Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy in the United States. If he is elected president, he will try to become a dictator.
That warning must be repeated, over and over again, so Americans don’t forget it in November.
But that’s not the daily news that you will read or hear in the American press today. Instead, it’s mostly coverage of polls favorable to Trump and cute scene-setting stories about the carnival-like atmosphere at his crazed rallies, where his massive cult following is on display.
That daily coverage ignores the five-alarm fire burning up the 2024 election. The mainstream political press is effectively ignoring the coming national apocalypse. How can that be? How can they once again screw up covering Trump?
After all, Trump isn’t hiding his lust for dictatorial power. He admits it publicly. In December, when his Fox News lackey, Sean Hannity, gave him an opportunity to dispel fears that he wanted dictatorial power, Trump instead offered a rare truth. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked. “Except for day one,” Trump replied.
Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”
Trump is a fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.
With their obsession with horse-race coverage, political reporters tend to judge what Trump says or does by whether his words and actions will help him politically. By doing so, the press is saying that Trump’s racism, corruption, criminality, and insane abuses of power matter only so far as his electability.
There are exceptions: major news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done some important stories about Trump’s dictatorial plans for a second term. But those investigative stories are drowned out by the chorus of horse-race stories — sometimes published on the same days and by the same news organizations behind more substantial coverage.
The media is sleepwalking.
I’ve often wondered how the press, both in Germany and around the world, failed to see Hitler for the monster that he was before he gained power. After Trump, I think I understand.
Hitler took advantage of the incremental nature of daily journalism. For years, his rise in Germany was not taken seriously in the United States, and that period of American inattention and isolationism enabled Hitler to become a much greater global threat. The American press played a significant and ugly role in downplaying the threat Hitler posed to the Western world.
American journalists initially viewed Hitler as little more than a German version of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who they saw as a blustering demagogue, yet also a leader who had helped save Italy from the economic chaos of the post-World War I era.
The New York Times credited Mussolini “with returning turbulent Italy to what it called normalcy,” according to a study of the press coverage of Hitler and Mussolini in Smithsonian Magazine in 2016.
When Hitler first burst into German political life, the American press sought to downplay his importance by treating him as a joke; the Smithsonian notes how Newsweek called him a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” and that his appearance suggested “Charlie Chaplin.”
Over time, American journalists’ views of Hitler began to shift, but mostly just to show greater respect for his skills as a charismatic public speaker and a successful demagogue. Ultimately, through more than a decade in German politics before he came to power, Hitler was normalized by American reporters. The press became numb to the outrageous things he said and wrote and did. He kept saying the same things for years; he laid out many of his plans and intentions in “Mein Kampf” in 1925, eight years before he came to power. By the time of the crucial 1932 German elections and Hitler’s subsequent rise to power in 1933, his rabid antisemitism and his lust for power were treated as old news.
The American press is making the same mistake today.
Ever since Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, reporters have alternated between depicting him as a goof who couldn’t be taken seriously and showing respect for his skills as a demagogue.
Two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and one insurrection later, Trump is normal now, at least as far as the political press corps is concerned. The January 6 insurrection, in which Trump tried to illegally hold on to power, is old news. Just like Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was old news by the 1932 German elections.
This leads to more coverage of Trump’s poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.
After Trump’s chaotic four years in office, too many journalists think that everything about Trump’s insane record has already been reported and written. This leads to more coverage of his poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.
Mainstream journalists are increasingly open about their refusal to cover the campaign in crisis terms. In a recent interview, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn bristled at the notion that the Times needs to recognize the threat that Trump poses to the republic. He claimed that would just be doing the bidding of the Biden campaign and would turn the Times into a state propaganda organ like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”
Kahn’s defensive crouch is symptomatic of the press today. After years of losing to social media companies in the fight for advertising and attention and fending off a constant barrage of attacks from right-wing critics who seek to discredit their journalism, major news organizations have become increasingly insular. A sudden surge in readership and viewership during the Trump administration has waned, while a drive to make newsrooms more diverse by hiring a wave of young progressive journalists has left older white editors embittered that the new generation has dared to challenge the status quo.
News organizations have always been hostile to outside scrutiny, but their hypocrisy about transparency and openness have reached new heights. Earlier this year the Times launched an ill-conceived leak investigation of its own staff to find out who talked to The Intercept for a story, while more recently the Washington Post has sought to downplay evidence that its new publisher, Will Lewis, was involved in a scheme to conceal evidence about phone hacking of British royals and celebrities while he was an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in London. Semafor reported this week that an editor at the Post ordered the staff not to promote on its newsletters one of the Post’s own stories that included new allegations about Lewis from a lawsuit filed by Prince Harry in London.
Expect little accountability for these actions; the Post got rid of its ombudsman in 2013, and the Times got rid of its last public editor in 2017. Both the Times and the Washington Post have media reporters, but they rarely write about their own newsrooms and instead spend most of their time punching down on smaller news organizations.
Last year, CNN went through an internal crisis as well, after its new owners sought to force the newsroom to bend more toward Trump. That controversy ultimately led to the firing of CNN’s chief, but it is not clear whether the new ownership group still plans to push for more Trump-friendly coverage.
These efforts to build protective bubbles around their organizations at a time of unprecedented volatility in the news business seem to be at the heart of the refusal by the mainstream press to get out in front of the voters and take a stand on Trump.
In fact, many in the news business would secretly be thrilled by Trump’s return to the White House, particularly old, white pundits and commentators who claim to be liberal but quietly believe that “cancel culture” is a bigger threat than Trump. Many corporate executives in the news business would likewise be happy to see a return to Trump-era revenues.
But the basic reason the press isn’t sounding the alarm about the threat Trump poses to American democracy is much more banal. It’s about the structure of journalism.
Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today?
For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time.
But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.
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