This country has a problem and it can be summed up in one word: perception.
Rep. Jim Jordan perceives that it's OK to try to intimidate the district attorney in Manhattan, who is investigating Donald Trump. According to a Tuesday tweet from Jordan, "Americans want affordable groceries. Not a Donald Trump prosecution."
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg says Jordan won't intimidate him. Meanwhile, many legal observers perceive that Jordan may have unlawfully interfered in the proceedings of a grand jury. Me? I just want to know why Jordan has the perception that Bragg has anything to do with the price of groceries?
Rep. Ted Lieu's perception is that Jordan has lost his marbles. Here's what he said:
The former president has yet to be charged with a crime, yet Republicans are making serious accusations about a criminal investigation without seeing evidence, without seeing charging documents, and without any proof of prosecutorial wrongdoing. Time and again Speaker McCarthy, Chairman Jim Jordan, and other Republican leaders have sided with the most extreme wing of the GOP and chosen chaos over governing. Clearly, the Speaker of the House is so busy interfering in a criminal investigation that he doesn't have time to present a budget.
As for the perception that the Republican Party is being held hostage by Trump and would like to kick him to the curb, Kurt Bardella of the Los Angeles Times reminds us that it's time to give up that nonsense. "Anyone who thinks Republicans really have any desire to 'move on' from Trump should abandon this fantasy. At this point, Republicans such as McCarthy aren't hostages to the former president; they're his volunteers and aspiring accomplices."
Not to be outdone, Rep. Matt Gaetz, the crown prince of crazy clowns, chastised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for not "jumping into the breach" to keep Trump from being extradited to New York to face charges that have not yet been filed. It is also Gaetz's perception that while he too has not seen any evidence in the New York case (which hasn't been filed) any legal action taken against dandy Don is unwarranted.
I guess we should also mention these are the very same people who had the perception that Hillary Clinton should be locked up, although they had no evidence she had done anything wrong — even after numerous congressional hearings.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump doesn't care about any of that. It is his perception that whatever happens to him can be used to raise more money. Over the weekend he leaked a story that he would be arrested on Tuesday — which didn't happen. The following day, he demanded that whoever leaked the information be held accountable, and then by the end of the day he was asking his supporters for money to fight the bogus charges that hadn't been filed and, again, had been leaked by him. Some perceive that Donald Duck set it all up just to make money.
Speaking of perceptions, there is a general perception that covering the White House is glamorous. For example, this week the cast of "Ted Lasso" showed up in the White House briefing room to talk about mental health. And then the following day the press corps got to watch President Biden present 24 awards celebrating the arts and humanities. Bruce Springsteen, Gladys Knight and Julia-Louis Dreyfus were among those honored.
The press never really got to ask questions of the "Lasso" cast, though as Jason Sudeikis exited the stage, I managed to ask him if his fictional team would fare better than 20th place. (After all, there is no 21st place in the English Premier League.) He looked askance until he got the joke — the night before, that question was a central part of a "Ted Lasso" episode that involved a press conference — and then he smiled and said "Yes." He refrained, however, from doing his Joe Biden impression when NBC's Kelly O'Donnell asked. I guess he didn't want to give the perception that he was being rude. "You've got the real one here," he told O'Donnell with a smile.
I used my best football-coach voice on the gadfly reporter who disrupted the White House press breifing: "The rest of us are here too, pal."
That day was marred by a gadfly reporter who started off the briefing by griping that he never gets called on — even before press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asked for questions. That reporter never actually asked a question; he just whined on for 15 minutes. O'Donnell asked for decorum several times and former WHCA president Jeff Mason of Reuters quietly tried to reprimand this person, who just prattled on, trying to bully the press, the guests and the press secretary. I'm all for a good question, but I'll save a good wine for dinner. In my perception he was acting like a spoiled child. After all, he could always go upstairs to the press office and ask his question like the rest of us. The perception of the rest of the press is that he just wanted some "me" time on camera, so in my finest football-coach voice I reminded him that "the rest of us are here too, pal," and then admonished him for "impinging on everyone else who is in here only trying to do their job." He got quiet.
