http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/corey-lewandowski-donald-trump-campaign-manager?CMP=share_btn_twCorey Lewandowski may be off the hook. But he didn't winJeb Lund
Donald Trump’s campaign manager won’t be prosecuted for battery. But how did we even get this far in the first place?
Friday 15 April 2016 11.57 EDT Last modified on Sunday 17 April 2016 12.42 EDT
Well, he didn’t lose. The Palm Beach state attorney has declined to prosecute Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who manhandled Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields on 8 March, allegedly bruising her in the process, after she tried to ask Donald Trump a question about affirmative action.
There are no winners here. Not Trump, nor his people, nor the conservative press.
Trump didn’t win. The Lewandowski incident was a sideshow, the first that didn’t work on any level. Until this point, outrages have merely focused the 24-hour media’s free-advertising on the candidate and made him appear like some relatable low-level maverick.
But Trump and his people played this one wrong. Lewandowski and Trump both denied that the alleged assault happened, in spite of video footage and a cluster of journalists around the incident. You can’t gaslight a videotape.
Ordinarily, who are you going to trust – me, or your lyin’ eyes? is a decent tactic to use against journalists when it comes to the trivial stuff: foreign, tax, social and environmental policy. You can make up junk about those issues because Beltway reporters will find some thinktank “scientician” to substantiate a claim that, say, sharks eat gorillas in the jungle. Hey, they objectively covered both sides of the issue; crisis averted.
But, perhaps emboldened by the fact that his insults of Fox News’ Megyn Kelly didn’t hurt him at the time, the Trump camp forgot that the one injustice journalists will not accept is one committed against their own. Those are real injustices, not just abstract things that happen somewhere else. There are real victims involved.
Trump’s security had already been goony enough to merit comment, but it was relegated to bellyaching on Twitter or vapid thinkpiece comparisons to Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, and in any case hostility for the press is a conservative staple. (And still many of Trump’s rallies passed without incident, akin to a baby boomer concert.) Trumpian gooniness was still more a thought exercise than an immediate problem involving meat and bone.
Lewandowski didn’t win either. He’d always seemed like a chronically aggro used car salesman. Now he seemed like one who’d try to sell you a Chevrolet reclaimed from the bottom of one of the Great Lakes by unbuttoning his jacket and resting his hands on his hips to reveal the 9mm in his holster before saying: “Now, what is it gonna take to put you in this primer-gray 1984 Citation?”
Lewandowski is now reportedly being downgraded within the Trump campaign hierarchy after the candidate had to waste time deflecting ugly attention and changing his story. His role as Prime Meathead is now more liability than menace.
Breitbart Media didn’t fare too well either. If anything, the incident exposed their slavish devotion to the Trump campaign. Despite a founding legacy of lies and contempt, Trump put Breitbart Media in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether their candidate or their reporter was wrong. They chose the latter, because nothing adds dignity to drinking from the toilet like letting someone kick you in the rear-end while you do it.
Underlying all this, of course, was the decades-long conservative escape-hatch excuse that the media lies about everything. What had once been a useful tool for wishing away anything inconveniently addressed by mainstream media – like recorded history – turned on its most frequent users. Breitbart was essentially forced to say: “Everyone in the media lies, including us”, while conservative journalism-ish outlets had to make the argument that everyone was lying but them.
Ordinarily, this would make for some amusement for the mainstream media, but they didn’t win either. Years of quailing “gotta hear both sides!” reporting created a space in which the Trump campaign and its adherents could claim that there was another side to a videotape of an assault.
Every dead-soul ratings-humping segment on 24-hour media on which Trump was allowed to lie paved the way for this moment.
Every gutless wad who decided that pushback with the truth was too much hassle or would lose viewers, every invertebrate meat sack who decided that every take deserved an audience and that facts could be counter-programmed sent us careening into this ditch.
We’re in a place where Donald Trump and his feral bullet-headed stooge could claim something caught on tape didn’t happen because a lot of people decided a long time ago that objective reality is just the null outcome of two opinions colliding with each other mid-screen.
The only person who won anything here was Michelle Fields, who, at the very least, won a moral victory. Too bad that, given the circumstances, she has very little reason to celebrate.
