How to test negative for.., p.12
How to Test Negative for Stupid, page 12
I’m not saying that the media, traditional and otherwise, is always the enemy. Much of the time, they are vital. There have been instances in Louisiana where if it weren’t for the media, some politicians would have stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down. My point is that during the 2016 campaign and the first Trump administration, the media, led by its legacy members, went from watchdog to attack dog. Once-respected journalists reported lies, and treated them as facts. Real, objective journalism became an afterthought. The Russia hoax is only one example. My experience has been that many members of the media think that Trump is a threat to democracy, so he must be stopped at any cost, even if it means destroying democracy. Americans know all about Trump. They also know all about democracy, and they like it. The people who support Trump don’t support him because they hate democracy. They support Trump because they think people opposing him hate democracy. And when the press takes sides, the press squanders the people’s trust.
Was, or is, the media always wrong? Nope. But when your job is to report facts and you report opinion, or you use facts selectively to advance a narrative, or you continue to balance on your nose, like a trained seal, what “your” side tells you and you squeal with delight when the “other side” stumbles, or you rationalize that this is all okay because it’s for America’s own good, because Trump hates democracy, well, people stop believing you. Think I’m being a snowflake? How hard would it have been to find out that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? And couldn’t the media see that President Biden couldn’t finish a sentence without taking a nap? Everyone else could.
* * *
Fortunately, the mood in the Senate during my and Trump’s first term was not nearly as hostile as the one outside it, at least when it came to relationships with each other. About a year in, I had gotten to know my colleagues and the rhythms of the Senate well enough that I was asked to perform at the annual Gridiron Dinner alongside Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The Gridiron Club, which puts on the annual black-tie affair, is the oldest and most selective journalistic organization in Washington, D.C. Amy had been in the Senate since God was a child, and she’s smart, affable, and well liked by just about everyone. I, on the other hand, was more like the new animal in the zoo. No one was quite sure what I was. All they knew was that sometimes, when they poked me, I said things they weren’t used to hearing in Washington. Given that the job of a Gridiron Dinner speaker is to tell jokes and lightly roast other politicians and media figures of both parties, I suppose I seemed like an okay choice to someone. I accepted.
In the lead-up to the event, I called Senator Tom Cotton, who had done the Gridiron Dinner before. I asked him how he’d come up with his jokes. He told me that many senators who weren’t naturally funny (most of them) hired a comedy writer to assist. I had one of my staff members check around and learned that the going rate to hire a joke writer in Washington was around ten thousand dollars. Screw that. I decided to write my own jokes, and I asked my staff for their contributions as well. I finally came up with what I thought was a pretty good speech. Just before the day of the dinner, Cotton warned me that although the media crowd at the dinner would definitely laugh at the jokes I’d written about my fellow Republicans, they were much less likely to laugh at the jokes about Democrats or the media.
Yep. That’s what happened. One joke that got a big laugh was, “Do you know why Alabama raised the drinking age to thirty-two? They wanted to keep alcohol out of the high schools.” (I love Alabama, but dammit, they keep beating LSU in football.) Another, which referenced the recent disappointing Super Bowl game between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams, was “Was that a great game or what? If I wanted to watch guys failing to score for three hours, I would have taken Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders to a singles bar.” But not all the gags played well in the room. For example, toward the end of my speech, I said, “We’ve learned so much together these past two years. You’ve learned the meaning of whangdoodle”—a term I sometimes use—“I’ve learned what you mean when you call me clickbait, and we have both learned that a modest new tax on politicians in blackface would raise billions.” This was a reference to the Democratic governor of Virginia, who had recently been caught in blackface in a photo from a few years earlier. Hardly anyone laughed. Another risky joke went like this: “Southerners like to ask people where they come from. I saw Chuck Todd from MSNBC one day. He’s so cool. I went right up to him and said, ‘Where are you from, Chuck?’ And Chuck said, ‘Where I’m from, we don’t end sentences with prepositions.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, Chuck. So where are you from, bitch?’” Much to my surprise, this joke, an old one I got off the internet, earned me laughter from the crowd. They also seemed to like my observation about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “Mitch and Chuck have a lot in common. They’re each whip-smart, they’re each tenacious, and they each could lose their place during sex.”
Afterward, I looked around for Chuck Todd, but he wasn’t there. I guess he was home watching reruns of The View. I did encounter one twentysomething young man who let me know that my speech, while funny, was “slightly misogynistic” in places. I asked the kid’s name, and he took off like a hound for the tree line.
I’ve always assumed he later went on to a high-level job in the Biden-Harris administration.
