Saturday's postcard, Ramiro's questions and stories from a tumultuous week

October 19, 2024

Woods at Wallace Falls state park in the North Cascades

A Range for Every Emotion

In my basket of gratitude is the fact that I live in a state proficient at mail-in voting. Not only have I filled out my ballot, but I’ve already mailed it in, before it had gotten any deeper amid the layers of notes and documents on my desk. Not that you need my advice on this, but please remember to vote. In Washington you don’t need a stamp.

This year’s presidential election matters more than any of the others elections in my lifetime, and arguably more than any federal election since the last civil war. Honestly, it feels like we are on the verge of the next American civil war, what with a convicted but not yet sentenced ex-President calling his opponents and other critics “sick”—a greater threat to the country than our foreign adversaries—and musing aloud about using the U.S. military to suppress dissent if he takes power again. At campaign rallies he promises “retribution” to his supporters, who cheer when they hear it. He is not campaigning to bring us together, but to pull us even further apart.

When asked, I predict Trump won’t win either the popular or electoral college vote but that he’ll get close enough to claim victory the night of November 5th—as rural counties in swing states pile up votes for him before votes from urban centers get tabulated. He will then bellow about the election being “fixed” against him. There’s nothing new about this ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ equation. He will not except defeat. He will encourage obstruction and violence from his followers, and hope the Supreme Court will ultimately intervene, as it did in Bush v. Gore, to hand him the reigns.

My plan for this edition was to suggest reading and listening material. By Wednesday morning, I thought I had a solid list. But then it was upended by ensuing events. (If you follow politics, we’re all drinking from a fire hydrant this month.)

Ramiro Gonzalez delivering his questions to Donald Trump at Univision’s town hall event.

“A Day of Love”

Wednesday evening a man I’d never heard of got the opportunity to ask the ex-President a question during a forum organized by the Spanish-language Univision network. His name is Ramiro Gonzalez, a 56-year-old construction worker from Tampa. Gonzalez, a former Trump voter, disclosed he was disillusioned but said he wanted to give Trump the opportunity to win back his support. I assume many of you have already viewed or read about the encounter, but here’s what Ramiro Gonzalez said to Trump:

“I am a Republican, no longer registered. I want to give you the opportunity to try to win back my vote. Okay. Your, I'd say action and maybe inaction during your presidency and the last few years, sort of, you know, was a little disturbing to me. You know, what happened during January 6th and the fact that, you know, you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol. Coronavirus, I thought we were, the public was misled during coronavirus and that many more lives could have been saved if we would have been informed better. And also people in your administration who don't support you. I'm curious how people so close to you and your administration no longer want to support you. So why would I want to support you? If you would answer these questions for me, I would really appreciate it and give you the opportunity. You know, your own vice president doesn't want to support you now. Thank you.”

Trump’s answer rambled, but here’s the first and most salient part of it, starting with the unsurprising attempt to downplay the number of former top Trump aides who say he’s unfit to hold the office.

“So the people that don't support a very small portion, we have a tremendous about 97% of the people in the administration support me. But because it's me, somebody doesn't support, they get a little publicity. The vice president, I disagree with him on what he did. I totally disagreed with him on what he did. Very importantly, you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn't come because of me. They came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election and that's why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken strong action. Ashley Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn't have guns. The others had guns, but we didn't have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walk down. This was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows. But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions. It's like hundreds of thousands. It could have been the largest group I've ever spoken before. They asked me to speak. I went and I spoke.”

“A day of love,” Trump said. Yeah, right on—that’s what all of us felt watching it unfold that day, with the noose for the vice-president, the battering and crushing of the Capitol police, members of Congress fleeing or, like Ted Cruz, hiding with his Republican allies in a supply closet. A veritable riot of “love.” How could we have missed it?

It matters (to me) that Ramiro Gonzalez is from Florida; that he’s a construction worker, a former Trump voter, who was asking his questions in a second language. That took courage. His words were real in the way the media coverage of Trump most often fails to be. So much of it—to comply with the media culture of both-siderism—is bubble-wrapped with reportorial dilution to take the edge off the lies and the bluster. But Gonzalez was both polite and straightforward when he put his questions to Trump. Though he was understandably nervous, his comportment was in stark contrast to Trump’s “day of love” nonsense.

“With All Due Respect…”

The other event that intervened Wednesday was that part of the much-anticipated Kamala Harris-Fox News interview in which Harris vigorously confronted Fox host Bret Baier about the set-up to one of his questions. The key moment came about 20 minutes into the interview when Baier asked Harris why—if Trump is “as bad about as you say”—polls show he is still popular with roughly half the nation’s likely voters.

“Are they stupid?” Baier pressed.

Harris ducked the punch, and without hesitation brought up the steady pace at which Trump demeans, belittles and diminishes Americans in his campaign speeches. He voice rising, she said: “He’s the one who talks about an enemy within, an enemy within, talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.”

Baier quickly cut to a video clip from a Trump event that Fox had hosted earlier in the day. It was not a clip of Trump talking about the “enemy from within” but one of him denying that he was the one threatening people, and lambasting Harris and the Democrats—“they’re the ones doing the threatening.”

To use a baseball analogy, it was fastball in the middle of the plate, and the vice president didn’t miss it:

Harris: “Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’ that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed.”

Baier struggled to cut her off, finally adding: “I’m telling you that was the question that we asked him.”

She then cut him off, with this:

“You didn’t show that and here’s the bottom line. He has repeated it many times and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy and in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America.”

The epilogue to the clash came two days later when Baier announced, on air, that he’d made a mistake; that due to a video editing error a Fox clip of Trump making his threats to use the military against his opponents was left out of the set up to the question he asked.

Ironies abound. One of which is that discovery in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit revealed that some of the most ardently pro-Trump personalities at Fox, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, were so disturbed by the assault on the Capitol that they were texting the White House trying to get Trump to shut it down. The Dominion case also illuminates the social cancer in the Fox News business model. The network rakes in millions in profits by posing as a journalism outlet—a scheme that remains profitable even after dispensing nearly a $1 billion to settle the Dominion defamation case. It underscores the Faustian bargain between Fox and its viewers—their loyalty is what delivers the profits, and viewer loyalty depends on reporting and commentary slanted not toward what’s true, but bent toward what the audience wants to hear, so loyal Fox viewers don’t drift away to even more extreme, right-wing media outlets. When you think about it—a truer answer to Baier’s question “are they stupid?” is “perhaps maybe not, but they’re getting all their news from Fox.”

Under the protections of the First Amendment, Fox and its brethren amplifiers in right-wing media have badly injured American democracy. They’ve also exposed how complicit their consumers are in creating and enabling a culture of disinformation that is legal, but profoundly unethical.

—tjc

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