There are reasons to envy people who work in conservative media and reasons to pity them, but there's an element of abstraction to that ecosystem and its native bog critters that makes either response seem insufficient. For those stuck working at outlets supported by subscribers or advertisements, and not by the rounding-error subsidies of half-literate box magnates and the heirs to electronics fortunes, some envy is natural. Those jobs mashing away at the reactionary soundboard on behalf of a seething and reclusive Wisconsin billionaire, who will not and quite possibly cannot read anything you write, are easy and secure relative to ones that exist in the free-market media environment. The pity comes from the same place—these aren't real jobs, really, and the work of hunching over the ROFL lathe and extruding shitty little blogs, videos or podcasts about The Foreign Hordes or trans teenagers has no dignity anywhere in it. It's a hothouse environment and absolutely lousy with pollutants, and the fruits of that climate only look edible. Even the ones that aren't actively poisonous are kind of sad—too shiny, bloated, wan.
Which is not to say that the greasy products dropping off the end of that assembly line aren't fun to laugh at. The work itself is so hilariously undignified, and so self-abnegating in its expression, that it can be confounding and funny in the way that good art can be. I think, here, about the late Fox News anchor Lou Dobbs, near but not quite at the end of his career, who capped off a show in September of 2019 by saying "have a great weekend," before adding "the President makes such a thing possible for us all." It was halfway hack even then to point out that America's public reality was increasingly existing within several different Paul Verhoeven movies at once—I know this because I did it myself—but it only felt half-right. The presentation was there, but the sleazy verve of Verhoeven's dystopias was nowhere to find. It was just a bunch of gross cynics winking through their various infarctions and increasingly frequent mental brownouts, trying to will an untenable public moment into triumph and normality. Even for the true-blue sycophants, the little weenies and old empty bladders who really meant it, there was no life in it. They all pushed the button that made the treats come out, and at some point the question of whether they were doing it because they truly love pushing buttons or just because the treats keep coming isn't really an interesting one.
The president that Dobbs thanked for the weekend is the president again. The old fake jobs celebrating his reign are still there, and the people who work that machinery are still doing it. Everything is a bit worse and a good deal dumber by now, but the work itself hasn't really changed. A mainstream venue looking to get a piece of that easy-seeming money would face some obvious challenges. The consumers who like that sort of thing already have places they trust to give it to them—there is a whole honking casino of buttons out there to push, and they all deliver the same rancid little treat—and those people don't really want to hang out anywhere that presents a risk of happening upon something that might upset them in anything but the ways they love to be upset. It's just a matter of finding more fulsome ways to flatter and defend a spiteful boss, and the people who do it best are the sort of people who'd be doing just that wherever they found themselves.
All of which makes it that much funnier when someone fucks it up. The goblins of conservative media understood the assignment where Super Bowl 59 was concerned: The job was to grouse about having to see a black guy performing at halftime in a way that suggests deep personal offense; snarl in the direction of the designated cultural villains when possible; and suggest that watching football on television is both kind of suspiciously woke and much less fun than being upset, all the time, about the exact same things that some dull old billionaire is always upset about. It didn't help that Harrison Butker barely made it onto the field, but it didn't really matter. The gig is to get upset, and these guys all got upset—the same shouts going up, never in harmony but more or less at the same time.
The dorks who took charge of The Daily Beast last year are not of this cohort. They're weird and abstracted in the wrong ways, the wrong kind of arch and reliably snickering off beat. It's clear that they're delighted by whatever it is they're doing over there, but it's all off in the same way that old Mentos commercials are off—strange and stilted scenarios given strange and stilted stagings, all of it reflecting an origin that is instantly identifiable as Not The United States. A good example of this is Joanna Coles, the British-born magazine legend who was installed as The Daily Beast's Chief Creative and Content Officer, telling Semafor last year that the thing she was most wrong about in 2024 was when she said that "Lauren Sanchez was the perfect combination of Amelia Earhart, Brooke Astor, and Jennifer Aniston," when in fact she now believes that Sanchez is "a combination of Amelia Earhart, Brooke Astor, and Beatrix Potter." There's probably a joke in there, although Coles does seem pretty committed to whatever the bit is where Jeff Bezos's girlfriend is concerned. But what is it? Why is it?
