Shock and Politics
Has showbiz killed competency for good?
It’s hard to describe the levels of shock that America’s media appears to be experiencing right now around Donald Trump’s picks for his incoming administration. Network anchors are agog, podcast host spluttering, pundits perplexed… It’s like watching a chimpanzee engaging its reflection in a mirror unaware that it is that same ape waving back at it with the big, inane grin.
None of what has happened over the past two weeks should have come as a surprise. We’ve had years of Trump and his proxies warning us what a second Trump term would look like, and yes, it looks exactly like this. It’s just that large parts of the media (and a few GOP grandees) refused to take the warnings seriously. This is the reality they helped shape.
Did they honestly expect him to cherry-pick experts from Ivy League universities rather than the TV Guide? Was it ever likely that he’d choose some small bald expert in exotic forms of macroeconomics over some muscled, square-jawed TV chump with Christian nationalist tattoos and credible accusations of sexual assault?
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