Don’t treat Trump like he has no agency

The New York Times casts Trump’s racist and misogynistic response to Kamala Harris as inevitable, rather than as a deliberate choice on his part

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Reporters who know Donald Trump know that he will respond to Kamala Harris’s candidacy with racist and sexist attacks on her as a woman of color.

In fact, he’s already started.

But the way two New York Times journalists wrote about it on Tuesday, it was as if Trump has no agency –  no responsibility for his own behavior.

The article cast Trump’s racist and misogynistic response to being challenged by a woman of color as inevitable and unpreventable – something like the weather or a natural disaster -- rather than as a deliberate choice on his part.

Written by the Times’s two most ardent Trump-whisperers, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the article was headlined: “Trump’s New Rival May Bring Out His Harshest Instincts.”

Note the passive construction – and the use of the word “instincts,” as if Trump has no say in the matter: It’s just Trump being Trump.

That's letting him off the hook. The headline should have said something like: “Trump Already Engaging in Repugnant Attacks on New Rival”.

The Times reporters wrote that Harris’s decision to run on a “prosecutor vs. felon” theme “may appeal to undecided voters “ but “may also goad Mr. Trump, who reacts strongly to criticism, into resurrecting the language he has used against other Black female prosecutors, such as Letitia James in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia, both of whom he has called ‘racist’ and attacked in personal terms.”

They explained that “Mr. Trump has a long history of attacking female rivals and critics in personal terms, usually describing them as mentally unstable or worse.”

Although in a tweet, Haberman indicated that she sees this as a liability for Trump, there was only a hint of that in the article itself. Here’s the paragraph that comes closest to criticizing Trump. First, it gives him credit he doesn’t deserve. Then it weakly acknowledges the downside of his behavior:

Mr. Trump, for his part, has been trying to soften some of his harshest rhetoric about seeking vengeance on his rivals ahead of the general election. But over many years, he has turned off a sizable proportion of college-educated voters and suburban women with his rhetoric on gender and race — and the Harris candidacy introduces the risk of Mr. Trump lashing out at her and further alienating those voters.

If you read the whole article, you find out that this is hardly the stuff of speculation. Trump’s already been at it:

Publicly, Mr. Trump has described her as “nasty,” “crazy” and “disrespectful,” mocked her laugh, mispronounced her name and promoted a false claim that Ms. Harris is constitutionally ineligible to serve as vice president, echoing his racist “birther” campaign against Barack Obama.

In a post on Truth Social on Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump accused the news media of trying “to turn ‘Dumb as a Rock’ Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future ‘Great’ President. No, it just doesn’t work that way!”

Finally, the Times reporters put forth a different, more sympathetic reason by Trump might act out:

Ms. Harris is now garnering extensive media attention, and drowning out Mr. Trump. People close to him have acknowledged that such a circumstance usually prompts him to try to insert himself into the news cycle somehow, often in self-destructive ways.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, is blaming the culture wars. Rather than calling out right-wing attacks on Harris as racism, pure and simple, reporter Emmanuel Felton on Monday termed them “racial attacks” and situated them as part of “the broader culture war over corporate diversity and affirmative action programs.”

For Felton, the story is not that the right wing is responding to Harris with grotesque racism, it’s that “America’s fraught racial politics are set to, once again, take center stage.”

The headline on that story was another passive horror, almost putting the onus on Harris rather than on the perpetrators: “Harris’s campaign will have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks”.

An Associated Press article went viral on Monday for reporting that “Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris.” (“Good luck with that,” one tweeter responded.)

But even there, reporters Lisa Mascaro and Jill Colvin deemed such attacks politically “risky” rather than morally repugnant.

And don’t expect Trump to get negative coverage from the mainstream press when he crassly insults Harris. Check out this Politico article by Natalie Allison headlined “Harris and Trump launch lines of attack: A crook or ‘Dumb as a Rock’” – in which the author falsely equated Harris’s evidence-supported assertion about Trump with Trump’s unfounded nastiness.

On a brighter note, the Baltimore Sun editorial board noted with concern on Sunday that when Trump speaks of Harris, “he inevitably lowers himself to the language of racists and misogynists.”

The editorial cited his comments at last week’s rally in Milwaukee where, “despite all the calls from both inside and outside his party for unity and civility,” Trump called Harris "crazy" and "nuts."

The editorial posed this excellent question:

[W]hat message does it send to millions of Americans when a political rival directs himself not to her policies or positions, not to her resume or experience, but to crude, playground-level name-calling?

Meanwhile in an opinion piece in Salon, Amherst College professor Austin Sarat focused on Trump’s hateful misogyny:

Another strong, accomplished woman threatens to stand between him and his ability to satisfy his lust for power. First Hilary Clinton, then Fani Willis, now Kamala Harris. It drives him crazy.

Sarat predicted that Trump will return to the playbook he used against Clinton and  Willis, and will call Harris  “unstable,” “unbalanced,” and “unhinged”.

My advice to political reporters is this: Yes, Trump insulting Harris in racist and misogynistic ways is inevitable, given his character. But that doesn’t mean it’s not news. Rather, it makes it a way to write about his character. Take advantage of that opportunity.