The media is still selling a fantasy version of Trump
The media is still selling a fantasy version of Trump
We should all know better by now.
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Nikki Haley spent the dying days of her presidential campaign reminding anyone who’d listen that Donald Trump is unhinged and unfit. But when she ended her candidacy last week after Super Tuesday, she suggested it was possible Trump could still win her endorsement.
“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him,” she said. “And I hope he does that. At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing.”
Of course, it’s impossible that Trump, who regularly called Haley “birdbrain,” will make anything resembling a positive moral choice. He does not build willing coalitions. He only attempts to dominate through violence and intimidation. We know this about him because our birth certificates are not dated “Yesterday.”
But if Haley is overly optimistic about Trump, perhaps it’s because she uncritically consumes mainstream media, which seemingly can’t help but default to covering Trump as if he’s a normal candidate — even after his attempted coup and multiple criminal indictments.
Yes, major news outlets, including the New York Times, are now more likely to acknowledge that Trump outright lies than simply makes “false” statements, but the press still resists definitively calling him out for the terrible and dangerous person he is. Because their baseline assumption is that Trump is erratic and malevolent, it’s not generally regarded as big news when Trump does awful things, such as mocking Biden’s speech impediment during a speech over the weekend. (Watch the footage below, though it should be mentioned that the NYT published an article noting that Trump mocked Biden’s stutter.)
Implicit in the media’s ongoing coverage of Trump is the idea that he might suddenly stop behaving like Donald Trump. Case in point was an absurd article Axios ran last week from national politics reporter Sophia Cai with the headline, “Top Trump advisers try to steer him off personal drama.” The top of the article is bad enough, as it presents Trump’s unhinged vendettas like a “Sex and the City” brunch scene, but the low point is Cai’s suggestion that Trump is “toning down” his rhetoric as he attempts to woo college-educated voters.
On what was once Twitter, the caption above Axios’s article read, “Looking to November, Trump tempers his claims about the 2020 election — a little.” (An earlier version of the tweet that didn’t hedge as much and was widely criticized was deleted — see it at top of the post.) Cai wrote, “In some recent speeches, Trump has used different terms in describing his typical complaint that the 2020 election he lost was ‘stolen’ — saying, ‘We were interrupted,’ or ‘something very bad happened.’”
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These are obvious euphemisms for Trump’s ongoing election lies, but Cai’s assertion isn’t even true. He told supporters at a North Carolina rally just days before the Axios article that “what happened at that last election is a disgrace, and we’re not going to let it happen again. Did you ever notice they go after the people that want to find out where the cheating was — and, by the way, 82 percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election, OK? You can’t have a country with that.” (Surprise! Trump’s “82 percent” claim is a lie.)
In fact, the very day after Axios’s piece dropped, Trump went on Truth Social and proclaimed, “the Election was RIGGED.”
Trump’s remarks at a Rome, Georgia, rally on Saturday were just as disturbing. He insisted that he’d won Georgia in 2020 and that the election was “rigged.” Those same lies painted targets on the backs of Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who won a defamation suit against Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. It’s clear that Trump won’t accept an election loss, and we can expect that he’ll incite more violence and harassment. It’s the height of irresponsibility for a major media outlet to suggest otherwise.
And it’s not just Axios. After Trump won the South Carolina Republican primary, NBC News ran an article headlined, “Fewer grievances, more policy: Trump aides and allies push for a post-South Carolina ‘pivot’.” If you’ve paid any attention to the words that come out of Trump’s mouth, you’d understand that Trump’s policy is personal grievance. He’s openly vowed to spend his second term persecuting his political enemies and anyone who dared tried to hold him accountable for his crimes.
“There is no question that after [the South Carolina primary] there will be a pivot, because there needs to be,” one of Trump’s advisers claimed to NBC. “We are not going to totally be able to move away from what is going on in his personal life. It’s going to be happening every day, and he is a fighter and will talk about it. Everyone understands that.”