The British tabloid journalist David Gardner, who is Chief National Correspondent at Coles's Daily Beast, struck a similarly uncanny note in his report about Donald Trump's visit to Super Bowl 59. Sunday was the first time that a president has attended a Super Bowl, and the president involved was Trump. Gardner's job is grinding facile blogs with action-intensive headlines about whatever conflicts are happening in American politics. This is not really what conservative media does. That is a longer game; it's a soap opera which understands that while its central character can never be seen to fail, he can also never be seen to decisively win. The enemies are the thing that keeps those readers coming back; anyone fluent in the American style of political brain damage would know this.
Gardner, who worked for British tabloid The Daily Mail in the U.K. and Los Angeles, and whose job now appears to be bullishly "describing how things appear to be going for Trump" at least once per day, sort of knows the words and sort of knows the music, but wound up delivering a post much more in line with Lou Dobbs blearily thanking Mr. Trump for letting there be Saturday. In the story, headlined "Eagles Won The Super Bowl But Historic Trump Was The Real MVP," Gardner spends 800-odd words attempting to justify that headline through a combination of carriage returns and faintly off Tory syntax.
"Like the TV-savvy pro he is," he writes, "Trump realized the most watched live show in the country was a massive self-publicity coup hiding in plain sight." What follows are a series of very short paragraphs describing Trump's triumph, which amounts to arriving at the game, sitting around for a while, and then leaving:
Incredibly, Trump was the first president in history to attend a Super Bowl.
And he quarterbacked the entire event like the master of publicity that he undoubtedly has always been.
Advertisers fight to spend millions for a few minutes of prime, prime television property; an invite to perform at half-time is considered a cherry to top the biggest of musical careers; the audience is a who’s who of business leaders, Hollywood stars, and the big-hitting influencers of the moment.
In 2013, the last time the Super Bowl was held in New Orleans, a power outage delayed the game for 34 minutes. It was the first time the game had suffered for lack of power.
On Sunday night, all the power was there in the shape of the president. It was Trump in his element, playing to the crowd. Elon Musk can be the power behind the throne but MAGA’s emperor knows the world’s richest man doesn’t have the clothes for this kind of close-up.
Points to Gardner for crediting Trump for "quarterbacking" an experience that also featured two much more literal examples of quarterbacking. But taken altogether, the experience of reading his story is that of watching someone who has had four or five drinks attempting to explain an extremely well-known thing, in a way that suggests the person explaining it thinks it's all a bit silly but also quite entertaining, to a disinterested house cat. To the extent that there is anything justifying the post's existence, beyond a jaunty catch-up on all the stuff Trump posted about during his flight home, it is the contrast that Gardner draws between Joe Biden skipping the traditional pre-Super Bowl interview last year, which is bolstered by a quote from Democratic strategist David Axelrod, and Trump's willingness to show up at the game and walk around pointing to things before complaining about Taylor Swift from his airplane.
It could also be argued that the meaninglessness of Gardner's post points to the super-meaninglessness of this (much longer) one, but that would be very rude. But there is, in that post's unctuous uncanniness, a neat little microcosm of this shitty and shameful moment—a headlong campaign to suck up to someone too far gone to even acknowledge that act of enthusiastic humiliation, an attempt to write some sort of coherence and style over a series of actions that are mostly empty, and in so doing make all this luridly meaningless stuff seem not just meaningful but triumphant and fun. Here's how it ends:
Think what you like about Trump’s nascent presidency, but he got it right on Sunday night. He has the ball and will hold it tight until someone rips it from his grasp. The end line is still four years off but you can bet your bottom dollar he will be at the next three Super Bowls. His only misstep was picking the Chiefs as the winner.
Next year, he’ll know who to back. Himself.
There are two responses to this, broadly speaking. One is to ask, "What could that possibly mean? Also what happens when he crosses the 'end line' with that ball?" The other is to simply congratulate Donald Trump on winning the Super Bowl, and to wish him good luck in winning it again next year and the year after that. Neither one is especially gratifying, but one seems a lot less embarrassing than the other.
