Trump coverage needs to change and here’s how
Trump is a con artist and ordinary people are going to get hurt. That’s the all-encompassing story of the next four years
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Mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is a disaster.
The incremental daily stories utterly fail to convey the extent of the danger he presents to the functioning of government, to national security, and to democracy itself.
Even the news analyses rarely put Trump in anywhere close to his full context.
Political journalists and their editors will tell you they don’t craft their stories that way because it could create the appearance of partisanship. That’s a garbage argument, but there’s no convincing them otherwise.
As it happens, however, there is a different framing of Trump that is even more accurate -- and explanatory -- than describing him as a fulminating would-be dictator.
It’s also completely non-partisan, because it has nothing to do with political views.
That framing is simply this: That Trump is a con artist.
He is, in the words of investigative journalist and author David Cay Johnston, “the greatest con artist in the history of the world.”
“You’ve got to stop covering him like he’s just another politician, with a different agenda,” Johnston told me recently. “He’s a criminal and a con artist. And that has to be central to everything you cover about him.”
That framing has a lot going for it: It’s easy to grasp, fully substantiated by the facts, and explains pretty much everything about Trump past, present and future. It’s the unifying theory of Donald Trump.
The con artist M.O. is to get people to suspend disbelief – to believe things that aren’t true. Then they grab money or political power -- or both. Sound familiar?
Eventually, they leave town, promises unfulfilled, but with their coffers full. (Unless, that is, they get run out of town on a rail, which is a possibility.)
For journalists, failing to situate Trump’s words and actions in the context of an ongoing con is tantamount to deception. It’s not just failing to tell the whole story, it’s failing to tell the central story.
It also has the huge advantage of preparing readers and viewers for what’s to come: The inevitable betrayal of the suckers who voted for him.
If you recognize that Trump is all about accruing power and money at others’ expense, then you also can see that he will inevitably let down those who counted on him to make their lives better.
In reality -- and in stark contrast to Joe Biden’s strongly pro-worker agenda -- Trump’s actions will hurt ordinary Americans. The downtrodden will be even more trodden upon.
A political journalist’s obligation going forward, then, is to expose the con and chronicle the betrayals.
That’s the big story. That’s the job.
Some of his con is coming undone already, even before he takes office. By giving billionaires leading roles in his administration, he has shown that he will not rule as a populist.
In his “Person of the Year” interview with Time Magazine interview, Trump acknowledged that what was arguably his single most effective promise -- to lower grocery prices -- is no longer operative.
At an August rally in North Carolina, for instance, Trump told the crowd, “From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again.” He added: “You just watch. They’ll come down fast.”
But in the December interview with Time, Trump said “It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard.“
That’s the first con unraveling before our eyes. It should have made for banner headlines and days of follow-up stories, but was largely buried in the mainstream press.
And there are so many more betrayals to come.
Tariffs will not be paid for by foreign countries; they’ll be paid for by the American consumer, which will increase inflation.
Mass deportations – if they even occur -- won’t make anyone’s lives better, they’ll simply destroy communities, devastate a critical part of the American labor force, and disrupt the economy.
Although Trump promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare, it seems likely he’ll break that promise, too, in order to enrich himself and his friends.
Although he promised not to pursue a national abortion ban, he will almost certainly do so.
And although he promised to end wars, he is more likely to start them.
Once you acknowledge that Trump is a con artist above all else, everything becomes clearer. For instance, it’s no longer surprising that he has no idea how to govern. That’s not his thing. Nor does he have a clearly definable political agenda, other than seizing power and destroying enemies.
He is the proverbial snake-oil salesman. That’s the accurate framing. But it’s not what we’re getting from the traditional mainstream media.
What we get instead are articles like this one from New York Times reporter Nate Cohn, embracing the fiction that Trump has policy views supported by analysis.
You sometimes get tiny little whiffs of the con-man narrative, but not often and not much. For instance, the Post’s perpetually credulous news analyst, Dan Balz, wrote on Dec. 15 that Trump’s “personnel decisions raise questions about whether his true priorities square with those of the people who voted for him.”
Raises questions, indeed!
You have to go back to a Paul Krugman New York Times opinion column in late October to get the real story in the traditional media. Under the headline “Trump’s Biggest Con: Pretending He’s on the Side of Working Men and Women,” Krugman wrote:
Donald Trump has always been a con man. As a businessman, he left behind a trail of investors who lost money in failed ventures even as he profited, students who paid thousands for worthless courses, unpaid contractors and more. Even amid his current presidential campaign he has been hawking overpriced gold sneakers and Trump Bibles printed in China.
But Trump’s biggest, potentially most consequential con has been political: portraying himself as a different kind of Republican, an ally of working Americans.
The truth is that to the extent that Trump’s policy plans — or, in some cases, concepts of plans — differ from G.O.P. orthodoxy, it’s because they are even more antilabor and pro-plutocrat than his party’s previous norm.
Trump is a con artist and ordinary people are going to get hurt. That’s the all-encompassing story of the next four years. To the political journalists out there, I say get on it or get lost.
tRump's success at a fifty-year con and counting can be laid 100% at the feet of a complaisant media, as w/o the support of the gullible and the cynical press, he would be nowhere close to the power he has accrued...the cited article by the incorrigible Nate Cohn is but one example of what we rightfully call today "sanewashing", and there is ZERO signs of any meaningful change in tRump coverage as we and the media move zombie-like into tRump 2.0.
Paul Krugman wrote his last column for the NYT. That should speak volumes. Corp media is now trump media. They may as well be fox. But corp media's audience is shrinking while alternative outlets that cover trump in the manner you advocate are sprouting and growing. There is hope.