In the final days of Trump, it’s important to keep an ear to the ground

When a deadly insurrection broke out last week at the US Capitol, I was in the middle of a shift, attempting to cover the latest culture-related news in the US. Footage of rioters storming the building and breaking windows started surfacing on social media. I turned to my husband and asked him a question that only surfaces three to four times a year at most: “Should we put the TV on?”

Like most millennials, I watch very little live television. Ninety per cent of the time, the set in our living room serves as a relay for streaming platforms – because Bridgerton deserves to be enjoyed on something larger than a laptop screen. Pre-pandemic, when I still worked in a newsroom, at least one cable network would be on at all times, providing live coverage of the day’s developments. Since I started working from home almost a year ago, that has changed. The TV only comes on for major, history-defining news events (which, in 2020, and now 2021, still happen more often than average).

When the Jacob K Javits Convention Center was turned into a temporary hospital for Covid patients in April, the TV was on. When massive protests broke out across the US against systemic racism and police brutality in June, the TV was on. When the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, the TV was on. When Donald Trump loyalists stormed the seat of the legislative branch of the US government, the TV was on too. And when the House voted to impeach that same president for the second time last night? Of course, the TV was on as well.

In the week since the insurrection, I have been following, and often writing about, television coverage of the event and its aftermath. CNN’s anchors have expressed shock and anger – understandably so. In a recent segment, Anderson Cooper condemned Trump’s “greed and his grievance”, as well as his lack of “sense of responsibility”, and a lack of “real reckoning” at the White House. A frustrated Don Lemon played an absurd Fox News interview in which Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley discussed Trump’s purported masculinity, and told Gidley in his own segment to “shut up”. “I’ve heard a lot of pathetic things from this White House,” Lemon said in reference to Gidley’s comments. “This one really takes the cake.”

Long, outraged rants on cable television can flirt with self-righteousness, but there has been something cathartic about monologues such as Cooper’s and Lemon’s. Yes, people are worried, and angry, and incensed. If not now, when?

Late-night hosts fall in the same category. One segment in which a furious Stephen Colbert condemned the second video released by Trump after the insurrection was particularly powerful: “I’m not going to show you a word of his video, because he doesn’t mean a word of it,” Colbert told viewers. “A man facing a noose will say anything to save his neck – or save his skin, it’s hard to tell, there’s a lot of skin around that neck. All you need to know is this man is terrified.”

More recently, Seth Meyers wonderfully expressed his exasperation after Tucker Carlson attacked measures taken by social media platforms after the violent storming of the Capitol, and sought to paint them as an infringement on – what else? – individual liberties. “My God, are these people whiny, hysterical lunatics who never miss an opportunity to make themselves the victims, even after a deadly insurrection at the nation’s Capitol,” Meyers mused. It worked, because the indignation behind it felt sincere.

And then… there’s OAN, also known as One America News Network, also known as the fringe, pro-Trump TV network that apparently got the Borat treatment when Sacha Baron Cohen was filming his new movie. Post-insurrection, OAN has kept on living in the pro-Trump bubble it has built for itself. On one recent occasion, as pointed out by the media watchdog Media Matters, it attempted to argue that the insurrection was the ideal opportunity for Mike Pence to overturn the presidential vote – in an odd, pretzel-type argument that makes less sense the more you try to understand it.

To be clear: nothing about OAN’s rhetoric is funny, no matter how absurd it gets. If the insurrection has proven one thing, it’s that people getting radicalised by what they see and read, on television and in other places, can have dire, violent real-life consequences.

And so, the TV will stay on. Now is the time to keep at least one ear to the ground.

Yours,

Clémence Michallon

US culture writer