By portraying Donald Trump as something other than a mentally ill grifter, the media is doing a disservice to the country and is helping him for the third election in a row.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Once again, the media is screwing up a presidential election. This time, major news outlets are not covering Donald Trump, they are covering up for Donald Trump.
Before we get to that, let’s look at past media fails.
In 2016, corporate news outlets gave Trump billions of dollars in free press. Back then, they treated him as a novelty act and never figured out how to cover his lies. The national press corps played right into his hands by focusing more on Hillary Clinton’s emails than all of Trump’s scandals combined. Even worse is that a lot of this information found its way into their hands courtesy of Russian hackers trying to help Trump win (ironically, the media learned its lesson from that debacle just in time to help the former president again this year).
How is it possible that Trump was able to create an entire alternate reality for years? After lying his way through the 2016 campaign, things got even worse after he was elected.
This isn’t to say that the media showered him with nothing but glowing coverage. Far from it. However, journalists also did not treat Trump like the threat to democracy that he was.
Part of that is because there has never been anybody like him, and part of it was some antiquated notion that “both sides” had to be given equal consideration or weight. That might work if both sides were acting in good faith, but not if one side just keeps lying.
Therefore, the then-president got away with the most shameless (and shameful) behavior because there was simply no precedent for dealing with someone so utterly unprincipled.
Fox News didn’t have that problem because it cynically promoted Trump… and that’s another media fail.
Instead of portraying Fox as the right-wing propaganda outlet that it is, the media too often treated its “reporters” like wayward colleagues. They were not. Fox is a part of the GOP’s propaganda apparatus: Its goal is to deceive viewers and get Republicans elected.
This combination of ineptitude, indifference, and malice is how the Big Lie came to be.
Yes, Trump is the one who gave voice to the “stop the steal” fabrication, but if journalists had done their jobs, it would have never gained as much traction as it did. And the former president never paid the price for it. The only minor consolation is that Fox literally did — to the tune of $787 million and being exposed as a spreader of misinformation that would have destroyed the reputation of any real news organization.
And that is how Trump managed to become a presidential candidate again instead of a political pariah.
This time around, the media has found a new way of screwing up.
Undoubtedly, the former president has gotten weirder, more demented, and more unhinged.
However, the coverage of him has not reflected that.
Too often, the media is covering Trump in a way that makes him sound sane or reasonable or honest or competent, when, in reality, he is none of these things.
Yes, of course, the major news outlets have covered some of the crazier stuff, like the deeply racist “Haitians eat pets” lie, but that barely scratches the surface of Trump’s insanity.
If you pay attention to everything he says and does over the course of a few days — the rallies, the interviews, and the social media posts — you will reach an inevitable conclusion: This man is not fit to hold office… especially not the presidency.
Take Tuesday’s rally in Georgia, which was billed as a speech on the “economy.”
In an 80-minute address, Trump made some statements that were certainly related to the economy, like when he pledged that he would bring back jobs “at a level not to be believed, but you believe it,” or that he wanted “German car companies to become American car companies.”
Setting aside that the economy lost jobs during his presidency, this is just the kind of braggadocious nonsense he regularly spouts.
After hyping his tariffs (“one of the most beautiful words I have ever heard”), he then turned to classic fearmongering by predicting that, if he were to lose another election, the US would be “gone.”
Of course, none of his touted doomsday scenarios came to pass when Joe Biden defeated him in 2020, and the stock market just hit a series of record highs.
After riffing on the dangers of hydrogen cars, Trump went to the non-economy portion of his remarks… which included praise of authoritarians, lies about his poll numbers, and complaints about a debate he claims he won (contrary to all the polls and his subsequent refusal to consider meeting Kamala Harris in a rematch).
After stoking some xenophobia, Trump ambled across the stage to hug an imaginary chart (at 47:20) and suggested that God protected him from an assassination attempt.
Then there was some more xenophobia before the former president mused about Oprah Winfrey enjoying key lime pie.
Next, his audience booed a reference to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before Trump praised another authoritarian leader and promised the construction of a useless missile shield protecting the US.
So, here is how The New York Times and The Washington Post covered the rally.
Times: “Trump Lays Out Economic Proposals in Georgia”
Post: “Trump Promotes Tariff Plan in Savannah Speech”
That’s not journalism; that’s a dereliction of duty.
Yes, reporters have to be objective.
However, in the case of Trump, being objective means acknowledging his mental illnesses, his never-ending grifts, his increasing feeble-mindedness, the endless lies, a lack of anything that even remotely deserves to be called a plan, and his attempts to bring out the worst in his supporters.
That’s not being unfair to the former president, that’s accurately describing him and his campaign.
But the media just cannot get itself to make these obvious truths the story, and that is a big reason why Trump is even running again and now finds himself in a competitive race.
