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My favorite genre of Donald Trump sound bites are the ones in which he obviously has no idea what he’s talking about but keeps plowing forward regardless — the verbal equivalent of posting through it. A classic of the form came when he went on-camera in the wake of Hurricane Florence and said that it was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Trump’s trademark public-speaking strength — one that, it must be said, has been waning considerably in the past couple of years — has been to feel entirely comfortable going in front of a camera and, rather than doing even the slightest bit of research to have the faintest notion of what might actually be going on, just winging it. Of all the Trump personality quirks that have lowered our national floor over the last decade, this is one of the most pervasive. We used to mock people for going on television despite being clueless on whatever they’re supposed to be talking about. Now we’re too busy looking at a second screen to notice. We’re like the kids in Charlie Brown cartoons listening to teachers; we just hear the sounds.
But it’s not like Trump is the only famous person who has made authoritative-sounding ignorance a trademark over the years. As a sports fan, Trump’s soliloquies have always reminded me of a man who mastered the practice a long time ago. I suppose, then, I should not be surprised that now people are encouraging him to run for president.
There are many quintessential Stephen A. Smith clips; he has, after all, built his career on the two-minute segment. But this one from 2018 is my favorite:
Stephen A Smith’s scouting report for #TNF has Hunter Henry and Derrick Johnson as a key matchup…
Neither has played a snap for the Chargers or Chiefs all year 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/1NyqfJY52G
— NFL Retweet (@NFLRT) December 13, 2018
To recap: Smith, while discussing a game he was paid to analyze, mentioned two players who were not in fact on either team playing in the game, emphasized the importance of another who was not currently in the league, and got the name of one of the teams wrong. If he did not have someone else on the panel with him to correct him, he would have just plowed right through. Smith isn’t a sports analyst. He has just mastered the art of sounding like one — he has, essentially, weaponized sports shouting.
Smith isn’t doing any more research now than he used to, but he and his network have learned that there’s no reason to put him in a position where he’s supposed to spout actual facts. The mistake of the 2018 segment wasn’t that Smith didn’t know anything about the teams he was discussing; it was that ESPN acted as if he was supposed to. Smith’s segments now are constructed to be vague and basically content free — their main purpose is to generate a takeaway quote (on the 76ers from the other day: “This season is a joke!” ). Then it’s on to the next segment and the next quote. For all the talk of Smith “debating” other commentators, that’s not what he does anymore; that would require research or even talking points. It’s much easier and safer to simply roll him out there, let him bark for a while, “respond” to someone else on the panel by cartoonishly furrowing his eyebrows, and cut back so he can bark some more.
Smith has said his favorite debate “partner” was Skip Bayless because “I didn’t have to show up to a morning meeting with [him].” He used to be famous for writing his newspaper columns (back when he deigned to write anything at all) on his BlackBerry while commuting. He views knowledge as just something that might slow him down, get him bogged down in the annoying minutiae of facts and reality. His primary rhetorical trick is to loudly proclaim something so obvious that only a moron would think otherwise, so that when his opponent attempts to explain why an issue might actually be complicated and involve some nuance, it makes them sound like a sputtering simp. My old friend and Deadspin successor Tommy Craggs once said that Stephen A’s sole skill was being “emphatic on command.” This skill is now the only skill anyone needs.
And it’s a skill that transfers easily into our degraded political discourse. After Democrats’ crushing loss in November, the party has been agonizing over ways to appeal to disaffected voters — especially young men — who have drifted right over the years, often wooed by straight-talking, ostensibly nonpolitical figures like Joe Rogan. Though Smith has shown plenty of interest in politics, he doesn’t come off as especially partisan (he’s an independent), and, unlike much of the Democratic Party, he’s undeniably entertaining. So why not him? Suddenly, the idea has gained currency. There he is, telling CNBC’s Alex Sherman that he “wouldn’t mind being in office.” There he is, explaining why Democrats find themselves in such a hole to Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor.