The NBC News article doesn’t immediately mention that Trump’s “issues” aren’t merely personal, like a difficult divorce or a failed facelift. He has incredible legal troubles, including four indictments on 91 separate criminal charges. It’s too often taken for granted that Trump will bury all the cases against him if he wins. That’s a massive abuse of power — yet another impeachable offense — that Republicans would enable, and he makes it a major part of his platform. But the media is still talking about a “pivot.”
Along similar lines, after Biden’s strong State of the Union address last Thursday, the New York Times’ political memo was headlined, “In Two Speeches, Trump and Biden Offer Starkly Different Views of the Country.” This is technically true of any normal presidential race. But what the Times should probably focus on how authoritarian and anti-democratic Trump’s vision actually is.
Amy Walter, publisher of Cook Political Report, criticized Biden’s speech as too partisan: “This feels more like something one would hear at the DNC than a SOTU. Has already mentioned his ‘predecessor’ in negative terms 2 times in first few minutes.” But Biden’s predecessor attempted a coup and actively undermined democracy. It’s not rude for Biden to correctly call out this domestic threat.
On Saturday, the Times published this article: “The Biden-Trump Rerun: A Nation Craving Change Gets More of the Same.” The framing whitewashes Trump as a normal politician and minimizes the stakes of the upcoming election, as though voters must endure another bad Sony comic book movie. The danger of another Trump term, domestically and globally, are seemingly dismissed. Hint: If your headline would’ve worked just as well for a 2016 Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush matchup, you need to reconsider your coverage.
What if … Trump were normal?
The media can’t resist teasing us with the possibility that Trump will suddenly start behaving like a mammal. After all, aren’t drastic personality changes common among 77-year-olds who haven’t changed their behavior in 50 years? This tendency perhaps traces back to 2015 when the press kept selling the former “Apprentice” star as a rational deal maker. Politico described him in 2016 as the “perfect populist.” This was the same Donald Trump who’d inspired Gordon Gekko of “Wall Street” and the 1980s corrupt businessman version of Superman nemesis Lex Luthor.
Trump benefitted greatly from this counterintuitive framing. His primary opponent Ted Cruz was seen as the rigid ideologue, though this was mostly Cruz’s own doing, a mistake Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would later repeat. Weeks before the presidential election, polls showed that voters believed Trump was more “moderate” than Democrat Hillary Clinton, and pollster Harry Enten noted that Trump was viewed as more moderate than any Republican presidential candidate since 1972.
This result seems like a spectacular failure in covering Trump, who openly campaigned as an extremist on immigration, vowing to build a wall on the southern border and ban Muslims from entering the US. What passed for his foreign policy was hardly measured, either: He proposed bombing terrorists’ families at his campaign rallies.
During his presidency, Trump consistently governed as a typical right-wing Republican in every terrible way (domestic policy, judicial nominees) and broke with one-time GOP orthodoxy in ways that were alarming (kowtowing to Putin’s Russia, threatening to abandon NATO). Nonetheless, the media seemed to think he could change, that he could become the politician they’d crafted in their heads — a practical negotiator who’d rise to the occasion.
The media expressed no such faith in Trump’s 2016 opponent: Multiple articles presented Clinton’s “untrustworthiness” as a done deal, with no hope for improvement. “Mrs. Clinton has slowly owned up to the trustworthiness problem. But it will take more than acknowledgment to fix the issue,” the Times wrote in July 2016. Later that month, after she accepted the Democratic nomination, the Times declared, “The trust of the American electorate remains out of her reach. Its affections still elude her.” (A similar narrative has emerged about President Joe Biden’s age.)
The Times claimed Clinton suffered from a “trust deficit,” yet the media failed to effectively challenge Trump’s many lies on the campaign trail, especially the ones that made voters consider him a “moderate.” He claimed that he’d avoid any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and that he’d replace the Affordable Care Act with some magical law that kept everything voters liked and ditched everything they didn’t. There was never any reason to trust a known liar like Trump, who’d say anything to get elected while somehow avoiding the “dishonest politician” label.
