Trump Will Never Be a Normal Presidential Candidate

In the wake of an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, the usual media suspects fell all over themselves to praise Trump’s political acumen in not dying, and quote anonymous Democrats declaring the election over and Trump victorious. 

Nothing that happens to Trump can be anything but great for Trump. Whenever he manages to say something vaguely decent, it’s a stirring presidential moment, even if he goes back to rage-tweeting about electricity and sharks afterward. If he delivers a speech without digressing into open racism, he’s adopting a “new tone,” no matter how short-lived that tone is. 

He’s always made to be close enough to statesmanship that his nonstop falsehoods, violent fantasies and rampant corruption can be swept aside. 

The assassination attempt was immediately spun as good news for Trump. Axios hacks Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, whose newsletter is used as an assignment sheet by half the East Coast corporate media, began waxing repulsively rhapsodic about how this moment could turn Trump into the man of their dreams: 

He could show a different side of himself. In public, he’s all fire and bombast. But his wife, Melania, talked in a statement yesterday of looking “beyond the left and the right, beyond the red and the blue.” People who know Trump well say he’s a gracious host, inquisitive, loves music and social media. This is the kind of moment when people give leaders a second look, a second chance.

Like all moments, this one will pass in a blink. You seize them—or let them waft away.

Contrast that tongue-bath treatment with the mainstream coverage of President Joe Biden recently. After a June debate in which Biden stumbled against a relentlessly dishonest Trump, it was Biden’s age and apparent unfitness—and not Trump’s promise to suspend the Constitution and subvert American democracy—that became the focus of the media.

The president had a stroke! He can barely walk! He almost fell asleep at the podium! He mixes up names and forgets where he is! He’s being protected by his vice-president, by his aides, by his wife, all of whom are conspiring to govern the country without him. 

There was no theory too outlandish to be given oxygen. 

The New York Times led the charge. Its reporters filed dozens of stories about Biden’s age, citing anonymous officials and nebulously attributed donors concerned he could no longer face down Trump. They asked every elected Democrat they could find, from governors to attention-hungry representatives to state election officials, whether Biden should drop out.

And then they put a little ticking counter up on their website to tally how many Democrats had called on Biden to step aside: That would be a total of six representatives (out of 213), zero senators, zero governors. The Times took it down only to reinstate it to post breathless updates, as one pundit after another took up the battle cry. 

This kind of disparity in coverage does immense damage every day. It’s the job of a journalist to explain what’s unclear, not to point out how unclear it is in order to fuel speculation and panic in the many, many people who will be in the government’s crosshairs during a second Trump term. It’s the job of a journalist to explain what, beyond one bad debate performance, is really going on here. 

Infuriatingly, it’s obviously a conscious choice. President Biden was elderly the day before the debate, and had a stutter, which sometimes led to the kinds of “gaffes” on which pundits are now seizing. None of this was new to people who had covered Biden for years, and the political press had long since concluded that his communication issues were harmless. 

The day after the debate, these known things were a national emergency, necessitating we drop everything and engage in endless speculation about whether Biden should drop out and who should replace him. The day after the debate it became necessary to interrogate every politician who’d ever spoken to Biden for ten seconds for their thoughts on the president’s walk and way of speaking. 

Putting a counter on the front page of the Times website and running numerous editorials and assigning columns and stories and stories and columns about Biden’s obvious need to exit the race just proves the Paper of Record could have done this anytime, for any of Trump’s multitude of unsuitabilities, and chose not to. Instead they euphemized his bigotry as “racially charged rhetoric” and reported his corruption 

When Trump escapes legal consequences, as with Monday’s dismissal of the espionage case against him, it’s seen as a sign of his political savvy, and not of the corruption of the federal judiciary Trump himself installed. 

“There is an effort from anti-Trump critics on social media to suggest the decision is not a major development,” wrote the Times’ Maggie Haberman, a longtime Trump beat reporter. “It may get overturned on appeal, and the case was already grinding slowly, but it’s a dramatic development that even some in Trump’s orbit were surprised by, and it is objectively a significant moment.”

It’s all borne of a cowardly refusal to reconsider the way the political press operates. If Trump is indeed a grave threat to democracy, an autocratic racist kleptomaniac who ignored a pandemic as it killed a million people, unprecedented in his crimes and the enablement of his party, then editors and producers need to drop everything. 

They need to stop assigning stories about who’s up and who’s down, and quit taking known liars at their word. They need to quit making equivalencies between Biden’s minor speech gaffes and Trump’s repeated declaration that immigrants are “vermin.” They need to take Trump’s critics, inside and outside the GOP, seriously and stop pointing cameras at him while he calls the free press the enemy of the people. 

They need to make crystal clear the distinction between a president who administrates competently and is subject to criticism based on policy disagreements, and a jackbooted monster who would use his own attempted murder to lash out at the American people. 

In the hours following the shooting at Trump’s campaign event, condolences and words of sober reflection poured in from Democratic politicians and officials. Biden called Trump prior to making a public statement denouncing political violence and calling for unity. 

Former Democratic presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter each made statements asking for politicians to lower the temperature of their rhetoric, to bank the fires. 

Republican members of Congress dumped on the lighter fluid. Trump’s new VP pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, tweeted on X: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Georgia Rep. Mike Collins went further, posting, “The Left has spent eight years building a narrative indoctrinating a large portion of our population to believe that killing Donald Trump is justifiable. The media played their part.”

They certainly did, but not in the way Rep. Collins imagines. Media leadership, when criticized for editorial decisions, love to pretend to be powerless, as if a story’s placement or the intensity with which it’s covered are dictated by acts of God. We don’t make the news! We just report what’s happening! 

But they set a narrative with the way they cover a controversy, with the kinds of questions they ask, with who asks those questions, and how many times they repeat themselves. One story inspires another, until the number of stories implies there’s something worth being written about, no matter how flimsy the foundation the first story rests upon. And the people in charge, who are being quizzed relentlessly about whether Biden is toast, start to wonder about why they’re being asked so much about it. 

Their responses lead to another round of stories, another round of speculation, a snowball of tenuously sourced speculation and gossip that can’t be refuted without making the problem bigger. 

Figures in the national press rarely reckon with major mistakes they make, no matter how high the cost. Cheerleading for the war in Iraq, spreading spurious rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, creating a wave of racist jingoistic paranoia after 9/11 … none of those sorry chapters in history resulted in any kind of resolve to behave differently in the future. At most there were years-after “reflections” of the “we didn’t do as well as we might have done but we did very well indeed anyway” variety. 

But an afterword to this sorry chapter won’t be adequate. A milquetoast “reconsideration” of a weeks-long campaign to drive out the only candidate to have beaten Trump electorally won’t undo the damage to the country done by a second Trump term. Even a series of resignations, at this point, wouldn’t undo what’s been done, but it would at least signal that what’s happened here will not happen again.

And the next time Trump does something monstrous and Biden does something normal, we might be able to hope for better than “both sides” coverage that enlightens no one.