While major media’s excessive and uncritical coverage of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run was a catastrophe that very likely enabled his election — I am thinking in particular of CNN’s decision to run his campaign rallies unfiltered, providing millions of dollars in free advertising and priceless legitimization — the media may now be repeating the mistake in the opposite direction. Just as some of the decision-making around Trump in 2016 was likely rooted in the belief that since he was unelectable, there could be no harm in excessively covering him in order to boost ratings and readership, a sort of parallel editorial judgment seems to exist today, in which ignoring or dismissing Trump’s post-presidential machinations is tacitly seen as the proper way to handle him.
But given that Trump was the first president in our history who attempted to remain in power by means of a coup, and has not yet been fully held to account for his actions, a tendency to write the former president out of the news also obscures the ongoing need for a national reckoning with his actions. Trump has continued to publicly insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him, using the same falsehoods that supported his coup attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Joe Biden. Propagation of this big lie is at the center of his ongoing attempt to rally an authoritarian, if not outright fascistic, movement that cannot be reconciled with American democracy, and in fact is democracy’s enemy. And as if all of this were not sufficient reason to subject the former president to ongoing, critical coverage, Trump is clearly still the leader of the Republican Party, with high-ranking officials such as House minority leader Kevin McCarthy continuing to almost literally kiss his ring.
My 30,000-foot take is that we need more coverage of the former president’s ongoing activities - but coverage that contextualizes the words he speaks and the ideas he propagates within the reality that he’s at the center of an anti-democratic movement: a movement that encompasses both his personal cult of personality and the efforts of GOP elected officials to undermine voting rights and the electoral process for 2022 and beyond. Because this movement is antithetical to the basics of American democracy, there’s no question in my mind that the press has a responsibility to communicate its unvarnished reality, and its dangers, to the American people.
I’m thinking about this today in particular because of an excellent Twitter thread by Laura Jedeed, in which she both describes and comments on the former president’s rally in Alabama this weekend. While not an exact model for how other media might cover Trump — I don’t know if the average non-political junkie American needs THIS much detail! — her method is spot on. No Trump line is communicated without providing context for its significance to Trump’s authoritarian project. For example, she notes that Trump was introduced not only by a speech by Alabama Representative Mo Brooks that painted Democrats as enemies of the state, but also by playing a speech from the movie Patton that includes the lines, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. All real Americans love the sting of battle!” (among Trump’s many offenses, we must now include making George C. Scott roll over in his grave). Jedeed homes in on Trump’s efforts to portray the American departure from Afghanistan as a humiliating, shaming event for the country — a sensation that Trump has repeatedly invoked as part of his fascistic appeal to redeem a nation that has supposedly been crushed and betrayed by external and internal enemies. If Trump plans to start using the Afghanistan withdrawal — which he authored — as part of his insistence on the failures of American democracy, then this strikes me as pretty newsworthy.
From what I’ve seen so far, coverage of the Trump speech by most outlets has centered on one small part of it, when told his listeners, “I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you gotta do what you gotta do, but I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good” and was booed in response. But as Jedeed remarks, “If Trump doesn't come out against vaccines in the next couple days, he has more of a moral compass than I ever could have imagined.” I am not holding my breath that he will ever repeat that unsuccessful line — as Jedeed neatly speculates, “That frosty silence wounded him to his core--a nightmare scenario for the man.” Such coverage only bolsters my point — by emphasizing the one normal thing that Trump said (and that he likely will not say again), it normalizes him while underemphasizing the radical bulk of his speech. A casual observer might conclude that the president is going around promoting vaccines, while the reality is that the president is going around promoting authoritarianism. Is this really how a free press should defend democracy?