Why A Trump Victory Would Be Bad For America But Good For Me
I'll still keep writing about why Trump must not return to the White House. But honesty compels me to admit that—because I'm a journalist—a second Trump term would likely give me greater job security.
My role model.
When people ask me at cocktail parties where I’m working these days, I tell them I’m between firings at the moment. That’s another way of saying I work in journalism. In this still-young century I’ve been separated from a regular paycheck five times. In most instances it wasn’t my idea, and in every instance when it wasn’t the reason was financial distress. News organizations are not stable employers (excepting, of course, my present one!— though a previous owner canned me eleven years ago).
I used to be somewhat sensitive about getting fired all the time. As you see, I am sensitive no more. Older journalists like me came up inside a financial ecosystem that no longer exists, and we are therefore expensive. We can hedge our bets by becoming an editor, where age remains to some extent an asset (because nobody born after 1970 had a 7th-grade teacher who made them diagram sentences). But only up to a point. I got fired once as an editor, too, because the stories I was editing weren’t hitting the numbers. In one of my many dismissals, I can state with extreme confidence that age discrimination played a role, but mostly the culprit has been the news business’s own financial instability. There’s a reason that newspapers, which used to be owned by publicly-traded corporations, are owned today mostly by private companies or individuals. Private ownership frees the owner from having to report embarrassing financials, and to lie his head off about profitability. (Or, in the case of a hedge fund, to cannibalize more quietly).
Whenever a journalist my age gets laid off (the preferred euphemism), somebody usually refers that unfortunate person to me. The first thing I say is: “Please don’t imagine this has anything to do with you. If it did you wouldn’t have had a journalism career until now.” Then I advise this person, if he or she doesn’t have a union, to hire a lawyer to negotiate the financial terms of his or her departure. Hard experience has made me known in this cruel business as the El Exigente of severance agreements. A joke, incidentally, that nobody ineligible for Social Security will likely get (and that originated, I neglected to mention in an earlier version of this post, in a classic 1983 Texas Monthly piece about the Kennedy assassination wherein the author, Ron Rosenbaum, wrote he was the El Exigente of conspiracy theories).* El Exigente, or “the Demanding One,” was a fictional coffee-bean connoisseur played by the actor Carlos Montalban in TV ads for Savarin instant coffee, first in the New York market in the 1960s and 1970s, and later, starting in the early 1980s, nationally. Savarin, previously a luxury coffee-bean brand, marketed its instant product as “the coffee-er coffee.” But this snob-appeal pitch did not survive the rise of more-fervent coffee snobbery in the 1990s, and the brand is no more.
But I digress.
My latest piece for The New Republic posits, mischievously, that a second Donald Trump term may be just the thing needed to keep yours truly from hitting the bricks between now and 2029. Trump’s return to power would of course be very, very bad for America. But many things that are very, very bad for America turn out to be good for journalists, in much the same way that the Covid epidemic was good for funeral directors. Hey, I didn’t make this world, I just live in it. Anyway, you can read the piece here. Roll it over the back of your tongue before you swallow.
*Since I am a hanging judge on the topic: Yes, this is plagiarism. In this instance I appropriated a conceit rather than a sentence or paragraph, but that’s plagiarism, too. I’ve been telling this particular joke on myself for so long that I forgot it originated with Rosenbaum’s article, which I first read in Texas Monthly four decades ago and then again when it was reprinted in one of Rosenbaum’s anthologies two decades ago. The management regrets the theft.