A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.
Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.
I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.