Guest columnist Steve Pfarrer: Soap opera country just fell for soap opera star

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By STEVE PFARRER

Published: 01-30-2025 6:01 AM

Modified: 01-30-2025 1:56 PM


I enjoyed reading John Paradis’ Jan. 25 guest column suggesting the Democrats form a shadow opposition cabinet to offer consistent public responses to the worst policies of the new Trump administration [“Time for a People’s Cabinet”]. But I strongly disagree with his statement “Let’s face it, the Democrats have failed miserably in countering Trump’s lies and bluster.” And I have to question how effective such a Democratic shadow cabinet could be.

The Democrats — Joe Biden and his inner circle in particular — shot themselves in the foot by covering up Biden’s cognitive decline, a condition made glaringly apparent during the ex-president’s terrible debate performance against Donald Trump last June. But they have long made a strong case against Trump’s manifest unfitness for public office, such as in the extensive hearings they held on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol that Trump incited.

More to the point, Trump’s many pathologies — his corruption and lawlessness, his cruelty and vindictiveness, his serial lying and bottomless narcissism, his autocratic impulses — have been on full view for years to anyone paying even cursory attention.

And during his rambling and often incoherent campaign speeches last year, Trump was very consistent about a number of things: demonizing undocumented migrants and LGBTQ people, vowing to tear up a raft of environmental regulations and halt clean energy production, and promising retribution against journalists, prosecutors and others who had crossed him.

In the face of all that, including Trump’s 34-count felony conviction for illegally influencing the 2016 election through hush-money payments to a former porn actress, not to mention a long list of women bringing credible allegations of assault against him, a (small) majority of voters in November said “meh” and voted for him anyway.

Why? Pundits have pointed to voter anger over high rates of inflation during part of Biden’s tenure, and that’s certainly part of it. And Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, faced an uphill battle, forced to run an abbreviated, on-the-fly campaign against him when Biden bowed out of the race last July and backed her to succeed him.

But more seems to be at play here. For one, today’s fractured news media environment is increasingly dominated by right-wing sources. Far more Americans watch Fox News than read The New York Times. And the 24/7 onslaught of news, social media feeds and other online distractions seems to have shortened everyone’s attention span.

That’s the kind of environment Trump thrives in, especially now as he issues endless executive orders, threatens nations around the world with tariffs, and in general sucks up all the oxygen in the room. I don’t see how Democrats can make any inroads on that, especially with both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans who, though a combination of spinelessness and cynicism, willingly do their Dear Leader’s bidding.

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Democrats are also up against what seems a general sense of voter indifference, exhaustion, and intellectual disengagement. In a recent piece, New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested we have become a “soap opera country,” one in which “you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions ... Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.”

About half of the electorate also no longer seems to believe that it’s important to have someone of basic decency and moral character in the White House. If we’ve become a soap opera country, we’ve also become a very cynical and angry country. And who better to lead that country than Donald Trump?

Steve Pfarrer lives in Northampton.