The problem with reporting on Donald Trump is the press never took him seriously

The way political journalism worked before Donald Trump seems quaint in retrospect. If it was a presidential election year, a reporter was assigned a candidate to cover. The first thing task was to contact the campaign and notify them of the assignment. If the campaign was serious, press credentials were issued to allow access to the campaign headquarters and into his — it was always a “he” — rallies. In the old days, if the paper or network you worked for was important enough, your pass would get you onto the “press plane” and the bus populated by the “Boys on the Bus,” in the words of the title of Timothy Crouse’s best-selling book on the way the press covered the 1972 presidential campaign. The “boys” were the other political journalists following the campaign, because with perhaps one or two exceptions, there were no female political reporters. 

You didn’t have to cover American politics very long to realize that politicians lied, prevaricated and said things that were demonstrably untrue all the time. It didn’t take much longer to learn that you weren’t there to report their lies. You were there to report what politicians said. You were, in effect, a stenographer. Lies, if they were remarked upon at all, were the domain of pundits.

As a political reporter, you could point to gaffes, however. Remember gaffes? A good part of the job of a political journalist was to endure hours and days and weeks and months of tedium on the campaign trail waiting for that ever-hoped-for moment when the candidate would make a gaffe and you were there to witness it and write about it. A candidate would sometimes say what we now call “the quiet part out loud,” expressing his real view that cutting taxes actually did affect the deficit, rather than give his talking point that tax cuts would raise revenues instead of adding to the deficit. A candidate might misspeak, or, as Edmund Muskie was said to have done in New Hampshire while running in the 1972 Democratic primary, break down in tears right there in front of the press, and everyone would run to the phones to call in this groundbreaking political moment that was certain to bury his candidacy, which it did.

If you were lucky after days and weeks and months on the road, you might be there when a candidate makes a mistake, saying he was in Des Moines when he was actually in Detroit. If a candidate told a lie out loud, it wouldn’t be called that, of course, because the press didn’t accuse politicians of lying back then. It would be called a “distortion” or even a “falsehood,” but never a lie. The way you couched the statement that wasn’t true would indicate the seriousness of its falsity. If a politician claimed that he had never been unfaithful to his wife, you would repeat that, but then maybe indicate that he had been seen “in the company of” another woman once or twice, hinting at his unfaithfulness. Incredibly, it once took a photograph of presidential candidate Gary Hart with Donna Rice, a young campaign worker, sitting on his lap, to disprove Hart’s denial that he was a “womanizer.” But just as incredibly, he wasn’t called a liar for claiming faithfulness that wasn’t there.

Those were the “before” days. It boggles the mind that we have been in the “now” days for more than nine years, since the twice-divorced platinum playboy descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and, unburdened by the more than two dozen women who had accused him of sexual harassment and sexual assault, greeted the political press who had gathered, they thought, to report that Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for president. 

He did much, much more than that, beginning with his lies about immigrants: “They are bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime and they’re rapists.” Who was this buffoon? was the reaction of the national media. No one had ever announced a political campaign like this. A few months later, I wrote this for the Village Voice about Trump: “What we are watching every day is ‘pageant Trump,’ and it’s why the national political press has been so confused. Covering him is like covering the Victoria’s Secret fashion show: It’s supposed to be hot and sexy and fun and irresistible, but it turns out to be just a bunch of pneumatic posing – all feathers and sequins and nylon and cheap lace from China, as sexless as one of Trump’s silent wives. Donald Trump is the Wonderbra of American politics. He pushes everything Up and Out and In Your Face. But you know what’s left when the Wonderbra comes off, don’t you? Donald Trump sure as hell does.”

I wrote that in January of 2016. The national media certainly didn’t know what to make of Trump, and neither did I, because at the same time, I saw him as a buffoon, the rest of the press saw him, and treated him like a uniquely “American” figure in politics, with his fake hair and his fake tan and his supermodel wife and his exaggerations and outrageous statements nobody in American politics had ever made before. 

See if how I described it way back then sounds familiar: “Trump says something outrageous, and his fans parrot him with outrage of their own. Then he escalates the outrage. He says John McCain is a pansy, and the pundits are shocked, but then it’s okay. Then he wants to register Muslims, and the pundits haul out their pocket Constitutions and wave them around, and then that’s okay. He promises to bring back waterboarding, and the pundits loose the dread words, George W. Bush, at him like poison arrows — and waterboarding goes back down the memory hole. He wants to ban all immigration by Muslims, and a couple of Ivy League law professors write op-eds saying it might not be all that illegal, and once again the pundits put down their pens.”

I’m going to go ahead and drag out that hairy old cliché, it was all downhill from there, because, God help us, it was.   Trump lied his way all the way into the last month of the 2016 presidential election before the New York Times deigned to use the words “lie” and “Donald Trump” in the same sentence. It created such an earthquake in American journalism that the Washington Post put the story of the Times' apparent transformation on the front page.

But what did calling Trump a liar in late September of 2016 accomplish? It didn’t keep him out of the White House. He won on those lies.  It hardly put a dent in his support during his time in the Oval Office…just barely enough for Joe Biden to squeak out a victory in 2020 after jaw-droppers like Trump saying over and over again that the COVID pandemic “is going away” and advocating using bleach and a veterinary drug called Ivermectin to “cure” COVID. 

Did hundreds of thousands of pandemic deaths stop him, even as the death toll climbed to over one million after he left office? No, he led a conspiracy to blame the pandemic on an evil combination of China and Anthony Fauci and then opposed every attempt by the Biden administration to bring the pandemic under control using masks and getting vaccinated. This year, he accepted the endorsement of the world’s biggest anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and called him a national hero. And of course, he continues to push what is now known as “the big lie” that he won the 2020 election and has forced the rest of the Republican Party, including its most senior leaders, to join in his lie.

The New York Times this week finally published a front-page story calling attention to Trump’s age and pointing out how frequently Trump “has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately,” complete with actual unhinged quotes from his rallies and a linguistic statistical analysis of Trump’s speech patterns and most frequently used exaggerations and lies. But it’s the next sentence in the Times story that, for me at least, says it all: Speaking of Trump’s erratic speech on the campaign trail, the Times said, “In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.”

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Nine long years in, the man who began his first campaign for president as a buffoon has become a caricature of a buffoon, but we, including the political press, are all so used to it by now that the New York Times calling attention to Trump’s obvious unfitness for office became a story covered by the rest of the political press. Why? Because the Times and much of the rest of the national media played such a large role in normalizing behavior that once would have been disqualifying on the day it occurred. 

Let’s go back to just two disqualifying things Trump did and said. In an interview at the Family Leadership Council in 2015, Trump said of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Later, after McCain died in 2018 and his funeral was being planned, Trump said, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and asked why flags were being flown at half-mast. And then there was his reference to the war dead from World War II as “losers” and his refusal to attend a ceremony honoring French and American graves at the cemetery at Belleau Wood. Libeling American war heroes and calling them losers in years past would have ended any politician's career immediately.

The orange-haired buffoon who first ran for president in 2015 showed us over the years who he was, and still much of the press let him slide, perhaps because his entire political party not only let these outrages slide, they celebrated him for them.  A discussion of how 70 million Americans could have followed Donald Trump’s long descent through one disqualifying act after another — he’s been criminally convicted of multiple crimes by a jury of his peers, remember? — is one for another day. In 2016, I called him a “toy fascist.” He was the real thing, not a toy. I mistook a buffoon for a monster, and I will be eternally sorry for that.