MAYBE THERE ISN'T ONE WEIRD MEDIA TRICK THAT WILL SAVE US FROM TRUMP

Hi, I'm back. Thank you, Yas, for great coverage of Smokin' Joe.

And now we turn to Donald Trump. Stephen Robinson of Public Notice thinks the media's Trump coverage is failing us. He writes:

Yes, major news outlets, including the New York Times, are now more likely to acknowledge that Trump outright lies than simply makes “false” statements, but the press still resists definitively calling him out for the terrible and dangerous person he is. Because their baseline assumption is that Trump is erratic and malevolent, it’s not generally regarded as big news when Trump does awful things, such as mocking Biden’s speech impediment during a speech over the weekend.

Then Robinson adds:

... it should be mentioned that the NYT published an article noting that Trump mocked Biden’s stutter.

Yup, and while the Times is frequently awful, this story was not part of the problem:

... former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday blasted President Biden’s State of the Union address as an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” that was more divisive than unifying.

He then mocked Mr. Biden’s lifelong stutter, a jab that set the tone for the lengthy speech that followed.

Over nearly two hours, Mr. Trump lobbed sharp personal attacks at Mr. Biden’s mental and physical health and revived a litany of grievances against political opponents, prosecutors and television executives. He used inflammatory language to stoke fears about immigration, called the press “criminals” and repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Mr. Trump told thousands of his supporters gathered at the rally that “everything Joe Biden touches” turns to filth, though he used an expletive to describe the result. “Everything. I tried finding a different word, but there are some words that cannot be duplicated.” (He used the word, or a variant, at least four times in his speech.)

So maybe it is now "regarded as big news when Trump does awful things." Maybe liberal press critics are finally inspiring the Times and other news outlets to pay attention to Trump's malevolent words. Maybe President Biden's State of the Union address had an impact. Maybe Democratic insiders are working the refs behind the scenes.

But will it matter?

Robinson continues:

Implicit in the media’s ongoing coverage of Trump is the idea that he might suddenly stop behaving like Donald Trump. Case in point was an absurd article Axios ran last week from national politics reporter Sophia Cai with the headline, “Top Trump advisers try to steer him off personal drama.”

... On what was once Twitter, the caption above Axios’s article read, “Looking to November, Trump tempers his claims about the 2020 election — a little.” ... Cai wrote, “In some recent speeches, Trump has used different terms in describing his typical complaint that the 2020 election he lost was ‘stolen’ — saying, ‘We were interrupted,’ or ‘something very bad happened.’”

But the Axios piece in question also includes this:

Reality check: In front of right-wing audiences, Trump still rambles on, making the conspiratorial — and false — claims many come to hear.

* At CPAC's recent meeting outside Washington, D.C., he called 2020 a "rigged election" and accused Democrats of "cheat[ing] like dogs."

* His rambling speeches to MAGA crowds and others also still include suggestions that he'll "terminate" parts of the Constitution and use the military against protesters. He also casts immigrants in racist terms — as "poisoning the blood" of the country and "speaking languages nobody's ever heard of."

And a Washington Post story published today says this about Trump's "rigged election" rhetoric:

He has invoked the rhetoric at each of the 43 rallies he has held since officially kicking off his campaign in November 2022, according to a Post analysis.

Speaking in Rock Hill, Trump first broached the topic of what he dubbed “a failed election” by warning that “the only way it can end where they win is a rigged election,” before noting — again falsely — that what Democrats “did in 2020 is disgraceful.”

It was a claim Trump repeated several more times, including when he accused “Joe Biden and his thugs” of “weaponizing law enforcement for high-level election interference.”

“Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are really the true threat to democracy,” Trump said, taking the charge Democrats have long levied against him and turning it back on his accusers. “Those are the threat to democracy.”

Later, after a riff mocking President Biden as senile, Trump continued: “The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in two-twenty — two thousand and twenty. They rigged the presidential election, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

At this, the crow[d] stood and cheered before breaking into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

Is it possible that the press is actually giving us an accurate portrait of Trump, and it isn't causing his poll numbers to plummet? Could our problem be that there simply isn't One Weird Trick the media can employ to make the scales fall from Trump voters' eyes, because they know exactly what he says and they don't have a problem with it?

The media's coverage of Hillary clinton in 2020 was terrible -- but I'm not sure the coverage of Trump was as bad as we remember. We complain that the media gave us a distorted picture of Trump and that the media broadcast hours of uninterrupted Trump speeches. Can both of these things be true? People who watched those speeches heard Trump unfiltered. He was racist, ignorant, and offensive in many ways. Apart from the unedited rallies, we heard and saw his attacks on John McCain, on a disabled journalist, and on Gold Star parents exactly as he delivered them. We heard the Access Hollywood tape unedited. And then millions of people voted for Trump anyway. Maybe those voters are the problem?

Yes, we should continue attacking the media when it fails us. But we should also consider the possibility that there may be no "right" way to cover the election, if what we mean by "right" is a way that will make Trump lose in a landslide. We can try to pressure the media to change, but maybe we can't change voters who share Trump's hatreds and prejudices, or even the ones who don't think Trump's hatreds and prejudices are a big deal if gas prices are low. Our biggest problem might not be the media. It might be our fellow citizens.