America badly needs to take the entertainment out of politics

It’s approaching that time of year when one of the best jobs in journalism is surely that of a football reporter. Once the season reaches its end and there are fewer twisted groins, popped kneecaps, or ruptured Haalands (which might not be a real injury) to obsess over, football pundits resort to reporting rumours that player X will join team Y on a contract worth Zillions. It’s perfect filler, especially over the slow summer months. It looks like news, reads like news, and fulfils the same expectations as news. Except most of it isn’t news. It is all fiction made up to fill dead space. 

Yet the real genius of transfer speculation is that nobody ever remembers it. Come the new season, all the rumours merge since the papers will have printed so many. Nobody is called out for their poor predictions. It’s a journalist’s dream: consequence-free reporting.

Around 5 am on Wednesday, I began to wish that the same might be true of political reporting in the light of the dullest Super Tuesday in living memory. 

In previous years, Super Tuesday would usually mark some meaningful development in a presidential race. It’s usually the day when the field is narrowed, and we begin to have a sense of where the real contest will be fought. Back in 2020, the race was still between Biden, who won 10 states, Sanders who won four including California, and (notionally) Michael Bloomberg who won American Samoa, whilst Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard were still in the race. In 2016, the Republican race was still being fought by Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, as well as John Kasich and Ben Carson.

This year, however, Super Tuesday marked the end of the process, making it sobering to watch so many former senators, congresspeople, aides, speechwriters, editors, journalists, TV lawyers, and professional pundits trying to fill dead space as either Trump or Biden won year another state with another thumping majority.

Did I say sobering? Perhaps I meant soul-crushingly awful listening to pundits extrapolate a few votes in Texas and conclude it’s time to fill sandbags for the defence of Warsaw. 

If you’ve ever loved the sport of US politics, you will probably be finding very little to enjoy in the 2024 season. For all the talk of what Trumpism means, it’s essentially the negation of politics; the wilful denial of reality that makes meaningful debate impossible. How can you talk policy with a man who says nothing, and that’s doubly true when you’re a technocrat such as Joe Biden who finds his feet when mired in detail? 

What America badly needs – and the Democrats would dearly love – is to take the entertainment out of politics, and with it the sting of populism. It needs a series of long and boring debates between the candidates on each of the main policy areas, hosted by experts in the field. But that’s not going to happen. We’ll be lucky this time to get a head-to-head between the candidates. Politics has become a form of artillery bombardment. Dirt is thrown from a distance and each side hopes some of it will stick. As Alexander Nazaryan anticipates over at The Daily Beast, prepare for a season of “nastiness, bluster, and deception; of bad punditry and worse political clichés; days of anxiety and fear; days of rage.”

It certainly left Super Tuesday a parody of what Super Tuesdays used to be; a pastiche of elections past when people used to have policy disagreements and the worst they’d ever say of their opponent was that they believed in taxing too much or too little. Even the dark days of Watergate are beginning to feel like a high watermark of meaningful politics. Nixon, for all his sins, did at least believe in something and didn’t run a campaign predicated on “America is critically broken in some unspecified way which I will fix though unspecified means” which we all know means “America isn’t critically broken but let’s pretend it is so I can declare victory within a month of regaining the White House”.

The current situation was perhaps best summed up by Emily Maitlis’s already notorious interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday. After offering some standard replies by which she offered Trump her unequivocal support, Greene did at least let the mask slip when she responded to a question about conspiracy theories by telling Maitlis to “f**k off”. 

And, yes, even reporting this sounds crass, which is why it might not make many headlines. It’s too shocking to report. Yet perhaps it was also one of the few moments of real honesty in this entire farce. Those two words perfectly summarise where American politics is, right now: with open hostility between two sides who do not intend to find any common ground.

It leaves journalism in a difficult place, which one perhaps sensed in Maitlis’s question to Greene. How can you hold people to account when they refuse to accept some shared assumptions about reality? This is reflected in the coverage across the news networks where pundits too often resorted to ungrounded transfer speculation of their own, only instead of players between clubs, it’s bullets between nations. And, sadly, none of it is without real-world consequences, generating a climate of hyperbole that has the world spooked. Will NATO survive another Trump term? Will he abandon Ukraine? Will Russia take that as an opportunity to grab even more land? Should Poland be worried? Should you and I be learning to fire an assault rifle? 

These eventualities are certainly possible. But probable?

The problem is that bold and bleak predictions sell. No sooner had Nikki Haley suspended her campaign on Wednesday than Liz Cheney ramped up the rhetoric by declaring that America has “eight months to save our republic”. A rapacious media was soon all over the story. Trump himself has proved there’s plenty of mileage in predicting the end of the world, but had Cheney been a little savvier, she’d have chosen a more commercial timeframe. Perhaps “Ten Years to Save The West” (™ Truss Worldwide Industries) would have been a far more cynical claim, knowing that in 10 years nobody will point out if they’re ultimately proven wrong.

In fairness to Cheney, the next eight months might well feel like ten years. Now the phoney war is over, the real politics should begin. Only, this time, it’s not clear what that will look like. It certainly won’t look like Joe Biden’s attempt to grab the news agenda, this week, by introducing a cap on what banks can charge customers for credit card late fees which normally cost Americans $32 and will now be limited to $8.

And that might be what this election is coming down to. What’s worth more: the real $24 that Joe Biden is putting in an American’s pocket, or the cost of an imaginary World War 3 that’s entirely in Donald Trump’s head?

@DavidWaywell

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