There really is nothing President Trump can do that won’t raise the hackles of his media foes. On July 9, he nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on live television. Certainly, progressives hated the pick, but seemed equally miffed by the rollout of the announcement.
"When networks help Trump win ratings, democracy loses” according to Salon TV critic Melanie McFarland. She called Trump’s treatment of “a historic decision that stands to shift the direction of our country like a reality TV finale” the “ultimate act of solipsism.” McFarland claimed that “the president began priming the pump not long after Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement” and by “scheduling the announcement for Monday night” Trump was “raiding the sacred space” of hit television shows.
David Graham, staff writer at The Atlantic, claimed that “everything up until the president selected Kavanaugh had been optimized for drama.” Graham went on to say that, “Trump treated the process like a reality show” because he “ostentatiously weighed candidates.” CNN called it the “scripted end to Trump’s reality show” because “of course, the President put on a show for the cameras.” Saying that “monday night’s primetime interrupting performance” is the “sequel to that campaign run.”
Hell hath no fury like a liberal who doesn’t get to watch The Bachelorette.
Amanda Marcotte, politics writer and feminist scold at Salon, claimed that the “reality-TV authoritarian” declared his nomination on “this season of Who Wants to Be a Supreme Court Judge?” The “rating-hungry cable news networks played along” with Trump by “profiling the final contestants with the same hype-the-suspense tone” that they “use to advertise” their reality shows. Marcotte them asked “did women just lose their rights on a reality show?” claiming that “not enough attention was paid to the fact that it hardly mattered” who was chosen because “all of them were equally committed to the belief that wealthy white men are the only real citizens.” She claimed that “American politics has often felt like a psychedelic satire of itself” but more so “the night when women lost their human rights in a game-show format.”
This isn’t the first time that a president interrupted a live broadcast for an important announcement. When Obama did it, it wasn’t deemed “wanting attention” it was him doing his job.
