including the article seeded here, are highly bias one way or the other. And that's OK as long as we realize that, and then make it a point to seek alternate sources to either corroborate or rebut those statements made that sound highly partisan, incorrect, incomplete, or hyperbolic. That is the very point of a venue like NewsTalkers.
If one seeks only sources that support or confirm a predetermined bias, then that is when mis-information, dis-information, exaggeration and hyperbole can distort our perception of the truth. So if we are pressed for time, but want to know the truth, the raw facts without distortion, then we need to make sure we spend that time with the right sources and avoid the tendency for confirmation bias.
This applies if the outlets where one does the research are not confirmation bias sites. Unfortunately, the way we have "trained" our algorithmic helpers in the quest for truth may hinder our search for the same.
It is really difficult for me to trust websites, especially if they claim to be "Free of bias". I have been disappointed too many times.
This rings true. Many people go about their lives and have very little information about politics and players. They trust that things will basically remain the same and that the choice of PotUS does not really make much of a difference. Thus high prices is reason enough for change and change in a binary system means electing whoever is the nominee of the other party.
If Trump pursues his tariff idiocy, one wonders if Trump voters will actually connect the dots between Trump's actions and the new energized inflation they will be experiencing ... or will Trump propaganda shape their perceptions from the truth yet again.
To the first question...they sucked at connecting the dots in grade school so no
Second question....of course they will swallow the swill dripping from trmp's and his cronies' tongues
too stupid and too far from shore to jump over the side now ...
If the news is so damned important then why is it locked behind a paywall? The United States is actually a news desert where the news has become a commodity to be exploited for profit. So, the public only has access to the fringe hitters, like The New Republic. The New Republic is a lot of things but a source of objective, unbiased news it is not.
As to the complacency toward the Trump transition (from a decidedly left wing viewpoint) the idea that the country is rejecting Joe Biden is so ridiculous that it deserves to be scorned and shunned. But what can the public expect from a source like The New Republic; America's Pravda. The public has rejected the status quo that Joe Biden represents. The country has rejected the politics of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
The scolds, nags, and snobs of far left academia have lost their self endowed moral authority to brow beat, guilt trip, and gaslight the public. Blaming Rupert Murdoch will no longer hide the phoniness of that left wing moral authority. The public has recognized that the moral left only objects to be objectionable. That's not Biden's fault. But Biden is a rather clumsy, high profile practitioner of that status quo.
Because someone has to pay for it and advertising ain’t what it used to be. In spite of what Elon Musk would like, most people - even journalists - can’t afford to work for free. Of course, we have a news media corporation partly paid for by taxpayers, but Republicans have been trying to cut off that funding for years.
I don’t think so. I think it’s fair. He does not poll well. As much as I dislike Trump and his 3-ring circus, Biden hasn’t been a very good president. I think pretty much any Republican candidate would have beaten him this time around. That’s why it’s so tragic that none of them could beat Trump.
I agree. The sad reality is that a large plurality of the GOP electorate were Trump acolytes. That gave him early momentum in the primaries and the rest of the candidates could not stop the snowball effect as other GOP members jumped on the bandwagon.
How he was elected in the general election is indeed tragic ... to think that the electorate would put such a proven scoundrel in the most powerful office on the planet —while stupidly voting against their own best interests— is both sickening and concerning.
But, as you note, had the GOP been responsible, neither Trump nor Biden would have been elected.
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Since we are discussing news bias - am I correct that the source of this article The New Republic constantly leans left on its view of issues, its editorials and its reporting?
Just wondering
Indeed - See
But so does just about every source used here lean strongly one way or the other. It is the natural tendency of those who participate in online discussion boards to use such sources. The key is to recognize that and respond with less bias sources to the claims made or opinions rendered. And endeavor to use less biased sources or partisan language oneself. Please see my comment at 2.2 above.
Seriously: What do you think?
Is this article, from your POV, left leaning? Why do you think it is or is not? What do you think the point of the article is? Do you agree or disagree with the author's POV? Why?
Thomas, I know you were addressing Robert with this series of questions, but I'd like to offer my thoughts on these questions if that's OK?
Well since he was asking about left leaning bias of the source of this article, I'd tend to rely on both my experience with that source and the corroboration of my view offered by MBFC, as I linked above. I tend to think Robert is correct when he said what he thinks. See
It is certainly possible that an article from a known biased source could perhaps not be itself biased, but it is fairly easy to detect the bias in this piece. Certainly hyperbolic statements like, " He has nominated—almost but not quite literally across the board—unqualified extremists ", with very little supporting evidence is indicative of a significant partisan bias. In perusing the rundown and bios of the nominations in a recent Newsweek article HERE , or the Reuters piece HERE , I don't see any indication that they are almost all "unqualified extremists". It certainly sounds like some of them are younger than nominations we have seen under other recent presidents (not in itself a bad thing), but with a few exceptions their list of prior experience and positions held seem like a decent basis of qualification for the positions nominated. Some are certainly debatable.
The article also places the blame for the public being woefully misinformed squarely and completely on Rupert Murdoch and the right wing media machine, while completely omitting ANY culpability of other left-leaning sources in terms of spreading falsehoods and misinformation, or simply omitting inconvenient facts that don't support a narrative. Another member here pointed out an example of the mainstream media and left-wing media machine insisting on the fitness of Joe Biden for the office for months or years when it has been discovered that they knew better, and then he proved his lack of fitness on stage in a debate with Trump for all to see. Certainly that is not the only example of left leaning outlets pushing narratives that were not entirely true, or omitting facts in stories that did not fit a particular narrative. Perhaps not to the level that Fox News has over that last decade, but it is as plain as the nose on my face (which is plenty plain).
The point is clearly to discredit all of Trump's nominations and blame the "disastrous transition" (that hasn't even taken place yet) entirely on the right wing media machine for corrupting the electorate with lies and disinformation. That's the upshot right? It's simply a rephrasing of the headline of the article.
I disagree with the parts of the author's POV that are mired in irrational partisan tilt throughout much of the article, but there are parts I agree with, as I indicated previously.
Absolutely true. So why not be more truthful and honest and encourage people to look at less bias sources of information (neither tilting right nor tilting left)? For example why not encourage people who have limited time to learn more about the nominees from less biased sources rather than writing a hatchet piece with snippets of partisan characterizations of them ("auctioneer" as if that is all he's done, "anti-vaxxer" when the man has made it clear time and again that he is not an anti-vaxxer)? Perhaps encourage folks to just spend a little more time researching the qualifications of the nominees oneself, or as an author do a more in-depth study of each nominee and share it with one's readers sans the partisan tilt. Maybe we will find that some of them are indeed unqualified and we can implore our senators to block those nominations. But for goodness sake, an author shouldn't insult the intelligence of his/her readers by insisting that misinformation, disinformation, lies and omissions are completely the domain of the right-wing media alone, and the only reason for a grossly uninformed or misinformed electorate.