Opening 'The Overton Window'

BONUS: Did Joe and Mika 'kiss Trump's ring'?

The late Joe Overton and Donald Trump -illustration by TC courtesy the Mackinac Center and Wikipedia

Editor’s note: This will be brief because we have been baby-sitting our infant grandson here in San Antonio for the last 36 hours while his parents are away. It’s a joy but also time consuming and exhausting.

Too often pundits such as yours truly get it wrong. But after I filed last week’s column, “Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, RFK2? Seriously?,” it dawned on me that Trump’s worst cabinet nominations could be a smoke screen to get other highly questionable picks confirmed with little resistance from the Senate and only perfunctory scrutiny from news media.

Indeed, in my appearance on Paul Pacelli’s afternoon radio show yesterday on WICC-AM 660, I posited exactly that (fast forward to 19:10):

This morning, I ran across a New York Times story by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan headlined: “Gaetz May Not Be Confirmed, Trump Admits. He’s Pushing Him and Others Anyway” (free link). The subhead is: “The president-elect is taking a flood-the-zone approach to his cabinet nominations, betting that the Senate won’t dare to turn them all down.”

He [Trump] is making calls on Mr. Gaetz’s behalf, and he remains confident that even if Mr. Gaetz does not make it, the standard for an acceptable candidate will have shifted so much that the Senate may simply approve his other nominees who have appalled much of Washington.

Turns out, that strategy is hardly unique. There’s even an actual term for it: The Overton Window. My colleague, Northeastern University journalism Prof. Dan Kennedy, drew my attention to it today and summed up its applicability to 2024 politics in a blog post today:

The Overton Window is generally a term used to describe crazy policy ideas that are put forth in order to make other, slightly less crazy ideas appear to be more plausible. But it works for people as well. The only way Hegseth and Kennedy look good is by standing in contrast to Gaetz. And so it goes.

The concept is named for the late senior vice president Joe Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank, that even produced a video on the concept. And yes, Dan, so it goes …

Did Joe and Mika kiss Trump's ring?

Much has been made about Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski skipping work on Friday to travel to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump to “restart communications” and repair their broken relationship with the once-and-future president. Trump said the couple asked for the meeting.

When Trump first announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he was a regular guest on the show, sometimes cold-calling the now-husband-and-wife duo. They subsequently had a falling out and became harsh critics of Trump.

We don’t really know what, if any, agreement was reached during the meeting because the two, who are journalists (or play them on TV), would not tell us. Reaction was harsh on social media, with many erstwhile fans of the MSNBC morning political talk show accusing the couple of selling out and “kissing Trump’s ring.”

I am reserving judgement until I see what subsequent coverage looks like. As I wrote on Threads:

Going back on speaking terms isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if the content and tenor of their coverage of Trump softens in exchange for access or protection from his worst excesses, then they have compromised themselves and will lose the respect of almost everyone who watched the show.

Here’s my theory on what happened:

The bombastic Scarborough obviously hates Trump, to whom he once compared to Hitler and who once accused Scarborough of murdering one of his congressional staffers more than 20 years ago. Ditto Brzezinski, whom Trump once claimed he saw “bleeding badly from a facelift.”

After Trump won the presidential election earlier this month, ratings at MSNBC plunged by 54%, an epic decline sure to cost the network and parent company Comcast a lot of money.

Scarborough and Brzezinski make an reported $8 million apiece. Comcast’s top brass met with the couple and told them if the ratings continue to tank, then their salaries are not sustainable. However, if they could get Trump to appear regularly again on Morning Joe as a sitting president, ratings were sure to rise to their former levels, or perhaps beyond. Perfect: the network gets more revenue and Trump gets more legitimacy.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking with it.