Trump holds the football and the press runs up to kick it
No matter how often Trump proves the media wrong, they never stop holding out hope that he’ll change or “pivot” or just do something decent for once.
Maggie Haberman at the New York Times wrote in April 2016, “Donald Trump’s More Accepting Views on Gay Issues Set Him Apart in GOP.” The piece promoted the “moderate” image but Trump would soon pick anti-gay Mike Pence as his running mate and anti-gay Jeff Sessions as attorney general. He uniformly nominated extremist, anti-LGBTQ judges. Yet, that didn’t stop Haberman from releasing her 2020 sequel, “After Three Years of Attacking LBGTQ Rights, Trump Suddenly Tries Outreach.” The article admittedly details Trump’s actual horrible record on LGBTQ issues, but the headline provides needless cover for him. Why not focus instead on how much worse a second Trump term would be for queer Americans?
During a February 2017 speech to Congress, Trump addressed Carryn Owens, the widow of slain US Navy SEAL William "Ryan” Owens. CNN political commentator Van Jones said Trump “became president of the United States in that moment. Period.” It was bare minimum presidential behavior, actually, and just a few months later, Trump couldn’t even offer condolences over the phone to a Gold Star widow without offending her.
“Scripted Trump” is pretty easy to spot. He’s awkward and low energy, usually looking like the lead in a hostage video. But the media takes “Scripted Trump” at face value. “Scripted Trump” almost spoke humanely about immigrants at the 2019 State of the Union, but it wasn’t long before the real Trump was back to ranting about an immigrant “invasion.” The pattern is predictable: “Scripted Trump” turns up under pressure, usually in response to bad polls, but real Trump quickly comes roaring back.
Trump’s bungling, malicious leadership during the covid pandemic resulted in needless deaths, but the press quickly seized on the most minor evidence that Trump was starting to take the crisis seriously. Peter Baker at the New York Times wrote in July 2020, “Trump, in a Shift, Endorses Masks and Says Virus Will Get Worse.” That same month, Reuters posted on social media, "President Trump, in a shift in rhetoric and tone, encouraged Americans to wear masks.” But that was “Scripted Trump.” Real Trump spent the next few months refusing to wear a mask publicly and mocking those who did, especially Biden. He minimized the covid threat even after contracting the virus himself and almost dying. Yes, a true about-face would’ve been worth covering, but the media should’ve learned that Trump’s seemingly positive pivots never last.
Trump nominated three of the five Supreme Court justices who directly overturned Roe v. Wade, yet the Times suggested last year that he “seems less vulnerable on abortion” than other Republican presidential candidates and said his “vague statements” might “give him some leeway with voters.” But Trump’s anti-abortion actions should carry more weight than his nebulous statements, which are usually 99 percent lies. When Trump declares that he supports IVF, the media shouldn’t let that pass without reminding voters that he’s more responsible than anyone for putting far-right Republicans in a position to ban the procedure in the first place.
Mainstream media outlets have struggled with covering Trump as he truly is in part because it opens them up to accusations of “liberal bias.” If you’re trying to avoid the perception of taking sides, declaring one presidential candidate a moral degenerate might seem unfair, even if it’s the obvious truth. But the fact of the matter is that we’ve already lived through one ungodly Trump administration. And yet big outlets are still spending more time on Biden’s age than on Trump’s creepy Project 2025, his stated plan to “reshape the federal government” if he returns to the White House.
It’s a pleasant fantasy to imagine Trump might change, especially if you’re a partisan Republican still sticking with a Trump-dominated party, but we should all know by now that his authoritarian appeals aren’t just red meat for the base, and that he’ll never shift to the center or govern inclusively. We know who Donald Trump is. Spoiled meat doesn’t get better. It just continues to rot.
That’s it for today
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This was not just a good post, but a spot-on terrific read by Aaron Rupar It needs to be on the front-page of the NYT or The Post or read on MSNBC or CNN by Van Jones.
