NEW YORK—All over America IKEA futons are groaning with the restless insomnia of journalists—tossing, turning, cursing the impotence of their melatonin capsules—burdened with the future of the Republic. Long nights of torment, and then . . .
Morning resolve! Before they’ve even microwaved their second Jimmy Dean Sausage Sandwich, they know that this will be the day of reckoning. They will fire up the Kia Sedona and take the long way to work, giving them more time to think about the epic 1,500 words that will make the difference between chaos and civilization.
Yes, they tell their wives, its time for my “Donald Trump is a Dickwad” column.
Let me make it clear here that I’m not talking about lesbian-rights vegans who organize fair-trade coffee boycotts at Maxwell House and agitate for medical marijuana in The Nation. Nor am I thinking of tweed-jacketed professors of sociology at Montana State submitting articles to the Journal of Spanish-American Diacritical Marks. Think-tank analysts at the Institute for Pan-Arab Non-Alignment are most certainly churning out white papers on why Donald Trump is a dangerous threat to the Maghreb treaty on fish hatcheries, but I’m not discussing them either. I’m not talking about intellectuals or activists or experts.
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No. I’m talking about the guy who enrolled at McNeese State in the nineties and fell into a deep reverence for Professor Rusty Naugahyde, the legendary teacher whose Newswriting 312 workshop was almost as inspirational as Lou “The News Is Sacred” Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Our starry-eyed undergraduate buys a safari jacket, takes an oath of objectivity and resolves never to be a member of a political party. After that it takes years of struggle to become the lead Metro columnist at the Lotus Tree, Kansas, Daily Arapaho, days spent chronicling the brutal fights over county bond issues needed to repair the Lost Frenchman Bridge. But now that he’s a 32nd-degree Mason and chairman of the Little League committee on maintenance and parking, he knows that it’s his responsibility, and his privilege, to tell the people of Lotus Tree that Donald Trump is a narcissistic disagreeable soulless callous rude arrogant authoritarian vicious egotistical vulgar braggart and megalomaniac, possibly a lunatic, definitely a psychopath, perhaps a fascist.
This goes against everything in the journalism rulebook. Elections are the ultimate on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. You get the League of Women Voters to interview each candidate and then you make sure every biography is exactly the same length as the one before it and the one after it. You never say that one campaign platform is better or worse than another campaign platform. You occasionally note “controversy” over “remarks perceived to be off color,” but you limit your commentary to observations like, “It now appears that Beaver County Sheriff Judd will bring his traditional voting bloc to the side of Culpepper, while District Judge Monahan will side with the Democratic challenger.” The last thing you ever do is suggest, much less state, that someone is a pathological liar, because there’s a strong likelihood that more than 50 percent of the people you write about in the course of a lifetime will be, in fact, pathological liars.
What is it about Donald Trump that makes journalists go insane?
