The Trump supporter puts an intellectual shine on partisan hackery
“It is hard work to read widely and broadly, and on both sides of the political aisle, ” conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt in a July 2014 explanation of why he had decided to, in his words, “embarrass” a young Huffington Post journalist during an on his radio show by quizzing him about what books he had read about the war on terror. “Time consuming. Not very fun actually. But necessary. If you intend to be taken seriously. More importantly, if you intend the country to endure.” Since then, NBC Hewitt as a political analyst, The Washington Post brought him on as a, and MSNBC has that it is handing Hewitt a weekly show airing on Saturday mornings. These media outlets fell for the idea that he is a different type of conservative talker, the to “bombastic personalities” like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh. In reality, his actions during the 2016 presidential election campaign and the early months of the Trump administration have showed that he simply puts an intellectual gloss on their same brand of partisan hackery. In recent weeks, while pundits who share Hewitt’s reputation for erudition have as dangerously, Hewitt has instead stood alongside the president’s media sycophants, laying down cover fire for Trump. Hewitt Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating his campaign’s connections to the Russian government; he that Trump had revealed highly classified information in a meeting with Russian officials; after numerous outlets reported that Comey had kept notes of a meeting with Trump in which the president suggested he halt an investigation into a Trump aide, was on whether Comey, not Trump, had behaved appropriately. A breakout media star of the campaign, Hewitt stressing his intellectual heft and curiosity: the of national security tomes he promotes on this website; how he opens interviews by asking his guests if they know who Alger Hiss is and have read Lawrence Wright’s book “The Looming Tower; ” his friends on all sides of the political debate; his regular interviews of prominent mainstream journalists; his experience in politics, law, and academia; and in particular the way those features make him distinct from other conservative radio and cable news hosts. But Hewitt set aside his concern for the life of the mind and Donald Trump for president, a man of and who is unaware of and legal principles, uninterested in. As Hewitt had noted in demolishing a 31-year-old journalist, it is “hard work to read widely, ” and Trump never bothered to try — it he has read than he is credited with writing. Asked to name the last book he had read in an interview last May, Trump, “I read passages. I read — I read areas, I read chapters. I just — I don’ t have the time.” For Hewitt, reading widely was necessary to credibly comment on foreign policy, but not to make it. Hewitt, who remained neutral during the Republican presidential primary, frequently provided Trump with friendly access to his audience; he was “the very best interview in America, ”. In none of those interviews with a man who was seeking to be the potential next leader of the free world was Hewitt nearly as aggressive as he had been in his interview with a young Huffington Post reporter. In their first interview, in February 2015, Trump acknowledged that he hadn’ t read “The Looming Tower, ” couldn’ t name any works of fiction that he’ d read, and admitted that he could not speak about nuclear submarines in any real detail (“I just know this. Military is very important to me.”) . None of this seemed to strike Hewitt as a problem. Hewitt could perhaps be forgiven for not going after Trump with guns blazing at that time, before Trump had announced he was running for president, when many commentators thought that his potential run was a joke. But as the months passed and Trump became and remained the Republican front-runner, Hewitt never pivoted to consistently scrutinizing Trump’s intellectual stature. Hewitt drew attention and praise for their in September 2015. Saying that he was finally going to give the Republican front-runner “commander in chief questions, ” the radio host quizzed Trump about major terrorist leaders and international events. “I’ m looking for the next commander-in-chief, to know who Hassan Nasrallah is, and Zawahiri, and al-Julani, and al-Baghdadi. Do you know the players without a scorecard, yet, Donald Trump?” Hewitt asks at one point. “No, you know, I’ ll tell you honestly, I think by the time we get to office, they’ ll all be changed. They’ ll be all gone, ” Trump replied. Commentators praised Hewitt for having and Trump. Hewitt himself with those characterizations, and indeed, if you review the interview transcript, you’ ll find Hewitt repeatedly bringing Trump back from the ledge that the candidate’s ignorance put him on. Hewitt let Trump get away with saying it was appropriate for him not to learn about foreign policy issues until he’s elected and claiming that he wasn’ t willing to talk about hypotheticals because he didn’ t “want the other side to know” what he would do. At one point Trump openly rejected the entire premise of Hewitt’s purported worldview, saying that because he’s a “delegator” who hires “great people” it’s “ridiculous” to ask him specific questions about prominent figures and world events.
