Is Trump bashing worse than Clinton bashing?

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Back when I was in high school, it seemed like Clinton-bashing was a national pastime, especially in the media. I am of course referring to when Bill Clinton was President of the United States.
However, it seems that since Donal Trump has taken office, Trump bashing has far surpassed the level I recall from when Clinton bashing was popular.

Is it just me, or is he indeed getting it worse than Clinton ever did? I'm not saying whether it is deserved or not, just that it seems far worse than when Clinton was in office, let alone when Bush (either) or Obama were in office.

 

Part of the issue is quantitative, and part is qualitative. These are tightly--dare I say recursively--related. Everything is (bad) news because everything can be news.

First, the 'quantitative' element: There's so MUCH MORE MEDIA today than then, so we see bashing as worse when that may or may not be statistically so. When Bill Clinton was president, 24-hour cable news was in its infancy, blogs were a thing only a few weirdos did, and the internet was, indeed, just for researchers and porn. So people hated Clinton, but they did so privately; when journalists and commentators gave their opinion, they had fewer options to do so at fewer times during the day, and self-promotion was only technically an option. In 2017, everyfuckingbody is online all the time, so there is more content (because there is space for more content).

Related is the qualitative issue. Basically I would point to Marshall McLuhan. With larger content and larger competition comes more intensity of volume and velocity. We're in an exponentially louder and more crass media culture because it's always on, there's a very low bar to get eyeballs, and censorship is more or less dead. With more media comes an intensification of the effect of that media as we become numb to its effects. Kind of like shock absorbers on a car--you invent shock absorbers so you can go faster without getting bumped around. As you get used to going faster, you want to go even faster, and have to invent better shock absorbers or better roads or eventually flying cars. McLuhan called this "autoamputation" because we do it to ourselves.

Why is "the media" so crass? Because it's on all the time, because everyone is yelling, and so you have to yell louder and nastier to cut through. And because it's in your pocket now, rather than just in the box in your living room. There's a related issue of decorum here as well--our sense of decorum is contextual, and we're literally watching it change on our screens before us.

Let's remember that in the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had what... two weeks to get out in front of things before the narrative broke and the public got excited? Today if someone sneezes they have to issue a statement in the next hour or someone else has control of "the narrative".

Is it worse? Probably, but that's more because everyone has the agency to do it and because we see it everywhere, not because it never went on before. It just went on in living rooms and VAs and cublicles and only got bounced off of the people you knew directly your life. But nothing is private, nothing stays quiet long, and everyone is able to publicly react to everything immediately. We're also a forgetful race; after Obama was elected we very quickly disremembered all the nasty chimpanzee memes that that fanned the flames of so many conversations in these Alleys.

 

Honestly, it's getting a bit tiresome, but no one really cares about the news anymore. You're better off watching amateur youtubers than professional reporters these days.

 

The craziest thing here is that Trump himself is a product of that media environment. At the same time as Bill Clinton's rise, we had this curious inversion in American culture: With TMZ, Cable News, and Arsenio Hall, suddenly, all of our celebrities were expected to behave like 'real people' (So Bill Clinton can't act freaked out when someone asks him about boxers or briefs, and plays the sax on a nighttime entertainment show); and at the same time, 'real people' could become celebrities (the appearance of MTV's The Real World, the explosion of blogging platforms, and the recognition that 15 minutes of fame could become an entire entertainment career).

Trump is, weirdly, the perfect storm, the personification of this weird media/cultural change: the nobody celebrity who becomes somebody. The reality TV star. Sure, he's NY rich, but it's new rich... trash rich, the boor in a fancy suit who eats ketchup on his steak, jokes on mic about grabbing pussy, and has gilded furniture everywhere, who fires people on TV and pretends like it's substance. He's the purest performance of why we want our famous people to be just like us and why we all think we can be famous.

Trump is celebrity culture come to life. He is the television personified and voted into the big house. The only message is attention; the only constant is flickering colored lights. The only way to beat it is to turn it the fuck off.

 

I'd like to point out that while there was bashing of Bush and Obama, it did not seem to be nearly to the level that I recall for Bill Clinton, yet it seems to me that the amount of Trump-Bashing has far surpassed it.

Although I agree the man brings it on himself to a certain extent since they keep calling him out on lying as well as his own tendency to insult people like no other President I remember. For references, I barely remember Ronnie, as I was quite young when he was in office. I was a baby when he was elected.

 

Of course it has. There's more screens, more channels, more places to react on and to--so when we see more stuff, we react more, which gives them more to report, which we see, which we react to, which they report on, which....

It's a nasty cycle. And it doesn't help that Trump is more openly antagonistic of broadcast media. It's all very Freudian.

 

He wants to have sex with his mother?

 

Yeah, but everyone wants to have sex with his daughter...

 

My penis doesn't really care about her personality traits.

 

If his father is television, then his mother is us. And we're getting fucked.

 

It's politics, we're always getting fucked, that's how it works. Weren't you paying attention?

 

Being an east coaster... NJ is the butthole of America, Atlantic City is the butthole of NJ. Trump is the king of AC... which makes him the king of butthole America...

I’m mean seriously now guys... this clown is still in office?

 

There is also a simpler aspect to the whole thing. Trump simply takes a truly questionable amount of pride in what he does, right or wrong. It's like he likes to celebrate whatever he does out of arrogance or even narcissism, and if you remember your kindergarten/grade school years it's those type of children who get picked on the most. Now before you go comparing Trump to some victim of a childhood bullying the thing is that we're not actually talking about a physical child here, and a lot of these Trump bashings do tend to start out as honest criticism (since we are talking about other adults here).

Trump refuses to see them as such though and openly demonizes the media, acting like a petulant child. The breakdown of communications causes the media to take ever more sensational jabs at Trump.

It's basically an overblown case of people going "LALALALALALA I can't hear you!" at each other, and America is forced to watch.

 

Trump is a media genius and the media is falling in to his trap. They have been bashing him so hard and so relentlessly that people are tuning them out. It won't be long before he can stand on the White House lawn completely naked and no matter how loud the media bleats nobody will care.

 

Snook ..... I understand standing by your party.... but seriously? You are much smarter than that my friend.

I would love to see Pence takeover. I’m all for balancing things back after an 8 yr Dem run in the WH. Pence would tow the party line like a true Republican. Trump isn’t doing this. He is so out of touch with reality, as are most narcissist. It’s why we have a moron like SHS as the Trump mouthpiece. No one else wants the job. Just ask Spicer how that worked out for him...

 

Snook, do you work in Addison, IL? I just had a conversation at work that was remarkably along the same lines as what you just posted that maybe Trump is trying to get the public so sick of hearing about him that when he does finally do something really bad nobody will be paying attention anymore or care due to all the bleating about the relatively minor controversies.

 

Trump is neither the idiot the left think he is, nor the mastermind the right wish he was.