My only complaint with Sean Spicer is that he has always given the White House press corps more credit than they deserve. Like uncivil students who take advantage of a class lecturer who gives the class some leeway for give-and-take, they take advantage of his good nature by trying to argue and filibuster.
We know this because these gives-and-takes make for popular television on Spicer’s popular daytime television show, The Daily White House Briefing. So the outtakes from these shows provide the fodder for the next day’s internet news universe, almost always mocking Spicer.
My constant reminder to Mr Spicer (I’m older than his boss) is that this news universe, their universe, is now much smaller than perhaps even the White House knows. This is largely because of their own profligacy with the facts, and “criminally” exposed to the public, by Sean’s boss. So, today they are teetering on the precipice of irrelevancy, at least among the people who put Sean Spicer in that job in the first place.
On this account, everything is demographics, or as modern pollsters call them, “unfortunate truths”.
If I want to know what Sean Spicer said on any given day, I just visit any left-leaning news aggregator, Yahoo! News Home Page my choice as the best for trolling anti-Trump, anti-Republican, anti-God, anti-America and pro-Big government authoritarian and pro-Democrat news analysis. Yahoo was read-in enough to know exactly when to break from Russia-neutral to Russia-bad in November, 2016.
Sean Spicer needs to know just how small this world really is. They are almost all pro-Left, usually heavier on one cause than others, but generally aligned. I’ll wager that less than half voted last time, and that a measurable percentage have never even bothered to register. They are, after all, citizens of the world. They are not American in the strictest spiritual sense. America is just their beat. In their eyes they belong to a much larger global community.
Again, the math is simple. Donald Trump is the people’s choice, nearly 50-50 by vote count, and 60-40 by state-count. He got that job by promising the people to do, or try to do, certain things. He never once stood up and told them what they needed, or what was good for them. People generally like not being talked down to, and this endeared Trump to them. The trick to understanding Donald Trump is that he really does work for those people. His voters. They are his principal moving part. So while some say Trump is wearing demagoguery and populism on his sleeve, it is more likely that Mr Trump and his 60% of the people are simply on the same page. Only a clairvoyant would know otherwise, and we all know how that has worked for the Left.
As I have written elsewhere, citing Billy Graham who once said that if people are going to say that Jesus is the reason for Christianity, it would be nice if they would mention His name from time to time, there is a putative conservative media out there, along with some hardcore conservative opinion analysis; radio, blogs, newsletters, but rarely do they mention this very essential nature of conservatism, the people, and in this case, their special relationship with this president.
It would be helpful if Sean Spicer kept this in mind, for every time he steps out onto the stage at his press briefing he has to know that the vast majority of the group assembled there are totally antithetical to this fundamental relationship between Trump and “the people”. And it would be fruitless to educate them otherwise. If you sat them all down and explained it to them as one might a small Sunday School Class, holding up cardboard pictures to help sell the notion, they would still reject it…in part because they have no idea what you were talking about in the first place.
That’s the fly in the buttermilk, isn’t it? In order to explain fundamental Americanism to the modern media you would go back to 5th Grade thinking and reasoning just to establish basic premises, both moral and social, only to find out that they are all foreign to those notions, which most of us over 5o had always assumed were part of America’s primordial soup.
American is good? Liberty is good? Hey, everybody knows that.
Well, no, they don’t, it seems. Not anymore.
Besides some writing skills and purported journalistic talent, most media people arrive at their various appointed roles in the trade through a series of plateaus that are generally leftish in orientation. Otherwise, they’d still be reporting the car wreck on 5th and Main in the local Thunderstorm or on Channel 6.
So, when Sean Spicer strolls in to that room he has to know that in soul and spirit, not just the wallet, the people assembled before him represent, with full hearts, only the interests of the people who voted against Donald Trump.
What Sean needs to keep in mind is the basic math, that our side is bigger than their side, and while the Media are beating their collective heads against the wall, along with the Democrats, so far they have come up with nothing to make their side larger, or to make Trump’s side smaller.
Historically the Media’s principal role has been the latter. The Democrat Party’s principal role has been to broaden their base, except, by having run off a quarter of it, principally working white men, the term “breadwinner” banished entirely from the Party lexicon, plus others who are just tired of fifty years of lies, and are now faced with a crackdown on the Latino replacements they planned to fill in behind the departing Gringos, the Democrats are left offering a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with 30-day old bread as their best offering to increase the size of their base, which is beginning to take on the looks of a soup kitchen than a national party.
My own view is that Sean is way too kind with the assembled media, whose principal role is to diminish Trump support. With the voters themselves, they have little hope, no matter how horrific the misinformation they can dig up. No one that matters believes them. The media now has to go two lengths to be believed, and they have never had to do that before. Most don’t know how.
Trump voters don’t read them, except, perhaps like me, just to see what they’re saying. And I’m sure it’s dispiriting for all the Yahoo Home Page contributors who count the for-and-against comments from readers, to take note of the increase in “against-comments” since the election, not to mention the large difference in the quality of those comments. Some trolls have stopped commenting (“a soft answer turneth away wrath”, Prov 15;1) and some sites have even stopped allowing comments.
So the media’s only resort to reduce Trump’s influence then is to try to lean on the historical squishiness of Republican spines in Congress.
Now some of us out here are urging people who voted for Trump to keep the pressure on their Congressmen about just whose side we expect them to be on. I hope the White House isn’t missing this signal.
But in bracing the spines of Republicans, I think Sean Spicer can play a larger role, by sending a clear signal every day, reaffirming just where the Media stands with Mr Trump and the People. By cutting off argument completely, as Donald Trump did masterfully once or twice on his own dime, remind them, in clipped ripostes or straight line talk, just where they stand with both the President’s and his principal moving part. Remind the Media we all know where the media’s loyalties lie.
Someone recently said that the Republicans have for so long been the party of No, they don’t know how to be the party of Can-do. While likely true, they can be convinced to change their tune if shown a 2 x 4 or a rope (metaphorically speaking mind you) which only their voters can deliver. The American political process guarantees this one demographic fact; as long a elections remain free, the genuinely aggrieved citizenry will always outnumber their oppressors.
This should be easy, Mr Spicer.
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VASSAR BUSHMILLS
Contact: vbushmills@yahoo.com
Publications: Famous Common People I Have Known and Other Essays
Donald Trump, the Common Man and the American Theology of Liberty
(Both books in Kindle format only, Publishers and agents welcome, as both need to revised)
Support: Yes, I’ve never been paid a nickel to write.
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