Wrestling with an issue that we’ve spent a lot of time on over the last nine years, Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV argues, “The problem with reporting on Donald Trump is the press never took him seriously.” He contrasts the way political beat reporting worked for decades:
You didn’t have to cover American politics very long to realize that politicians lied, prevaricated and said things that were demonstrably untrue all the time. It didn’t take much longer to learn that you weren’t there to report their lies. You were there to report what politicians said. You were, in effect, a stenographer. Lies, if they were remarked upon at all, were the domain of pundits.
As a political reporter, you could point to gaffes, however. Remember gaffes? A good part of the job of a political journalist was to endure hours and days and weeks and months of tedium on the campaign trail waiting for that ever-hoped-for moment when the candidate would make a gaffe and you were there to witness it and write about it. A candidate would sometimes say what we now call “the quiet part out loud,” expressing his real view that cutting taxes actually did affect the deficit, rather than give his talking point that tax cuts would raise revenues instead of adding to the deficit. A candidate might misspeak, or, as Edmund Muskie was said to have done in New Hampshire while running in the 1972 Democratic primary, break down in tears right there in front of the press, and everyone would run to the phones to call in this groundbreaking political moment that was certain to bury his candidacy, which it did.
If you were lucky after days and weeks and months on the road, you might be there when a candidate makes a mistake, saying he was in Des Moines when he was actually in Detroit. If a candidate told a lie out loud, it wouldn’t be called that, of course, because the press didn’t accuse politicians of lying back then. It would be called a “distortion” or even a “falsehood,” but never a lie. The way you couched the statement that wasn’t true would indicate the seriousness of its falsity. If a politician claimed that he had never been unfaithful to his wife, you would repeat that, but then maybe indicate that he had been seen “in the company of” another woman once or twice, hinting at his unfaithfulness. Incredibly, it once took a photograph of presidential candidate Gary Hart with Donna Rice, a young campaign worker, sitting on his lap, to disprove Hart’s denial that he was a “womanizer.” But just as incredibly, he wasn’t called a liar for claiming faithfulness that wasn’t there.
And then, Trump entered the picture, and things changed.
Those were the “before” days. It boggles the mind that we have been in the “now” days for more than nine years, since the twice-divorced platinum playboy descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and, unburdened by the more than two dozen women who had accused him of sexual harassment and sexual assault, greeted the political press who had gathered, they thought, to report that Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for president.
He did much, much more than that, beginning with his lies about immigrants: “They are bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime and they’re rapists.” Who was this buffoon? was the reaction of the national media. No one had ever announced a political campaign like this.
As with so many things, the old rules weren’t designed for someone so outrageously outside the normal and our institutions were slow to catch up. Or never did.
A few months later, I wrote this for the Village Voice about Trump: “What we are watching every day is ‘pageant Trump,’ and it’s why the national political press has been so confused. Covering him is like covering the Victoria’s Secret fashion show: It’s supposed to be hot and sexy and fun and irresistible, but it turns out to be just a bunch of pneumatic posing – all feathers and sequins and nylon and cheap lace from China, as sexless as one of Trump’s silent wives. Donald Trump is the Wonderbra of American politics. He pushes everything Up and Out and In Your Face. But you know what’s left when the Wonderbra comes off, don’t you? Donald Trump sure as hell does.”
I wrote that in January of 2016. The national media certainly didn’t know what to make of Trump, and neither did I, because at the same time, I saw him as a buffoon, the rest of the press saw him, and treated him like a uniquely “American” figure in politics, with his fake hair and his fake tan and his supermodel wife and his exaggerations and outrageous statements nobody in American politics had ever made before.
See if how I described it way back then sounds familiar: “Trump says something outrageous, and his fans parrot him with outrage of their own. Then he escalates the outrage. He says John McCain is a pansy, and the pundits are shocked, but then it’s okay. Then he wants to register Muslims, and the pundits haul out their pocket Constitutions and wave them around, and then that’s okay. He promises to bring back waterboarding, and the pundits loose the dread words, George W. Bush, at him like poison arrows — and waterboarding goes back down the memory hole. He wants to ban all immigration by Muslims, and a couple of Ivy League law professors write op-eds saying it might not be all that illegal, and once again the pundits put down their pens.”
He recounts for the next several paragraphs how Trump continued to spin wild lies—and utter nonsense—to this day with the mainstream press rarely calling them out as such. Jumping ahead to the present:
The New York Times this week finally published a front-page story calling attention to Trump’s age and pointing out how frequently Trump “has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately,” complete with actual unhinged quotes from his rallies and a linguistic statistical analysis of Trump’s speech patterns and most frequently used exaggerations and lies. But it’s the next sentence in the Times story that, for me at least, says it all: Speaking of Trump’s erratic speech on the campaign trail, the Times said, “In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.”
Nine long years in, the man who began his first campaign for president as a buffoon has become a caricature of a buffoon, but we, including the political press, are all so used to it by now that the New York Times calling attention to Trump’s obvious unfitness for office became a story covered by the rest of the political press. Why? Because the Times and much of the rest of the national media played such a large role in normalizing behavior that once would have been disqualifying on the day it occurred.
While Truscott was calling out this phenomenon from almost the beginning, he doesn’t let himself off the hook:
The orange-haired buffoon who first ran for president in 2015 showed us over the years who he was, and still much of the press let him slide, perhaps because his entire political party not only let these outrages slide, they celebrated him for them. A discussion of how 70 million Americans could have followed Donald Trump’s long descent through one disqualifying act after another — he’s been criminally convicted of multiple crimes by a jury of his peers, remember? — is one for another day. In 2016, I called him a “toy fascist.” He was the real thing, not a toy. I mistook a buffoon for a monster, and I will be eternally sorry for that.
While I fully agree with Truscott on his major premise—that the press has treated Trump differently in some ways than it would a “normal” candidate, with the ironic impact of normalizing him—I remain skeptical of his conclusion: that it much mattered. The fact of the matter is that the New York Times, Washington Post, and other prestige outlets did, in fact, assign beat reporters to all three Trump campaigns and to the Trump White House. Said reporters dutifully reported pretty much everything Trump said. They were, in fact, stenographers. All of the gaffes and “saying the quiet part out loud” were covered. Many of them on the front page.
And, lord knows, the pundits pundited. They routinely called him a liar and unfit for the presidency. This, incidentally, included pundits who had traditionally been associated with the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Over time, it became difficult to distinguish the reporters from the pundits. While she’s caught a lot of grief from the left, I never once read a report from Maggie Haberman and had the slightest doubt that she held Trump in utter contempt. Which is very much not the way things were done before Trump.
The notion that the things Trump said and did that made him manifestly unfit for office were somehow kept secret by the press is just nonsense. Everyone reading this blog were exposed to each and every one of the outrages.
Those who decided that Trump was fit for office—or, at least, preferable to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris—did so using motivated reasoning, not blissful ignorance. Most were simply dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who were going to vote for their party’s nominee regardless. Some wanted to poke a finger in the eye of The Establishment. Some were just happy that someone was Saying The Things That Needed to Be Said or hated the same people they did. But none of them did so without knowing at least the broad outlines of who he was.
