We Have to Cover the Trump-Kanye Oval Office Meeting. How Should We?

From Esquire

Shortly after he publicly weighed whether the billions Saudi Arabia pays for U.S. weapons each year excuses the monarchy's assassination of a U.S.-resident journalist, Donald Trump, American president, hosted Kanye West in the Oval Office. It was the culmination of a remarkable relationship that has grown-or, perhaps, metastasized-over the last few months. West declared his allegiance to the MAGA-hat crowd, Trump returned the pleasantries ("Thank you, Kanye. Very cool!"), and West embarked on a wild rant on Saturday Night Live that ended with NBC giving him the hook.

The Narcissism Summit, a meeting of two people with a pathological need for attention, was a predictable circus. The ostensible subject of the meeting was criminal justice reform, but unlike his spouse, Kim Kardashian West, Kanye seems less focused on the policy details. A fascinating aspect of West's support for Trump is its almost purely aesthetic quality. West is veritably obsessed, at this point in his life, with his freedom to speak and express himself freely-and seems to feel Trump's running roughshod over the social norms often called "political correctness" make him a natural ally. It cropped up again here:

What's lacking here is substance. This is a performance. These two only really agree on the idea they should get to say whatever they want, whenever they want, without real repercussions. What they actually say-that is, what they do with that power-is largely irrelevant. Neither is known as much of a book-reader, and it shows. Apparently, a lot of West's rhetoric was cribbed from right-wing YouTube vloggers. But again: that doesn't matter. It's about speaking and being heard and asserting your speech power, not what's said or whether it has any basis in reality.

We're used to this from Trump, who pairs that impulse with a crippling inability to empathize with other human beings. (Earlier in the day, he used this meeting to suggest on Fox & Friends that his support among African-Americans was spiking. It is not.) He greeted a 10-minute monologue from West on his personal mental health problems like this:

Often, the discussion would deteriorate into absolute nonsense.

This is possibly the dumbest possible attitude towards politics, policymaking, and life in general. It's a song lyric, and a particularly empty one at that. But Kanye isn't actually there to talk about any of that-and neither, ever, is Donald Trump.

Theirs is an alliance between two people with an insatiable appetite for being watched, photographed, consumed, talked about. They seem to feel anything is justified if it goes towards serving that need, which may be why West has now taken to calling for "abolishing" the 13th Amendment-the one that freed black Americans from enslavement and sought to codify their rights to full humanity under U.S. law. (That it took about a century for citizens to truly begin to win those rights in practice through the Civil Rights Movement tells you all you need to know about how deep the roots of racism and racial subjugation go in this country.) West later clarified he wanted to amend the statute, but he returned to the "abolish" language here, calling the law a "trap door."

In some formulations, West's issue with the 13th is the exception it carves out for involuntary servitude if you're imprisoned. That's a real issue-just look at Louisiana-especially considering well-established racial inequality in the criminal justice system. But is that really what you gleaned from watching West's monologue here?

The question, as it often is in this era, is what obligations the press might have in all of this. If you put aside the ethics and the consequences, Trump is the greatest news story in modern history. He has realized his greatest dream-to be the most talked about, most photographed, most famous person in the world, and possibly in human history-and done it through some of the ugliest, most monstrous displays possible. There's no denying that the media has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with him, blasting that darkness out into the world in exchange for the clicks and views and dollars that it brings back in.

Now it increasingly looks like West will join in some acts of this carnival show, and the question hangs over proceedings again. They even touched on whether he'd run against Trump in 2020, or theoretically succeed him in 2024.

West is probably one of the world's five most prominent musicians. Trump is the president. It is almost impossible, as a news organization that claims to provide consumers with information about notable events, to justify not covering a public meeting between them. And yet the meeting is functionally a piece of theater, and features two people who have behaved erratically in public in ways that have garnered genuine concern about their mental health. One, in West, was recently hospitalized. That does not disqualify him from participating in the public discourse, but it does make the question more pressing: How can the press cover this, as it surely has an obligation to do, in a way that best serves the public?

After all, these two men and what they say is having a profound impact on the public discourse. They have immense cultural and practical power. And what they're saying isn't based on anything at all, at least when it comes to traditional bases for political speech-like, say, history. As USA Today illustrated in size-17,000 font yesterday, news outlets that simply share the words of prominent people without context or clarification are not serving the public, they are hurting them.

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