Sam Smith - Been thinking lately about two of the worst presidents of my lifetime - Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan - and realizing that the thing they really had in common was their experience in show business - the art of turning reality into whatever you want.
It's not something we think a lot about these days because with the arrival of television, the Internet and social media it has become a major aspect of our lives. We live in a time when choosing a president based on their campaigns is as reliable as buying a health product based on TV ads.
I am reminded of this as I read a remarkable new book - The Divider - by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser that describes the Trump administration via an assortment of actual events, actions and words of those in charge delivered in the manner of journalism the way it was when I started out, which is to say just the facts. Today, even good channels like MSNBC are weak on data and high on opinion and speculation, far more interested in what you should think than what you should know.
And not even universities are helping us. For example, Ron DeSantis went to Yale as an undergraduate and left Harvard Law School cum laude. Listen to him now.
As I wrote in my book, Why Bother? back in 2001:
"Sometime around the middle of the 1980s I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy. This realization first came in the midst of a meeting held to discuss a worthy investigative journalism project. We had considered every aspect of the proposal save one and now, unbidden, a heretical question wiggled into my mind, never to leave: did the truth being sought really matter anymore? . . .
"We were, I had belatedly noticed, embarked upon an age that denied the existence of objective truth and, by extension, the value of any facts that might point to it. This was now an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, when everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of itself - news no less than anything else. As one frustrated television journalist explained, 'I used to be a reporter for the Washington Post; now I play one on TV ' "
We now have a ex-president fairly accused of the most treasonous behavior we have seen since the Civil War but even the admirable House investigators and the media covering them talk only of a ban from public service rather than prison time. Steal a car and see if you do as well. But remember, you're not in show business yet.
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