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Commentary: The Fifth Estate
Donald Trump, the candidate, is a media fiction
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will debate tonight for the first (and perhaps only time) during this truncated election season. The standards of success the media will apply to each candidate are staggeringly different .
For Harris to “win,” she will need to: 1) Introduce herself to voters as a champion of the middle class who is neither too liberal nor too moderate; 2) Articulate specific economic and social policies; 3)Differentiate her agenda from that of the Biden administration; 4) Parry Trump’s boorish insults; 5) Gracefully, and efficiently, stanch his firehose of misinformation.
For Trump to "win," he will need to: 1) Remain semi-coherent as he attacks Harris on immigration and the economy; 2) Not use a racial slur.
If Harris suffers a single moment of awkwardness, or betrays her frustration at Trump’s trolling, the press will pounce. Meanwhile, we can expect Trump lie constantly and flagrantly, as he did at the last debate — and does at every single public appearance.
The moderators will not fact-check Trump in real time. First, because it would take too much time. But also because those moderators (like most Americans) have simply been worn out by Trump’s shameless rambling bombast.
That’s the state of American political coverage two months out from the election: Trump has managed to evade journalistic accountability simply by counting on media outlets to ignore his pathologies.
There are many recent examples of this. But here I offer one of the most outrageous from recent months. You may recall how back on June 9, during a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, during which, apropos of nothing, Trump brought up an issue that appears to have plagued him for some time. Not the economy, or immigration, or even the election he lost by seven million votes, which he falsely claims, over and over, was stolen from him.
No, the burning issue for Trump was boats powered by electric batteries. He was worried that such boats would sink, owing to the weight of those batteries, which he falsely implied were being foisted upon the American boat owners by the Biden administration.
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This is, of course, absurd. Electric batteries do not cause boats to sink, just as wind turbines do not cause cancer or power outages or the mass murder of bald eagles.
Such statements matter, though. They speak to Trump’s profound scientific ignorance, which takes on a darker meaning when applied to (for instance) a global pandemic. Remember in April of 2020 when Trump suggested that Americans inject bleach into their bodies to cure COVID-19? The result was a surge in calls to poison control.
Alas, in Las Vegas Trump’s logorrhea didn’t stop with batteries. He went on for several more minutes, introducing another element of danger. “What would happen if … you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?”
Having now settled on a second obsession, Trump continued:
By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that, a lot of sharks? I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said there’s no problem with sharks. ‘They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now.’ It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks.
As the audience laughed nervously, Trump lurched back toward his original story:
So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.
Watch it for yourself.
I’m sorry to have put you through all that. But it’s important to understand just how bonkers Trump is at his rallies, how his thought process zips from one heap of gibberish to the next. And it’s equally important to understand how mainstream media outlets present all this. In short: they launder his incoherence — some call it “sane-washing” — into headlines, including:
*Associated Press: “Trump complains about his teleprompters at a scorching Las Vegas rally”
*Reuters: “Trump tells sweltering rally in Nevada he won’t tax tips”
*CNN: “Trump proposes eliminating taxes on tips at Las Vegas campaign rally”
*The New York Times: “Trump Rallies in Las Vegas”
To capture a sense of how abnormal this is, please try to imagine how the same outlets would respond if Kamala Harris started babbling about sharks and boat batteries.
The closer you look, the worse it gets. Consider the follow-up story by the New York Times, which carried this headline: “In Las Vegas, Trump appeals to Local Workers and Avoids Talk of Conviction.”
Again, the emphasis is on Trump’s proposal to exempt tips from taxes. But here, the Times saw fit to mention some vital context: a week before his shark fantasy, the former president had been convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s record of criminal and fraudulent behavior is so extensive that media outlets routinely excise it from their coverage.
In other words, the candidate in question was a felon — the first American president, and major-party nominee, to earn this distinction. Trump was also facing three indictments, one stemming from his alleged theft of classified documents, and two related to his efforts to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election.
A month before his Las Vegas rally, a federal jury found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll, after attacking her in a department store dressing room. This marked the first time he had been held legally liable for sexual assault, though he has been accused of sexual misconduct by 26 women.
These rulings followed that of a New York judge who found Trump and his company liable for a decade-long fraud scheme that landed his CFO in prison and resulted in a penalty of $454 million. Trump has also had to pay massive penalties stemming from his university and family charity.
Trump’s record of criminal and fraudulent behavior is so extensive that media outlets routinely excise it from their coverage. In effect, they wind up laundering his criminality.
Consider how much space I just devoted to these facts. Not everyone does.
Please try to imagine that Kamala Harris had even a single claim of fraud against her, or a court penalty, or a criminal count. Would she receive the same deference?
Actually, there’s no need to imagine this scenario. You can simply revisit the 2016 campaign, in which a set of flimsy accusations regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server received more coverage than any other story.
While the mainstream media continues to downplay Trump’s criminality and coherence, its most egregious failing involves a third c-word — credibility. Simply put: Trump is a pathological liar. According to the Washington Post, he made 30,573 false or misleading statements during his presidency. He lied about everything: the size of his inaugural crowd, the path of a hurricane, the wall Mexico was going to fund on the southern border, the health care plan he was going to devise to replace Obamacare, the infrastructure bill he was going to sign. And that’s before you get to the conspiracy theories.
Every journalist with a functioning conscience knows that Trump is a liar. And yet media outlets continue to promote his false promises.
The New York Times, for instance, recently ran the following headline: “Trump tries to refashion himself as supportive of abortion rights.” The headline might just as well have read: “Warmonger tries to refashion himself as pacifist.”
After all, Trump spent months celebrating his demolition of reproductive rights: “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he crowed, online.
How is it that our national paper of record continues to transcribe such brazen lies? When the Times fails to identify Trump’s shameless pandering, it is willfully engaging in credibility laundering.
I wish such examples were the exception, but they’ve become the rule in the Trump era. A few weeks ago, the Times ran a story purporting to compare the two candidate’s affordable housing plans. The problem is, Trump doesn’t have an affordable housing plan. So the Times advanced the bizarre notion that his proposal for mass deportations of undocumented workers represented one.
Our media isn’t responsible for Trump lies or his crimes or his blatant incoherence. But they have fallen into a pattern of ignoring and sanitizing, and thus normalizing, a candidate who is, by any rational standard of political conduct, mentally and morally unfit to hold public office.
The race between Harris and Trump is incredibly close — according to some polling, closer than any presidential race in a quarter century. Tonight many Americans will tune into the 2024 election the first time.
The press has eight weeks to correct the record. If they fail to do so, they will bear a huge share of the blame for what comes next.
