"What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama — yet again—a central part of our own politics?"

Wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in January 2008, quoted in this morning's NYT in a review of a new collection of some of his essays. (The book is "And Yet...") From the review:

It’s a shame Mr. Hitchens isn’t here to comment on Donald Trump’s political moment. He saw in the ideas behind Ross Perot’s candidacy some of what he might have distrusted in Mr. Trump’s, that is the idea that “government should give way to management.”...

Yes, "management" — I was just saying that's Trump's "stock one-word answer to queries about how he'll do something he says he will do." So I dug up the old Hitchens essay. Here. It's in The Wilson Quarterly. The Wilson Quarterly? Egad. Woodrow Wilson. That name is mud this week. And the Hitchens essay is "Bring on the Mud/Mud-slinging in politics is a time-honored American tradition. But is there anything so bad about throwing a few political barbs?" It's not mostly about government as management, and the whole thing is on such a high level that I want to weep for our loss:

When asked, millions of people will say that the two parties are (a) so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable, and (b) too much occupied in partisan warfare. The two “perceptions” are not necessarily opposed: Party conflict could easily be more and more disagreement about less and less—what Sigmund Freud characterized in another context as “the narcissism of the small difference.” For a while, about a decade ago, the combination of those two large, vague impressions gave rise to the existence of a quasi-plausible third party, led by Ross Perot, which argued, in effect, that politics should be above politics, and that government should give way to management. That illusion, like the touching belief that one party is always better than the other, is compounded of near-equal parts naiveté and cynicism.

By the way, the phrase "his name is mud" goes back to 1823:

1823   ‘J. Bee’ Slang 122   Mud, a stupid twaddling fellow. ‘And his name is mud!’ ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.

But some people like to tie the phrase to Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated the leg John Wilkes Booth broke. Whether Booth broke the leg when he jumped onto the stage in Ford's Theatre is a separate question and one question too many for this post of many questions.

Politico: "TV networks hold conference call to discuss Trump treatment."

I thought the networks were colluding on how they were going to treat Trump, but it turns out they've got a problem with how he's treating them:

"The effort in the Trump campaign is to limit any kind of interaction between our reporters and the people attending the Trump events. So we'd like to have some access to folks," [one unnamed] executive said.... In one instance, a CNN reporter was told to return to the media "pen" or have his credentials revoked when he tried to film protesters in the crowd at a Trump event last week. A reporter from NBC News was told to return to the media area on Friday as she tried to interview attendees at a Trump rally before the event began. Campaigns often keep reporters in designated media areas during campaign events. The areas often include risers for cameras and sometimes include desks and reserved chairs for reporters.... But Trump's overall approach to the media — including direct attacks on reporters and specific outlets — has been particularly harsh. His campaign has also denied credentials to outlets such as Univision, Fusion, BuzzFeed and the Des Moines Register, often in retaliation for another piece the outlet (or its editorial board) wrote or broadcast about Trump.

Trump seems to talk a lot about whether he's being treated "fairly." "Campaigns often keep reporters in designated media areas... But Trump's overall approach to the media — including direct attacks on reporters and specific outlets... has been particularly harsh." Well, the media's approach to Trump has been particularly harsh, or so I'm sure it seems to Trump. Another big Trump theme is "management." (It's his stock one-word answer to queries about how he'll do something he says he will do.) Trump is managing the press. Is his approach "particularly harsh" or is this that management we're hearing so much about?

And isn't there an element of truth to my misreading? The network folk are trying to figure out how to treat Trump — how to manage him. It will be hard, because whatever moves they make he will use against them, and attacking the press is one of his prime strategies. He's got things going so that he doesn't need them or they need him more than he needs them. They really did think, early on, that they could bring him down, and they tried again and again. Their game didn't work, and he has some never-before-seen game and they're very confused about how to play it. He, on the other hand, is having great fun. Another big Trump theme is "energy." And this game with the press cranks up the energy for him.