Two days ago, during a trip to Lebanon that was intended to strengthen her foreign policy credentials, the leader of France’s National Front party paid a visit to the Grand Mufti of Beirut, the country’s leading religious authority. When his secretary invited Marine Le Pen to don a headscarf, she refused. Shortly afterwards, when it became clear that the meeting could not proceed without the headscarf, Mme Le Pen cancelled her appointment. For several hours afterwards, footage of the encounter became the top trending item on Facebook’s newsfeed and it stirred up debate as to whether she had bravely spoken up for secular ideals, or merely engaged in political posturing. Mme Le Pen cleverly added to the confusion by pointing out that when she had met the Grand Mufti of Al-Azhar during a foreign visit to Egypt in 2015, a headscarf had been optional.
Irrespective of the significance of the headscarf ‒ an important question that is explored at length in the Egyptian blogger Mona El-Tahawy’s thoughtful memoir Headscarves and Hymens – for Marine Le Pen it was merely a prop, a convenient symbol of resistance to bolster her anti-Muslim reputation among the party’s base. Like every populist, she knew the awkward moment at the mufti’s office was a political gift that could be parlayed into a global news story.
Unfortunately modern news-gathering makes it increasingly hard to treat such events as the public-relations exercises they so obviously are. Fifty years ago Daniel Boorstin published The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, a damning analysis of how media-friendly spectacles were used to distract reporters from more complex and important news. Boorstin argued that these digressions had become a key part of the Nixon White House’s communications strategy. Judging from the intemperate early coverage of President Trump’s foibles, few of America’s mainstream reporters have taken heed of the warning. While focused on the President’s gaffes, temperamental tweeting and ill-advised press conferences, relatively little attention has been paid to the surging US stock market, the near collapse of ISIS and the impending power vacuum in Syria. Equally little consideration has been given to the resurgent confidence within the GOP and the behind-the-scenes confrontation between the White House and America’s intelligence community.
The Atlantic magazine recently invited a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and an emeritus history professor from Brandeis University, to share their early impressions of the Trump administration. Professors Julian Zelizer and Morton Keller placed several of the most contentious matters within a much broader sweep of US history and their brief exchange suggests how many instructive historical comparisons have been overlooked. Zelizer noted that he was more reluctant than the media has been to conclude that “the Republic faces an imminent major threat to its principles and viability” and more open to the possibility that US politics was being “buffeted by forces that weren’t widely recognized before.” He also pointed out that several previous presidents – including Jefferson, Lincoln and Obama – had sparred with the press and that FDR’s famous fireside chats were an attempt to circumvent the media narrative (two generations before Twitter). What has been different, and more troubling, he suggested, is the new President’s willingness to “ope[n] up an all-out assault on the media as an institution from the very start” and to “traffic in falsehood.”
With similar restraint, Keller argued that Trump’s brusque governance wasn’t “occurring in a vacuum” and that to some degree the Democrats have now taken on the “take-no-prisoners style” used by the Republican opposition to President Obama. Judiciously avoiding an overhasty assessment of the recent administrative chaos, Keller added that the news coverage could be read as “the institutional consequence of a slowly building new politics of fierce, unforgiving, ideological confrontation.” In other words, it is far too early to forecast the likely success of the Trump presidency.
Liberals may believe the sky is falling but, as many conservative pundits have noted, there was a similarly apocalyptic tone to Republican dismay in the early years of the Obama presidency. But Obama still managed to deliver on much of his political agenda. Similarly, it is impossible to say whether the enduring consequences of Trump’s early disruptions – dismantling Obamacare, withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership, confronting Mexico, rushing through an ill-considered travel ban – will prove to be mere spectacles of no lasting significance, or the first step in a coherent political reshaping of US politics. America’s constitution and its democratic institutions have withstood the challenges of a civil war, two World Wars and dozens of other smaller conflicts and crises, there is little reason to doubt that they will outlast the current tumult, however alarming it may seem.
