Before you start popping the champagne over Donald Trump’s decision to back down from a January 6 press conference, I’d urge you to read this post from Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo. Marshall pulls back the camera to observe the larger phenomenon of Donald Trump’s relative disappearance from mainstream coverage and appearances, and the news is not great. Left to bluster and grow in the hothouse atmosphere of right-wing media, Trump’s utterances have only grown more extreme over the last year, even as most consumers of mainstream media would have little or no idea of this fact. Rather than being an abstract issue with little real-world consequence, though, Marshall nails exactly what’s wrong with this picture (at least for those who prefer the continued existence of American democracy):
This hasn’t made Trump any weaker. His hold over the institutional and electoral GOP has only intensified since leaving office. The very small number of elected officials who refused to support the Big Lie have mostly been drummed out of the party. Trump’s Big Lie propaganda has become unassailable in heavily state-legislative-gerrymandered states where it will matter most. In short, the “don’t amplify” doctrine has allowed Trump to speak freely to his supporters and intensify his hold over the GOP, while keeping the incendiary messages that mobilize a majority of the country against him largely off mainstream airwaves.
All of the upside and none of the down. [italics added for emphasis]
God knows I talk about the crisis of American democracy often enough, but if we were to drill down to examine the various crises-within-crises that make up this collective meltdown, far up this Russian-doll-within-another-Russian doll food chain would the disparity that Marshall gets at. On one side, Donald Trump has the ear of literally millions of Republican voters, unfiltered, able not simply to inform them of what propaganda he chooses, but, more specifically, to radicalize this base with his cracked ideas. Meanwhile, the mass repugnance such ideas previously elicited from the American majority — repugnance that fueled a mass mobilization against Trump over the course of his presidency — has been cooled and diluted by the sense that Trump has left the building. As I’ve banged on about many times before, we’re left in a very bad place where the GOP is not just energizing its base, but increasingly radicalizing its voters, while simultaneously the Democrats are demoralized by the lack of major legislation in Congress. For Trump, this lopsided state of affairs is perfectly captured by Marshall: “All of the upside and none of the down.”
As the Biden economic agenda and democracy-preserving legislation continue in a state of suspended animation, the danger of this enormous imbalance between the Republican base and the Democratic/persuadable mass of voters is increasing. The solution, absent more media coverage of what Trump’s been up to (coverage, I’d hasten to add, that would ideally draw from the many lessons learned about amplifying and legitimizing Trump previously), would be for the Democratic Party to provide periodic reminders of the menace waiting offstage. This would both provide a public service of letting citizens know valuable information about the authoritarian in exile, but as importantly would help energize Democratic voters and remind them of the stakes around the midterm elections and beyond.
It seems we have gone from one untenable extreme to another, from too much uncritical amplification of Donald Trump to an unhelpful suppression of the reality of his continued presence in American political life. Marshall notes that the media’s “don’t amplify” attitude toward Trump is based on a certain “myopia,” and constitutes a “misunderstanding of how both journalism and political power work” by thinking it will help drown out Trump’s ideas or make it seem they don’t even exist. Again, I think this point is echoed by much of the Democratic Party’s current stance toward Donald Trump, where at least in public, not much is made of the very real possibility Trump will be the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate or that he’s still stomping around re-making the Republican Party in his own image. It does seem to be a world-historic misapplication of the notion that if you ignore a problem, it will go away.