CHICAGO — Donald Trump, victim of the shutting down of free speech, after he had to cancel a Chicago rally over security concerns. Or should we say: Donald Trump, PR genius who garnered even more breathless headlines over the weekend than anyone could have expected?
Either way, all the people biting their knuckles about the coming waves of Trump-induced violence need to regain some perspective and look in the mirror for a sure-fire solution.
Let’s start with the news coverage that followed the cancellation of Trump’s Chicago speech:
“Donald Trump’s Heated Words Were Destined to Stir Violence, Opponents Say,” “The Chicago Anti-Trump Protest Was Only the Beginning” and, the most sensational of all, Talking Points Memo’s “Someone Will Die.” There was the poor-Donald-was-muzzled angle, too, with several variations on “Free Speech Trumped in Chicago.”
Oh, the humanity!
It’s incredible that anyone could possibly take this supposed turning point in the Trump campaign — the one that single-handedly reinforces Trump’s angered working-class whites’ sense of marginalization by liberal America and the media — as anything other than the reality TV show setup it so clearly is.
We’re really supposed to believe that Trump planned a speech on a college campus on the southside of Chicago where the student population is nearly 50 percent nonwhite without expecting to incite protesters and supporters into shutting the whole thing down? (The Chicago Police Department denied having recommended to Trump that the rally be halted, putting the dramatic cancellation solely on the candidate.)
You know what would have happened if Trump had picked a more neutral venue for his stump speech? Not much.
In fact, there wasn’t nearly as much coverage of Trump’s speech in Central Illinois, delivered last Sunday, during which he said, “Your taxes are through the roof, your companies are leaving you. You have nothing going.”
Ouch, this is 100 percent true. But the fact that the Midwest has been hollowed out by a manufacturing base that has fled the country isn’t nearly as easy to turn into national news outlet click bait.
By canceling the Friday night speech, Trump won a weekend’s worth of news coverage, social media chatter, angst-filled think pieces and first-hand-accounts of the incident.
Trump got to claim that he was, effectively, shouted down by an unruly mob, his acolytes got to complain that the left deprived them of their right to assemble, and his detractors got to act as though roving bands of Trump supporters are going to be emboldened into acts of mass white-on-minority violence.
And you know what? People are eating it up. With the Super Bowl and the Oscars in the rearview mirror, we’ve reverted to our regularly scheduled national pastime: pique and social-media-fueled outrage.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it succinctly a few weeks ago: “The reality TV element in Trump’s campaign is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in 2008. Presidential politics has long had an escalating celebrity component, a cultish side that’s grown ever-more-conspicuous with time.”
What else might we have expected of a candidate who is a professional entertainer and a page-view-driven media that thrives on a society that seems to care more about spectacle than substance?
It’s effortless to tweet your dislike of a politician or even head down to a local campaign stop to see what all the commotion is about. It’s far more time-intensive to canvass a neighborhood on behalf of a candidate, volunteer for a phone bank or train to be an election judge and then drag yourself out of bed to set up a polling place at 5 in the morning on Election Day.
Anger is easy. Those who are really committed to ensuring their vision for the best next president aren’t getting distracted by the updated-by-the-second rage machine that is the Internet, they’re spending their weekends registering people to vote, helping people get their driver’s licenses or practice for an upcoming U.S. citizenship test.
Donald Trump is a spectacle that feeds his fans’ love and his detractors’ hatred but we need not buy into his carefully constructed carnival of anger. Trump is only one part of a media-propelled outrage apparatus that is making money from sowing fear among people who might otherwise just engage in meaningful, face-to-face conversations.
Why not give that a try?
Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.
