This past week, I read journalist Katy Tur's new book about the 2016 campaign, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History (Harper Collins, 2017). A correspondent for NBC News, Tur was the network's reporter who covered Donald Trump's campaign virtually from beginning to end, and was also sometimes the frighteningly specific target singled out by name when Trump criticized the press at his rallies.
For those who can't get enough about what happened and why, this is yet another book worth reading. It is not an overly long book, but it does require a certain degree of patience - partly because of the way it is written (going back and forth between the campaign and Election Day) and partly because of the author's persistent preoccupation with sharing so much of her own personal life with her readers.
On the one hand, her account exudes a certain elitist, globalist lifestyle - for example, in her preoccupation with finding time for yoga and exercise and wishing for something other than bread, dairy, and sugar to eat at the airport, not to mention her sense of loss at missing waking up in London and getting "a flat white at the hipster coffee shop around the corner." On the other hand, her account proves her to be an excellent reporter, who saw exactly what was happening (for example, "drawing unheard-of crowds a year before the election") and really seemed to understand it.
Thus she recognizes the way many Trump voters see their lives: "Your twenty-something can't find work. Your town is boarded up. Patriotism gets called racism. Your food is full of chemicals. Your body is full of pills, You call tech support and reach someone in India. Bills are spiking but your paycheck is not. And you can't send your kid to school with peanut butter. On top of it all, no one seems to care. You feel like you're screaming at the top of your lungs in a room full of people wearing earplugs."
In some ways, those sentences alone almost tell the story not just of this book but of this incredible campaign.
At the same time, she also calls attention to the difference between the people who showed up at Trump rallies and those at a Trump watch party at Ma-a-Lago: "These are the people slashing budgets and enhancing their own bottom line while the bottom line falls out of everyone else's lives."
As for the candidate himself, she also captures the forever self-hyping character of the candidate, long familiar to New Yorkers, and she quotes the famous New York reporter Jimmy Breslin on how Trump "uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle." One result is that "People seem drawn to Trump's rallies in the same way that they are drawn to a professional wrestling match, and as with a professional wrestling match, they seem divided between people who believe all they see and hear, and those who know it's partially a performance. the scariest thing about being at a Trump rally is that you don't know who believes it and who doesn't."
She reminds us too of his outright, direct invitation to Russia to interfere in the election and of his strange attraction to Vladimir Putin.
She shows how surprised even Trumpers were on election night - how, for example, earlier that day, Kellyanne Conway was already starting the post-election recriminations, complaining how "she didn't have the full support of the Republican Party."
But. most usefully, she captures the relationship between Trump and those who tried to tell the story. She notes, "We can tell the truth all day, but it's pointless if no one believes us." And she has interesting things to say about the different impacts of network and all-day cable news.
Distrust and dislike of the media are not new, and she sources some of its origin in the fact that journalism "tells us things about the world that we'd rather not know; it reveals aspects of people that aren't always flattering. But rather than deal with journalism, we despise journalism."
Covering the campaign, Tur experienced first-hand an extreme version of that despising of journalism - and journalists. Most of what her book tells us about what happened is, after all, not really new at this point. But it is powerful to read her personal accounts of what this campaign was actually like on the inside, and how appallingly it empowered people to behave. "Trump is crude, and in his halo of crudeness other people get to be crude as well." I wonder whether this may be one of the most lasting legacies of that incredible campaign!
Tur's account illustrates how a lot of Trump-supporters were otherwise ordinary citizens - "your coworkers and your neighbors," who would not typically engage in disreputable behavior. "But inside a Trump rally ... they can drop their everyday niceties. They can yell and scream and say the things they'd never say out loud on the outside."
But I wonder whether now and in the future more and more people will behave that way "on the outside" as well, as the passions unleashed by this campaign, unbounded by traditional restraints of shared citizenship in a common society with at least certain common values, and no longer restrained by religion or old-fashioned manners.
For those who can't get enough about what happened and why, this is yet another book worth reading. It is not an overly long book, but it does require a certain degree of patience - partly because of the way it is written (going back and forth between the campaign and Election Day) and partly because of the author's persistent preoccupation with sharing so much of her own personal life with her readers.
On the one hand, her account exudes a certain elitist, globalist lifestyle - for example, in her preoccupation with finding time for yoga and exercise and wishing for something other than bread, dairy, and sugar to eat at the airport, not to mention her sense of loss at missing waking up in London and getting "a flat white at the hipster coffee shop around the corner." On the other hand, her account proves her to be an excellent reporter, who saw exactly what was happening (for example, "drawing unheard-of crowds a year before the election") and really seemed to understand it.
Thus she recognizes the way many Trump voters see their lives: "Your twenty-something can't find work. Your town is boarded up. Patriotism gets called racism. Your food is full of chemicals. Your body is full of pills, You call tech support and reach someone in India. Bills are spiking but your paycheck is not. And you can't send your kid to school with peanut butter. On top of it all, no one seems to care. You feel like you're screaming at the top of your lungs in a room full of people wearing earplugs."
In some ways, those sentences alone almost tell the story not just of this book but of this incredible campaign.
At the same time, she also calls attention to the difference between the people who showed up at Trump rallies and those at a Trump watch party at Ma-a-Lago: "These are the people slashing budgets and enhancing their own bottom line while the bottom line falls out of everyone else's lives."
As for the candidate himself, she also captures the forever self-hyping character of the candidate, long familiar to New Yorkers, and she quotes the famous New York reporter Jimmy Breslin on how Trump "uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle." One result is that "People seem drawn to Trump's rallies in the same way that they are drawn to a professional wrestling match, and as with a professional wrestling match, they seem divided between people who believe all they see and hear, and those who know it's partially a performance. the scariest thing about being at a Trump rally is that you don't know who believes it and who doesn't."
She reminds us too of his outright, direct invitation to Russia to interfere in the election and of his strange attraction to Vladimir Putin.
She shows how surprised even Trumpers were on election night - how, for example, earlier that day, Kellyanne Conway was already starting the post-election recriminations, complaining how "she didn't have the full support of the Republican Party."
But. most usefully, she captures the relationship between Trump and those who tried to tell the story. She notes, "We can tell the truth all day, but it's pointless if no one believes us." And she has interesting things to say about the different impacts of network and all-day cable news.
Distrust and dislike of the media are not new, and she sources some of its origin in the fact that journalism "tells us things about the world that we'd rather not know; it reveals aspects of people that aren't always flattering. But rather than deal with journalism, we despise journalism."
Covering the campaign, Tur experienced first-hand an extreme version of that despising of journalism - and journalists. Most of what her book tells us about what happened is, after all, not really new at this point. But it is powerful to read her personal accounts of what this campaign was actually like on the inside, and how appallingly it empowered people to behave. "Trump is crude, and in his halo of crudeness other people get to be crude as well." I wonder whether this may be one of the most lasting legacies of that incredible campaign!
Tur's account illustrates how a lot of Trump-supporters were otherwise ordinary citizens - "your coworkers and your neighbors," who would not typically engage in disreputable behavior. "But inside a Trump rally ... they can drop their everyday niceties. They can yell and scream and say the things they'd never say out loud on the outside."
But I wonder whether now and in the future more and more people will behave that way "on the outside" as well, as the passions unleashed by this campaign, unbounded by traditional restraints of shared citizenship in a common society with at least certain common values, and no longer restrained by religion or old-fashioned manners.
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