The truth about Donald Trump rarely makes it into the news
Mainstream journalists are depriving their audiences of crucial context
Donald Trump has no coherent plan, other than self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.
He is making this stuff up as he goes along. He is impulsive and changes his mind constantly. He lies pathologically and is often incoherent. He promotes actions that are overtly illegal. He is hostile to every form of expertise. Others, most notably Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, are making decisions in his name that he doesn’t seem to know or care about.
Asked if he has to “uphold the Constitution,” he replied “I don't know.”
He is also flailing. His approval rating is badly underwater. Judges have blocked many of his most consequential actions. His impetuous tariff proposal is backfiring massively, leading him to lie about imaginary trade deals as the economy teeters. Ordinary people are getting outraged by the administration’s hate-fueled cruelty toward nonwhite immigrants. His self-dealing is increasingly overt.
This is important context for any news article or segment about Trump, and yet it’s almost entirely left out of the daily coverage that he gets in mainstream media outlets.
The elite reporters who cover Trump still dutifully report what he says. Then they point out that others disagree. And they think they’ve done their job.
They aren’t entirely guileless anymore, which I guess is good. But their pushback tends to be lame, situational, and several paragraphs into articles whose headlines and leads are credulous and stenographic.
They don’t quote him at any length because it would raise questions about his cognitive function and they don’t want to go there.
Example 1: China Tariffs
Consider, for instance, this Washington Post article headlined “U.S., China agree to lower most tariffs for 90 days amid trade talks.” The big news here was that Trump was backing down.
But the only skepticism expressed by the authors anywhere near the top of their story was their acknowledgment that “analysts cautioned that the announcement fell far short of a trade deal and was merely the beginning of more rounds of negotiations.” And it wasn’t until near the end of the article that the authors lamely noted that Trump’s statements “represent a sharp shift in tone from the bluster of recent months.”
They take no notice of the fact that Trump repeatedly demonstrates he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.
Even in an article two days later, Post reporters quoted an analyst saying that Trump’s constant reversals on trade (there have been at least 50!) simply “reflect the president’s attempts to transform U.S. trade while simultaneously mitigating the negative consequences of such a transformation.”
The fact is these reversals are the consequence of an impetuous, irrational (initially misreported) move by Trump that has now blown up in his face and despite his various retreats still threatens to tank the world economy.
Example 2: Prescription Drug EO
Consider the Associated Press’s breathless coverage of Trump’s executive order on prescription drugs. Here’s the lead:
President Donald Trump on Monday signed a sweeping executive order setting a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to electively lower the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. or face new limits down the road over what the government will pay.
But the order is a joke. It has no teeth and was a big win for the pharmaceutical industry. (The New York Times actually nailed this one, for once.)
Example 3: Welcoming Afrikaners
And consider how much the story of Trump’s decision to admit white South Africans as refugees – when he has shut the door to all nonwhite people – needed to be contextualized as an obvious act of racism. Similarly, Trump’s declaration of a “genocide” of white people in South Africa required immediate and strident pushback.
Instead, the Washington Post article, headlined “White South Africans arrive at Dulles as refugees under Trump order,” understatedly noted that the Afrikaners were granted a status that “the Trump administration has suspended for all other groups worldwide.” And rather than rejecting Trump’s accusation of genocide as a racist fantasy, the Post initially didn’t push back at all, then in a later version simply called it “an allegation government officials there say lacks any evidence.”
A New York Times analysis three days later got a little closer to what’s really going on, noting that Trump had “upended a refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters.” Additionally, the authors wrote: “The administration is welcoming white South Africans after suspending the program for everyone else, including other Africans who have waited in refugee camps for years and were vetted and cleared, and Afghans who supported the U.S. war in their country.” The authors also described Trump’s allegation of genocide as a “debunked claim.”
But it’s still playing footsie with the truth, rather than delivering it.
What Every Trump Article Needs
Every article about Trump’s immigration policies needs to make it clear that those policies are steeped in racism.
Every article reporting on what Trump said needs to make it clear that he is a serial liar.
Every article quoting Trump needs to quote him at length, rather than cleaning up his incoherence.
Every article about a Trump announcement needs to make it clear that he could very well reverse himself anytime.
Every article about a Trump reversal needs to clearly indicate that the White House is in constant chaos, and that its reversals are deeply destabilizing
Every article about something Trump says in a social media post needs to state that he often uses social media to impetuously propose irrational things that end up not happening.
Every article involving him “testing the limits” of the rule of law needs to clearly indicate that he has no grasp of his constitutional responsibilities and is acting so unlawfully that he’s basically running a criminal enterprise.
Every article about what Trump “believes” needs a caveat that his only consistent beliefs are self-interested.
Every article about Trump enriching himself needs to make it clear that enriching himself is his dominant guiding principle.
Every article about something the administration has done needs to question whether Trump is actually aware of it.
Anything less than that is basically a cover-up.
Thank you. The press has let us down. I would add, every article should state the illegality of DOGE. Congress owns the power of the purse. Period.
Great analysis, as always, but I think we are getting caught in another eddy here. The term "mainstream," as applied to news media, has become obsolete.
It used to refer to large traditional news outlets, like the NY Times, Washington Post, broadcast networks, CNN, Fox "News," and the like. Media like X and Bluesky and Instagram, Reddit and TikTok have been lumped into the "social media" category, while important up-and-comers like Mother Jones, ProPublica, Substack get sidelined as "alternative" sources.
It seems to me that the most important distinction these days is not audience but motive.
Profit-making media always have an eye on the potential monetary value of the information they furnish consumers. Non-profit advocacy groups may well carefully curate and select what they present, however noble their causes may be, so they are looking for profit of a different kind.
The subset of truth-seeking, public, transparent, and independent media are the hope of the future. The Contrarian and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Southern Poverty Law Project and many others are doing the work that the former "mainstream" media used to do without interference from their publishers.
We need not only to support them financially and with our eyeballs, but to strongly recommend to friends and family that we all broaden our search for fact-based, eyes-open reporting and commentary, just like we do by coming here to read Mr. Froomkin.