Sleep Governing
What Trump’s frequent on-camera naps tell us about hypocrisy
We’ve all been there. Sitting in a meeting that should have been an email, just after lunch, in the back of a dark conference room as some suit drones on about the day’s business … and we find ourselves dozing off. It happens to the best of us, at least every now and then. Sometimes we catch ourselves in that uncomfortable space between awake and asleep and fight through it, and sometimes we have to suffer through the embarrassment of getting caught snoozing.
But none of us is the President of The United States, and our meetings don’t involve bombs, billions, and body counts. Yet Donald Trump simply can’t stay awake, not even with millions of lives hanging in the balance and every TV screen in the country broadcasting his public naps.
Normally, this is the point when I would throw legacy media under the bus for not focusing enough time or attention on this critical issue. But our media kind of has its hands full right now. Don’t get me wrong – legacy media sucks and we should kill it with fire and start over, but the folks comparing weak coverage of Trump’s somnambulist presidency to the daily and breathless coverage of Joe Biden’s real but far less urgent aging issues during his term, should stop. And here’s why:
Joe Biden was aging noticeably during his term as President. That’s real, and it was certainly fair to cover that in the press. But the biggest difference between that coverage then and Trump’s coverage today is that Joe wasn’t spending his waking moments lighting the world on fire, while Trump does nothing else. Joe became the victim of his own stability. Basically, because Joe was successful in returning a level of normalcy to our lives, our press, which had become accustomed to new outrages every day, had much less to write about. So they dug down into the “Joe is old” barrel deeper and deeper each day, in part because writers and journalists have to pay mortgages just like the rest of us, and also because America as a culture is now entirely addicted to outrage.
But that’s only part of the difference, and the lesser part at that. The larger part of the issue has to do with the Epstein class and their ownership of the media, and therefore their ownership of the message. As Trump’s brand of chaos has infected and polluted the body politic, his brand of business has poisoned our media. While legacy media’s relationship with the truth has always been strained, even in the best of times, today’s media has jettisoned any adherence to truth and journalistic ethics at all, leaving us with nothing but corporate owned click junkies who routinely ignore critically important stories in favor of reality TV clickbait. Both truth and importance are irrelevant when compared to ratings, which is why our legacy media is in love with Trump, not because he’s significant, but because he drives outrage, and therefore ratings.
Legacy media, even the parts of it that pretend to lean left, love Trump. They need him. He drives outrage, and that is great for the bottom line. So they will prop him up while he sleeps through cabinet meetings because they know that when he wakes up, he’ll do something awful and that awful thing will make them lots of money. And as long as the money keeps flowing, it won’t matter if Trump starts foaming at the mouth and wetting himself – our media will call it a negotiating tactic and simply move on, because you just don’t kill the golden goose, and when it comes to America’s outrage economy, Trump is certainly that.
More and more, Americans are becoming aware, not only of Trump’s rapidly diminishing mental state, but of the complicity of corporate media and its owners in normalizing his decline. But this realization isn’t happening nearly fast enough, because any moment now, he could wake up and start another war.
After all, war is great for ratings.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.