The Media Has Three Weeks to Learn How to Tell the Truth About Trump

Is a constant stream of undiluted fascist rhetoric and violent threats as bad as an unsecured email server? The political press can’t seem to puzzle it out.

by Michael Tomasky

Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Donald Trump keeps getting worse and worse. Last Friday in Aurora, Colorado, he gave a speech that was both bonkers and fascist, asserting that the city—where crime is down 17 percent—had been “conquered” by Venezuelan gangs and announcing that he’d use a 1798 law to deport them. Sunday morning, he said on Fox that “the enemy within” who might be planning any Election Day chaos—“sick people, radical left lunatics,” but presumably for the most part citizens of the United States—should be handled by the National Guard or even the military.

Of course, these things received coverage. The New York Times’s account of the Aurora speech was really quite good. The first paragraph said outright that in the speech, Trump “repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.” It went on to explain that the demagogic claim about the gangs started as a housing dispute, was quite isolated, and was taken care of by local law enforcement.

It quoted the city’s Republican mayor as saying: “The city and state have not been ‘taken over’ or ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by migrant gangs. The incidents that have occurred in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people, have been limited to a handful of specific apartment complexes, and our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns and will continue to do so.”

What more could the Times have done? Well, here’s one thing: Anyone who has spent any time in this industry knows that, for better or for worse, the headline is what’s likeliest to stick with the reader. It’s often the only thing that a reader even reads. So it’s a problem that all that straightforward and laudable reporting appeared under a euphemistic and mealy-mouthed headline: “Trump Rally in Aurora, Colo., Is Marked by Nativist Attacks.”

I write headlines. I know you have to make them fit. I can see that “Marked by” has the virtue of not taking up many characters. But seriously. “Marked by,” “nativist,” and “attacks” are all euphemisms that water down what actually happened. Who made the “nativist attacks?” It was Trump! This headline almost implies that he was the passive victim of some nativism that broke out nearby.

Looking for brief, punchy, and true? Try these on for size: “At Colorado Rally, Trump Spreads Racist Lies.” “In Colorado City, Trump Plays Up Problem That Doesn’t Exist.” “Trump, in Colorado, Fans Flames with Xenophobic Lie.”

I could go on.

Look, maybe the daily coverage of what Trump does has improved, even if the all-important headlines could still be a lot better. But the frustration many people feel with the way the mainstream press is covering Trump isn’t limited to the reporting about what he did or said yesterday. It also involves what we call in the biz “enterprise reporting”—that is, reporting that isn’t based on what happened yesterday, but that a news organization decides to do on its own, not in response to the daily news cycle but to bring a matter to its readers’ attention.

Here’s the sharpest example this year of what I’m talking about. We all know about Trump’s plan to deport up to 20 million people. Every outlet has written about this. Some places have done very good reporting on it. This Washington Post Philip Bump piece from back in May was excellent. The Times’s biggest piece looks like this one, from July.

But the single best article about this, by far? It was by the criminal-justice journalist Radley Balko on his Substack, also in May. It must have been 10,000 words long, maybe more, and it was absolutely harrowing—the details about the size of the army that would be needed to round people up, the number of buses and airplanes involved, the size of the camps that would have to be built, and much more.

Balko has a reputation and a following. But he isn’t The New York Times, The Washington Post, the AP, or a network news channel. None of our major outlets come up with coverage that equals to the effort that this one Substacker (who was actually on the staff of The Washington Post until October of 2022) managed to provide on the topic. Why? And do they have plans to revisit this topic in the next three weeks—or is it “old news” because it’s “already been covered”?

“Already been covered” is how journalists’ brains may work, but it isn’t how regular people’s brains are wired at all. This is arguably the most consequential action any presidential candidate has proposed in the recent history of the country. And lately, Trump has expanded it to include people who live here legally, like the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. Far from simply booting those who have entered the country illegally, or deny hearings to migrants seeking asylum, Trump and his acolytes have recently been talking about “remigration”—a euphemism for picking and choosing legal and naturalized citizens to shove out of the country against their will.

This plan will alter the fabric of the nation in a way nothing ever has. We’re talking about up to 5 percent of the people living in the United States being rounded up, taken from their homes and families, locked in a camp somewhere, and forcibly flown out of the country where they have lived in many cases for years. We’re also talking about something that will cost—and this is a conservative estimate—$315 billion. Plus it will blast big, billion dollar holes in tax revenues and create an estimated loss to GDP between 4.2 and 6.8 percent. This isn’t just an evil plan, it’s a costly plan.  

The media can’t just let voters forget this because it’s “old news.”

January 6 is “old news.” Trump’s catastrophic handling of Covid, which may have caused 400,000 unnecessary deaths, is “old news.” So is the Muslim ban (which will be returning if he’s elected), so is the favoring of Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies, and so is the Big Lie, and so are a lot of things. They’re old news. But they’re horrifying and un-American things.

The bottom line is this. Trump simply can’t be covered like most candidates, for two reasons. One, he was president before (something that hasn’t happened since Grover Cleveland), so we have a track record to examine and reexamine. You could call Trump’s four years in office “old news” if you want, but that sample size is still the best guide for what his future presidency will be like.

Two, the things he’s proposing are radical and dangerous. Call that a subjective judgment if you want. But by now it’s the subjective judgment of a hell of a lot of people. General Mark Milley, whom Trump once suggested should be executed (speaking of ways in which Trump is unlike all other presidential candidates!), called Trump “fascist to the core.” So, the sentiment is hardly limited to editors of liberal magazines.

Admittedly, some of the responsibility falls on Democrats here. These are topics that they should be speaking out on whenever they’re in front of a reporter or a television camera. But the press is supposed to play a civic role in a democratic society. We’re supposed to point out and resist threats to democracy. Donald Trump is that, and obviously so. There are not two sides to that story. And as long as Trump roams the landscape, it’s news.

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