Visitors to the major news sites that I frequent—The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, NPR, YahooNews, and Google News—could easily miss what one might think would be a big story: the presumptive Republican Party nominee for President making some rather outrageous comments in a profanity-laced tirade at a campaign rally. Of those, only NYT and YahooNews highlight the story high enough that I could see them without scrolling.
NYT (“Trump Says Some Migrants Are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if He Loses“):
Former President Donald J. Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.
With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.
The dark view resurfaced throughout his speech. While discussing the U.S. economy and its auto industry, Mr. Trump promised to place tariffs on cars manufactured abroad if he won in November. He added: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
For nearly 90 minutes outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Mr. Trump delivered a discursive speech, replete with attacks and caustic rhetoric. He noted several times that he was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.
The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.
If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”
Mr. Trump also stoked fears about the influx of migrants coming into the United States at the southern border. As he did during his successful campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump used incendiary and dehumanizing language to cast many migrants as threats to American citizens.
He asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”
[…]
Mr. Trump issued vulgar and derogatory remarks about a number of Democrats, including ones he often targets, like Mr. Biden and Fani Willis, the Atlanta prosecutor overseeing his criminal case in Georgia, as well as those widely viewed as prospective future presidential candidates, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.
Mr. Trump called Mr. Biden a “stupid president” several times and at one point referred to him as a “dumb son of a — ” before trailing off. He also compared Ms. Willis’s first name to a vulgarity, called Mr. Newsom “Gavin New-scum” and took jabs at Mr. Pritzker’s physical appearance.
Unlike some regular commenters, I don’t think the lack of prominence to these remarks—all of the sites covered them—is a nefarious plot to boost Trump to keep the race close. Rather, it’s a function of Trump acting outrageously with such regularity that it’s not newsworthy. It’s dog bites man rather than man bites dog.
I’ve long found myself doing the same thing for much the same reason. At some point, flogging the same story day after day gets monotonous. (For that matter, I’ve mostly stopped commenting on mass shootings, as I have nothing new to say about them and can already predict what the comments section will look like. And, while I covered the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on a daily basis at their outset, I now comment on them only sporadically.)
In the early days of Trump’s political ascendency, people constantly warned that his outrageous behavior was being “normalized.” To some degree, that has in fact happened. The press continues to cover it. They even describe it in ways that make clear they think it’s outrageous. But there’s also a certain “water is wet” quality to it.