* * *
Oddly enough, the next time I saw Chuck Todd was in 2019, when he had me on his NBC Sunday morning talk show, Meet the Press, to discuss some comments I had made about the 2016 election. I’ve been accused of having no idea how to make a long story short, so, to get right to the point: I had been asked earlier that year by another journalist, Chris Wallace, whether any countries other than Russia had expressed a preference in the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (at least that’s what I thought I’d been asked). I answered Ukraine, recalling a few well-sourced articles I had read in The Economist, the Financial Times, Politico, and elsewhere that had reported the Ukraine government’s opposition to Trump in the election. According to these articles, Ukrainians at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington may have actively assisted the Clinton campaign in the election. In most political environments, my comments about Ukraine wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows. But this was around the time when House Democrats were attempting to impeach President Trump over his “perfect phone call” with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. So, the press tried to hand my ass to me.
As I went over the transcript of the Chris Wallace interview later, I realized that I had been asked what other countries had attempted to illegitimately influence the results of the election, not what other countries had expressed a preference for a winner. So I issued a retraction and a clarification, as I have no problem admitting when I’ve made a mistake. But it didn’t help. As far as the media was concerned, I was doing Donald Trump’s dirty work by attempting to smear Ukraine. This did not seem fair to me, but a fair is where you show a pig. In this environment, when the press and the Democrats were both running around like squirrels at a rave, trying to oust Trump from office by any means possible, I got the crap beat out of me. “Useful idiot for Russia” was what The Washington Post called me. So, I thought I would go on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd and clear things up. Sure, I’d made a joke at the Gridiron Dinner at Todd’s expense, and I hadn’t seen him since, but he can take a joke, right? As the makeup artist put a little rouge on me and a technician affixed a lapel microphone to my jacket—a strange ritual I was just barely getting used to at the time—I wondered whether Chuck had heard about my little joke.
He had. It was evident by minute two of the interview. Even after I came clean about my error (probably even cleaner than I had to, looking back), he pounced on me like a ninja. He basically called me a liar, a fabulist, a fraud, a charlatan, a useful idiot, and an ignorant slut. These, of course, are my words, not his, but many people who saw the interview would agree with me. Essentially, Todd accused me of “gaslighting” (his word) the American people to further the agenda of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Now, Chuck has never been mistaken for Walter Cronkite, but you’d have thought I had said something about his mama rather than the 2016 election based on how emotional he became. Meanwhile, all I’d done was quote something I’d read. Looking back, I don’t think the interview is that important. But the media frenzy that it and my Chris Wallace interview caused does reveal something critical about the state of American politics between 2017 and today, which is that everything—and I mean everything—was about Donald John Trump. If you were a Republican, it didn’t matter what you said. Somehow, the media would hijack your words and introduce the president into the conversation. I’m not complaining. I could handle it. It’s just that that was how things were during my first few years in office, and to some extent it has continued to today.
During my time in the Senate, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with President Trump to pass some consequential legislation that I think made people’s lives better. I passed (and he supported and signed) bills that protect small businesses, strengthen financial oversight, and help communities recover from disasters. One is the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which forces foreign companies—especially those in China—to comply with U.S. auditing standards or be delisted from our stock exchanges. This was important in ensuring transparency and protecting American investors from fraudulent foreign enterprises. Another is the Rebuilding Small Businesses After Disasters Act, which expands access to Small Business Administration disaster loans, making it easier for small businesses to get back on their feet after hurricanes, floods, and other catastrophes. When the National Flood Insurance Program was about to expire, I worked with the Trump administration to extend it, ensuring that families and businesses in flood-prone areas are protected. Others are the Rural Business Advisers Relief Act and the Justice Against Corruption on K Street (JACK) Act. In 2021, the Center for Effective Lawmaking named me one of the ten most effective Republican senators in the areas of commerce, education, and trade in the 116th Congress. I rank second for the most bills signed into law by a first-term Louisiana senator.
While I was drafting these bills, I went to the White House many times and talked to President Trump on the telephone often, something I learned later was rare for a freshman member of Congress at the time. I don’t think I was invited because I always expressed fealty to Trump. I didn’t. In fact, I remember, for example, voting for net neutrality during my first term when every other Republican voted against it, and I opposed several of Trump’s judicial nominations. I think the president appreciated my independent streak. I think it’s because we’re both willful. I think it’s because we are honest with each other. (I once asked him why he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought, but he just looked at me. He seemed a little offended when I expressed to him once that tweeting a little less would not cause brain damage.) And I think it’s because we both believe that government has to figure out how to get its costs down and still deliver a decent product, like the private sector.
I’ll give you an example. Cell phones that use 5G wireless technology are much faster and can handle more data. Cell phones communicate with each other via a cell tower through airwaves called spectrum. Airwaves, or spectrum, are owned by the American people. The Federal Communications Commission is in charge of assigning the spectrum to telecommunication companies that wish to use it. The brainiacs who discovered 5G technology also discovered that the best spectrum for 5G signals is called the C-band. Prior to that, the C-band spectrum, thought to be nearly worthless, had been given practically free to a group of foreign satellite companies doing business in the United States.
