For the last few days, if you have been watching CNN, you will have witnessed something that hasn’t occurred in over two years - Trump-free news reporting. He was nowhere to be seen on the front pages of major newspapers. Even Manafort has been getting second billing. Hurricane Florence had taken the lede.
I confess that my initial reaction to the 24-hour coverage of weather on CNN was empathetic worry, which eventually turned to boredom. That felt … weird. For many months, watching the news has produced polyrhythms of depression, fury, and profound dread. Boredom never factored into it. That’s what caught my attention. That is when I realized Florence was bigger clickbait than Trump.
As of 5 PM Friday, September 14 (ET), ‘metropolitan storm’ Trump had not even registered on the political weather map of the United States for 20 miraculous hours. The clouds gathered and the angels wept tears of joy. Check his Twitter feed over that period. He tweeted nothing about himself, choosing to post OPTs (other people’s tweets), and strategically, all of them were from official sources like NOAA Weather Service, NOAA Satellites, and NOAA Ocean Services. Science, apparently, is suddenly believable.
This is what it looks like when Trump understands when he’s been trumped. It’s like the reverse eye of the hurricane. The slower Florence moves along the eastern seaboard, the stronger the winds, the greater the storm surge, the longer Trump stays out of the news. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper inadvertently summed up the situation perfectly. "Hurricane Florence is powerful, slow and relentless," he said. "It's an uninvited brute who doesn't want to leave." Trump may wish for this natural disaster to end, but only because he wants the spotlight back.
As truth is not a factor for this man, his tweets are as deranged as they need to be to deliver the one thing he feeds on: national attention. He grabbed headlines in the lead up to Florence’s arrival by singing his own unsung praises about his Puerto Rican achievements after Maria. The closer Florence came to making landfall, the more Trump had to up the publicity ante by claiming the 3000 deaths after Maria had been falsified. Outrageous, yes, but he knew he was up against a Category 4 storm that was barreling for the Carolinas - the heart of his base. The result? Florence: 1 - Trump: 0. He miscalculated. You can’t dispute old death scores when one million people are fleeing for their lives.
I’ve wondered what it would take to make this happen. That’s two storms that have now beaten Trump into submission: Ms. Daniels and Florence. Both are relentless. Both are powerful by their very nature. Both have moved very slowly. And both have paddled Trump’s ass. Michael Avenatti should be taking notes here.
Enjoy the weather while it lasts.
