Davis Merritt: Surviving the age of vacuous celebrity

Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon, two insufferable self-styled geniuses who richly deserve one another, are doing the seemingly impossible: dragging American politics to a new level of depravity.

They may deserve each other, but does the United States deserve to have Trump and Bannon as major drivers of public events?

Arguably yes, because too many Americans have bought into or surrendered to vacuous celebrity, the keystone characteristic of a post-literate age that began at the turn of the 21st Century and has enabled out-sized public personas like Trump and Bannon. It was driven by the digital explosion and the emergence of an entrepreneurial class of billionaires and wannabes who value the number of clicks on their websites or Twitter accounts over the number of people who vote or the number of semi-literate kids who learn to read.

A free nation that puts itself in the hands of such narrowly-focused people — the Trumps, the Bannons, the Murdochs, the Zuckerbergs — cannot long endure, and perhaps does not deserve to do so.

Both Trump and Bannon are bent upon disrupting and rearranging the norms that American supremacy was built upon. It seemed for a year or so that they would be locked together in that effort, but no administration has room for two autocrats at the same time, and so they fell apart, loudly. Mirroring the tenor of the post-literate age, they called each other juvenile names for a few days before the pettiness was subsumed by the next crisis.

That would be freelance writer Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” A core theme of the book is that Trump is a case of arrested development, a mental and emotional juvenile stuck at age 13 — short attention span, fabricator, impulsive, wholly self-interested and devoid of empathy.

There’s little new to see in the book for those who have been paying attention, but Trump reaffirmed it all with a Twitter storm, including calling himself “a genius and a very stable one.” He slashed at Wolff (“total loser”), Bannon (“sloppy Steve … dropped like a dog…”) and, of course, any media coverage that challenged him on any point (“Democratic lap dogs.”)

And he foolishly had his lawyers send a cease and desist letter to the book’s publisher, threatening libel lawsuits if they did not cancel the publication. In response, the release date was moved forward by four days and the publisher gleefully began toting up the additional revenue Trump’s outburst will generate.

Trump is ignorant of many things, and the historic and constitutional intertwining of the law, the press and presidents is prominent among them. No one, with the possible exception of The Almighty, is fully libel proof. But presidents come close.

Every Trump predecessor had highly-charged books written about them, including authors accusing Bill Clinton of murder, Barack Obama of being born in Africa, Ronald Reagan being senile and George W. Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction. None of them gave those books extra life by mentioning them and all knew that, as major public figures, they had zero chance of sustaining a libel suit. (See New York Times v. Sullivan, etc.)

Americans need to learn important long-term lessons from what could be a truncated, and certainly will be a failed, presidency. Trump is doing his part to demonstrate why there can never be a repeat of 2016’s tragic national error.

This story was originally published January 9, 2018 at 4:05 AM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Surviving the age of vacuous celebrity."