When the foreign satellite companies and the rest of the world discovered how useful the C-band was for 5G technology, and therefore how valuable it was, the foreign satellite companies that had licenses for the C-band convinced the FCC that it would be quicker and more efficient for the foreign satellite companies to work directly with the 5G telecommunication companies to share the C-band, rather than have the C-band spectrum turned back over to the FCC and have the FCC allocate it. This was a pretty slick move. In effect, the foreign satellite companies were going to sell a portion of the C-band to the 5G telecommunication companies and pocket the money. The chairman of the FCC, some very powerful Republican senators, and several aides to President Trump had already blessed this approach. They argued that we were in a 5G race with China and this was the quickest way to get the C-band allocated to the 5G developers. When I found out about it, the FCC was about six weeks away from approving this arrangement. I immediately started raising fresh hell. I could see what was going on. This C-band was now worth billions and billions of dollars and belonged to the American people, not to the foreign satellite companies that had a license to use it—a license that could be unilaterally rescinded by the FCC. So I mutinied. I began preaching that the FCC should take the C-band spectrum back from the foreign satellite companies and auction it off to the highest bidders in a competitive auction in which the various large 5G telecommunication companies would bid. I gave Senate floor speeches, wrote opinion columns on websites, and advocated for it in various Senate committees. I talked to the FCC commissioners. I did everything I could think of to get attention except stand on one leg and bark like a dog. Slowly but surely, the media picked up on the controversy. Still, I was a freshman senator and, though I was just a freshman senator, I was experienced enough in politics to know that the skids were greased. Despite the joyful noise I was making, I suspected that President Trump’s handpicked chairman of the FCC was going to go forward with his decision to give away the American people’s spectrum for virtually nothing. So I called Trump. He called me right back. He listened patiently as I explained the problem and the issue. “How much money do you think we could get if we auction off the C-band?” he asked. “At least fifty billion,” I said. The president threw a wobbly, as the Brits say. He went postal, as Americans say. “Fifty billion dollars?” he said. “We’re about to give away fifty billion dollars? Kennedy, I’ll conduct the auction myself. Let me take it from here.” Then I heard him tell his secretary to track down the chair of the FCC, who was in India, and get him on the telephone. And so the president took care of it. Within weeks, the FCC reversed itself and decided to hold a public auction. The agency is still auctioning off portions of the C-band, but at last count the auctions have brought in over $80 billion. Thus we were able to resolve all this in one phone call between me, a lowly freshman senator, and the president of the United States, who had a business background and who was accessible. We didn’t have to have a squillion meetings, or appoint a task force, or hire a bunch of bloodsucking consultants. That’s how government is supposed to work.
Another example has to do with the president’s First Step Act, which was championed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and whose purpose was to shorten sentences of supposedly nonviolent inmates in federal prison. Color me skeptical of this legislation from the jump. People in federal prison have been sentenced by a federal judge who knows more about the crime, the criminal, the victim, and the circumstances of the crime than a member of Congress or a president ever will, because the federal judge conducted the trial, listened to the testimony, and has federal postconviction, presentencing investigative reports on the defendant. Federal judges don’t get it right every time, but I think they get sentences right much more often than not. They also have to give sentences in conformance with written sentencing guidelines. In other words, they can’t go disco and just do what they want, at least in part because they have to answer to a court of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court. What primarily convinced me to oppose the president’s bill was the refusal by the Senate bill’s authors to include a provision I wanted to require the Justice Department to contact the victim of the crime before the criminal who committed it was released from prison. So I came out against the bill. Senator Tom Cotton was also opposed, but every Senate Democrat and most Senate Republicans were for it.
Once the media found out I was opposed to the bill, they swarmed me, because the media loves controversy, and they liked the fact that a Republican senator was opposing a Republican president. In one interview, I was asked how to improve the bill. I decided not to get into a weedy analysis of amendments, and instead just said: “The only way to improve this bill is with a shredder.” My comment was widely reported. It and an announcement in The Washington Post that I had been invited to appear on a Sunday morning news program to criticize the bill got President Trump’s attention. He called me.
“Kennedy, why are you against my bill?” he asked. I explained my position, and he listened calmly. “Any chance you’ll change your mind?” he then asked. I told him no. Then he said: “Okay, fair enough, but I want you to do me a favor. Don’t go on that Sunday news program.” I was taken aback. I didn’t think anything I said or didn’t say on the program would matter that much, and was surprised the president would even care. But I responded to the president’s request by simply saying, “Okay, I won’t do it. I’ll cancel.” Then there was about five seconds of silence, before the president said: “Just like that, Kennedy, you’ll just cancel? You don’t want anything in return?” I said: “Nope. You’re the president, and you made a reasonable request, so I’m going to cancel.” “Amazing,” the president said. And then he hung up.
