Psst. Over here. Over here.
You want to hear a trade secret?
The bulk of journalists who cover the so-called “halls of power” in Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, London, Paris and beyond prefer routine over spontaneity.
You see, predictability is easy. It’s comforting because most capital cities are mundane places where boring is not only an agreeable fact on the ground, but also a prevailing state of mind.
That is why the overwrought reaction to the lively dressing-down US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was so in keeping with the White House press corps’ stubborn fondness for the veneer of practised civility over the impulsive truth.
Unlike so many other pundits and columnists who rushed instantly and almost universally onto the familiar cable news networks to express their disbelief and shock over the “embarrassing spectacle” of America’s tactless commander-in-chief “humiliating” his “wartime hero” guest, I was mesmerised by the remarkable scenes unfolding live on my computer screen.
Rather than watching an orchestrated, forgettable set piece featuring smiling foreign dignitaries and heads of state visiting an ever-so-polite president in the Oval Office, it was refreshing to witness a blatant exhibition of the crudeness, rudeness, and brutishness of power politics that usually occurs far, far away from the cameras and, hence, reporters and the public.
They will be loath to admit it, but the sea of scribes who stood like mute mannequins while Trump, Vance, and Zelenskyy traded rhetorical blows for several bruising rounds, expected another tame, pedestrian day at work like so many other tame, pedestrian days at work.
They know the predictable role they play during these choreographed pantomimes.
Step 1: Go to the Oval Office.
Step 2: Record the foreign head of state saying nice and sweet stuff about the US president.
Step 3: Record the US president saying nice and sweet stuff about the foreign head of state.
Step 4: Report that the US president and the foreign head of state said nice and sweet stuff about each other.
Step 5: Later, call sources who say that, in private, the US president and the foreign head of state did not say nice and sweet stuff about each other.
Step 6: Report, quoting anonymous sources, that despite having said nice and sweet stuff about each other publicly, privately, truth be told, the US president and his grinning guest cannot stand one another.
That was, in effect, the formulaic arc of much of the reporting after French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made their pilgrimages to Washington last week to massage and mollify Trump.
True to his unorthodox nature – to put it charitably – Trump and his clawing vice president – upended that traditional script, either by design or instinctively, with Zelenskyy.
Reporters and pundits came away confused and disoriented. This is not supposed to happen the way it has happened, they moaned – disappointed, apparently, at having to act as journalists rather than stenographers.
A lot of the hyperbolic outrage being directed at Trump is the product not so much of what he said to Zelenskyy – since his antipathy towards Ukraine and its president has been plain – but how and where he said it: in the Oval Office before TV cameras.
That’s what America’s genteel chattering class considers so rank and appalling – Trump did his berating and bullying openly, when more discreet and “diplomatic” presidents do their berating and bullying behind closed doors.
The glaring irony is that American networks and the personalities who populate them leverage broadcasting “live” to draw audiences tempted by the urgency of now and the prospect that, at any moment, real, not manufactured, drama and conflict might erupt.
Newsworthy drama and conflict did erupt in the Oval Office on Friday, but instead of embracing it, those same networks and personalities recoiled from it and labelled it as unseemly and unbecoming of the office of the presidency and the United States itself.
Here’s a bit of news for the yapping ostriches:
Aside from lying with a pathological ease and ordering others to kill without a scintilla of regret or remorse, being rude, crude, and a brute is a job prerequisite of any US president – Democrat or Republican.
Trump is not the exception. He is the rule.
The administration of pretty boy, Harvard-trained President John F Kennedy enlisted the Mafia to try to murder Cuba’s young and charismatic leader, Fidel Castro, and gave its tacit approval to a coup in early November 1963 that saw the overthrow of South Vietnam’s government and the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was a six-foot, four-inch boor who physically assaulted much smaller public servants who angered him.
In 1965, a livid Johnson summoned Canada’s diminutive prime minister, Lester Pearson, to Camp David for a stiff talking to after the Noble Peace Prize winner denounced the US bombing of North Vietnam.
Johnson reportedly grabbed Pearson by the shirt collar, twisted it, and lifted the prime minister by the neck, shouting: “You pissed on my rug.”
That same year, an enraged Johnson shoved then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve William Martin against a wall for having raised interest rates against the president’s wishes.
“Boys are dying in Vietnam, and Bill Martin doesn’t care,” Johnson thundered.
That avatar of presidential probity, Richard Nixon, ordered the CIA to block, thwart, undermine, and destabilise Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
And Nixon’s obscene anti-Semitism makes Trump’s fiery remarks to Zelenskyy seem rather temperate, in comparison. He complained on tape that Washington “is full of Jews” and that “most Jews are disloyal”.
Whether the wailing pundits and TV personalities are prepared to acknowledge it or not, Trump was right. The sensational Oval Office fireworks made for great television.
This time we were privy to the astonishing, history-making words and deeds of another “gangster” president in real-time, as it happened.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