While the American media spotlight, ever enthralled by the sensationalism of the moment, remains fixated on Trump and his legal woes, other crucial and overlooked dangers continue to unfold in the United States. First, we have about half our country responding to Trump like zombies - brainwashed followers of the Republican Party (similar to members of the Jim Jones cult), who were unsuspectedly caught in coercive control techniques that Trump uses daily to influence his followers. Second, we have a presidential candidate who sold his soul and our country to the Russians at least ten years prior to sleeping in the White House after 2016. (proof is found in From Democracy to Democrazy by Graham) Third, the influence of Putin's strategies quietly attempts to reshape the trajectory of American politics and American lives. We see that happening NOW.
This current political race is not just between Democrats and Republicans, but between a decent, hard-working, public servant who has successfully served our country for almost 50 years. His constituents re-elected him year after year as a Senator (36 years as a Senator, 8 years as the VP, and 4 years as the President) - he must have been doing something right!!!
His opponent is a man who has been compromised by Russia, who is a convicted rapist and a serial sexual predator, also convicted of fraud with mounds of solid documented evidence and proof, and is now facing 91 criminal charges. His speeches are filled with revenge, hatred, defamation of others, and with no discernable ideology.
Americans were duped decades ago into believing that Russia is no longer our enemy and the world is living in peaceful coexistence. Yes, the Cold War did not die - a revelation for many Americans. We let our guard down, while Russia rebuilt their economy, their military, and their weaponry. Then in 2000, Putin became the second President of Russia. He instantly converted Russia from a communist-socialist government- a civilized form of government where people matter to a dictatorship where no one matters but Putin. He is a man who spent his entire life as a KGB spy, and blames the United States for the downfall of the USSR. He wants REVENGE.
Over the last quarter of a century, he has schemed and enacted his strategic plan. Based on the book called The Foundations of Geopolitics and published in Russia in 1997 - a carefully orchestrated and directed horror film has been produced. The movie theme is the destruction of the United States and the principal key actor is Donald Trump. It won't win any Oscars YET, because (1) this movie is still unrecognized by most Americans, and (2) the ill-informed Trumpers across our nation are the support cast. Trump's dangerous and many-sided destructiveness includes unprecedented ways to influence and control his followers - a form of brainwashing. Unbeknown to these followers, the person who's ideology they are following is not Trump, but Putin.
For the American public, our first source of information comes from our media - newspapers, TV, social media, and even movies. Since "Oppenheimer" was the Oscar winner in our 2024 Cinema history, it shows an awakening of the real dangers faced by Putin's threats of nuclear war. Putin's government also admitted to election interference in 2016 and 2020; they have said it will continue; AND Putin has "shouted from the nearest mountain-top" that Trump will win the 2024 election. What does he know that the American public does not? Has our media failed to do their research and inform the public of these dangers or are they continuing to focus on Trump's legal issues instead of the real danger facing America? Trump is NOT an ordinary political candidate - but a criminal and a traitor (From Democracy to Democrazy). Their broadcasts on sensationalism instead of reality is disconcerting.
I was at a book-signing event at a Barnes and Noble in Tucson, AZ. A middle-aged woman came up to me and said "I think Putin is a smart and great leader." I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out - I was shocked. These were the exact same works said by Trump only the prior week and in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This my friends is BRAINWASHING.
The shadow cast by Putin over the landscape of American democracy, and his influence and control over Trump grows larger and darker by the moment. Our democracy hangs in the balance.
Elizabeth, www.democrazy2020.org
Great Article and ALL your points are spot on. I find it absurd the former president is covered like a “Normal” individual with redeeming social value. Where I come from, he is a Scumbag, user of people, disloyal, predator and rich boy who lies, ridicules and is in Awe of “strongmen” (which he is not) and would never be caught dead with most of his Maggette Followers.
But make sure the media balances all that against Biden’s Age !!!