So much for glamour.
The next day during the arts and humanities awards I got to stand in the very back of the East Room. Our White House escort took the press through the Home Depot section of the White House, filled with freezers, food, a kitchen entrance, rakes, shovels and other implements of destruction before walking up the stairs into the East Room. We conspicuously avoided the guests. Most of the time the White House treats the press like feral cats. We're good to have around to chase the mice, but the staff doesn't want us meeting guests.
We watched the ceremony and then were quietly escorted back through the steerage section before being deposited unceremoniously outside the briefing room. Some of us had the additional perk of standing next to a reporter (who shall remain nameless) who either hadn't bathed in three weeks, or (more likely) had consumed several cloves of garlic for lunch that day. I'm not complaining. Being in the front row of history is great. It's just not as glamorous as the perception.
The ripples of our perceptions make their way across everything in our lives. In Florida, DeSantis perceives that talking about menstrual cycles is harmful. He also has the perception that banning drag shows and not saying the word "gay" will solve his perceived closeted self-loathing.
For others, the perception is that we are safely navigating our way through the uncharted waters of the war in Ukraine — even as the tension increases. The U.S. continues to analyze the contents of a Chinese spy balloon brought down in American territorial waters after it traversed the heart of the country. "We'll never publicly acknowledge what we found," a national security expert told me on background. "But we got everything valuable from the payload."
Then the U.S. lost a drone over the Black Sea when it was head-butted by a Russian fighter jet. "They got nothing. We wiped it clean before it went down," the same expert explained. And we watched President Xi Jinping of China pal around with Vladimir Putin in Russia. "That only shows how desperate Russia is and how concerned China is with our influence around the world," I was told. That's an interesting perception.
Putin wanted to look as brave as Biden. So he took a stroll through Mariupol, far from the front lines, to brag that Russia was rebuilding it — after bombing it into rubble.
Putin, meanwhile, wanted to promote the perception that he was as brave as Biden. So he recently visited Mariupol in the portion of Ukraine held by Russian forces. Sure, it's far from the fighting — unlike Kyiv, which is under siege and frequently bombed. Biden went to Kyiv. Putin took a leisurely stroll in Mariupol and apparently bragged about how Russia is already rebuilding there, as if that were a good thing. "They wouldn't have to rebuild there," John Kirby reminded us from the podium in the press briefing room on Tuesday, "if Russia hadn't bombed it." Turns out Kirby and the rest of the world have a different perception than Putin about Russia's magnanimous humanitarian efforts in occupied Ukraine. Putin has shown no signs of quitting the war he started. Nor has he shied away from the perception that the war is somehow our fault.
Meanwhile, there are members of the GOP who have the perception that giving up on our friends in Ukraine is somehow good for democracy. The perception of their critics is that those in the Republican Party who argue that point are addicted to either Adderall or crack.
As it turns out, perception is a tricky thing, mostly made of misperceptions that often spring from disinformation, fiction, greed and narcissism.
In nearly every speech Biden has made since he hit the campaign trail in the 2020 general election, he has said "Let's remember who we are. We are the United States of America. There is nothing we can't do if we put our minds to it."
His emphasis is always on "United." And he often says in these speeches that we're "at an inflection point" in America's history.
It is clearly Biden's perception that we labor under misperceptions because of disinformation which continues to stoke our division and keeps us from solving some serious problems. Hence, the media circus around Donald Trump continues to warp our perceptions.
There are many who agree with him. Darick Robertson, one of the creators of "The Boys" comic book, offered his perception on Twitter; "What we're witnessing in real time is mainstream media treating the law and politics like entertainment, while the law moves at its normal iceberg pace, and a candidate born of TV entertainment happy to exploit it all, consequences be damned."
In my perception, the man has a valid point.