In an interview with The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang — a fine writer who has hopefully not become so much of an online creature that he honestly is taking any of this seriously, though with a headline like “Stephen A. Smith for President,” there’s definitely reason to worry — Smith says, “Woke culture and cancel culture ravaged the country, the Democrats were way more focussed on that than the economy, immigration, and crime.” This is, not to put too fine a point on it, surface-level drivel; it sounds like so much of Smith’s output — like something your relative would pound onto their Facebook feed, or what a crank radio talk-show listener would call in to blare about while stuck in traffic. It’s basically the political equivalent of “Josh Allen can’t win the big one!” Surely Kang has heard this argument, such as it is, a billion times, and I can’t imagine he takes it seriously at any sort of face value. Were any other person speaking, he’d roll his eyes. But Stephen A. says it so emphatically that it almost takes the shape of an actual thought.
These two paragraphs in Kang’s piece are telling. I have put the words that Smith actually says in bold.
“They need to cleanse the Democratic Party as we know it,” Smith told me in a phone call on Wednesday. Career politicians and consultants should still have some say in how future campaigns should be run, but he believed the Party, as a whole, had adhered to a litany of failed ideas and practices. “The Republicans said, ‘We want Donald Trump,’ ” Smith said. “They’ve been that way for ten years now. The Democrats say, ‘It’s Hillary’s turn, now it’s Biden’s turn, now it’s Kamala Harris’s turn.’ ” This succession of entitled candidates not only ignored voters who were indicating they wanted change; the Party swapped out kitchen-table issues for a series of alluring, and ultimately destructive, ideas about justice. “Woke culture and cancel culture ravaged the country,” Smith said. “The Democrats were way more focussed on that than the economy, immigration, and crime.”
Smith also believes that the Party cannot overly engage in “demagoguery” against Trump because the American people have grown tired of that message and are looking, instead, for someone who will take a more analytical approach. “If he’s doing something good, let’s say so,” Smith said. “If he’s doing something harmful, let’s say so.” He has his reservations about Musk, but he does not object, in theory, to someone performing an audit of the federal government and trying to find pockets of waste and inefficiency. “Why are we reacting like this when we haven’t even discovered everything he’s found?” Smith asked.
I am not sure exactly what sort of political savior could save us from this moment, or whether one could actually exist, but, come on: “Why are we reacting like this?” Uh, that definitely ain’t it. (What a slogan! Get your picket signs and get out in the streets! Vive la résistance!) Why are we reacting like this? Seriously, what is this shit?
There are some completed thoughts in the above paragraphs, but they’re Kang’s, not Stephen A’s. Smith’s political “analysis” is a knee-jerk mishmash of RFK Jr. -style “just asking questions” and the worst version of both-sides journalism, combined with a near-total lack of interest in what Trump or Musk may actually be doing. Most of his comments sound like a guy trying to pretend he prepared for his next camera segment. Who, exactly, was saying it was Biden’s “turn?” When did Kamala Harris focus on “woke culture?” (Probably not when she was talking about “lethal fighting forces” in her nomination acceptance speech.) I’m reminded of John Mulaney’s great joke that the New York Post reads like “someone read a better newspaper and now they’re trying to text you everything they can remember. Doesn’t have to be right, just has to be short.” Smith talks about politics like he scrolled through Post headlines and, to use Mulaney’s term, “got the gist.” Which is not all that different from how he talks about sports.
Look, I’ve got a long and complicated history with Smith myself, but I’ll confess to have softened on him a bit in recent years. He has a shtick, and I do think this shtick has been corrosive to any sort of intelligent sports discourse, but I do not believe Smith is malicious and, in the end, I do suspect his heart is generally in the right place, if it hasn’t been entirely consumed by his persona at this point. In an age of Barstool and Pat McAfee, Smith is hardly the worst guy on the lot. He does seem to have an occasional sense of humor about himself — you can sense an earnest, even kinda likably dopey guy in there somewhere, as evidenced by his ever-amusing appearances on General Hospital. And anybody who does this to Jason Whitlock by definition cannot be all bad.
But in a world where expertise, rationality, and complexity are under constant assault by cartoonishly vile people foundationally motivated by willful and aggressive ignorance, the Stephen A. Smith political boomlet represents a deeply flawed kind of counterattack. The reasoning here is nothing more than “Hey, they have a bunch of people who don’t know anything, maybe we should get our own person who doesn’t know anything.” Stephen A. Smith for president — my God, I do not think I have ever written a more ridiculous phrase — is the result of giving up, of ceding everything that actually matters. If he is any sort of answer, then quite frankly we are not serious people.
