Donald Trump’s Tuesday night speech was received rapturously by cable news anchors eager to restore the political certainties that Trump’s rise upended. As Slate’s staff across the political spectrum from Jamelle Bouie to William Saletan observed, their response was baffling bullshit—when the speech includes an office to report crimes committed by immigrants, no tone or turn of phrase is going to make things “presidential.” Wednesday night, Seth Meyer took a look at the Trump’s disgraceful speech and the even more disgraceful response from cable news.
Meyer ably dissects the substance of Trump’s address, which he calls “heavy on empty promises and light on substance,” while offering the president’s trademark “empty solutions to nonexistent problems.” But the montage he put together of anchors praising Trump’s presidential tone is just horrifying to watch, none more so than Chris Wallace saying, “I feel like tonight, Donald Trump became the president of the United States.” “I bet there are some Muslims and undocumented immigrants that would tell you he became president back in fucking January,” Meyers says, before showing anchors spewing out the same myth of a “different” Donald Trump during one of his many campaign resets.
It’s just baffling where cable news anchors get the pathological need to believe that giving Trump more power—as much as anyone on the planet—will somehow make him grow up. But at a certain point, the root cause matters less than just stopping the bleeding. So here’s a modest proposal: Give Aaron Sorkin the same deal James Cameron got to build that new Avatar attraction at Disney World. Let him build a fantasy island where stentorian old actors play noble politicians, the truth is always somewhere in the middle, and compromise will save the day. Model it after Boys or Girls State, let the fake presidents set fake policy that affects fake citizens, and send these boneheads to report droolingly over the exquisite tone of the whole proceedings. Meanwhile the rest of the country—the people who know that when someone tells you to fuck off, it doesn’t matter what their tone of voice is—can try to make the real world a better place. Or at least slightly less awful.
