When fact-checking is not enough

News organizations need to expose Trump’s nefarious motives

Most mainstream news organizations did an admirable job of fact-checking Donald Trump’s speech full of election lies Thursday night — and not just in sidebars, but in their lead stories.

That was a pleasant surprise.

Quite a few of them even plainly stated that Trump was trying to sow doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections.

Also good.

But most of them whiffed when it came to answering the all-important question: Why is he doing this?

That answer is essential to understanding the extraordinary dangers ahead.

And here’s the answer: Trump’s goal is to create a pretext for invalidating election results he doesn’t like in the future, starting with the midterm elections coming up in just over 100 days.

Pundits expected Trump to relitigate the 2020 election. But he did remarkably little of that, choosing instead to make the specious argument that the country’s entire election infrastructure is insecure and untrustworthy.

Headlines Matter

Here’s what the headlines should have said: “Trump lays groundwork for election interference”.

Instead, many of the headlines were incredibly weak – even when the articles themselves were full of refutations of Trump’s lies.

The Associated Press sent out a story headlined “Trump doubles down on US election attacks in his primetime speech”.

The Washington Post headlined its lead story “Trump’s speech stops short of offering evidence of vote tampering”.

The New York Times, which initially led its homepage with a bold headline – “Trump Asserts Outlandish Claims About Election Results in Address“, quickly changed it to the vastly inferior “Trump Exaggerates Claims About Election Vulnerabilities in Speech“.

The Wall Street Journal got the year wrong in its headline: “Trump Ramps Up Effort to Sow Doubt About 2020 Election”.

But go read those articles and you’ll find consistently excellent, unambiguous fact-checking.

What you won’t find is a straightforward explanation of how Trump was setting the stage for another attempt to steal an election.

At best, the articles included a quote from a Democrat somewhere.

The Wall Street Journal piece quoted California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s social media post saying “Before a single vote has been cast, he’s already laying the groundwork to rig this election and convince YOU not to trust the results if they don’t go his way.”

The Washington Post quoted from a statement by Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner, who wrote: “The greatest danger to our elections right now is false narratives seized upon here at home as a pretext to convince Americans their elections cannot be trusted – or worse, to justify unprecedented federal intervention in elections that the Constitution entrusts to the states.”

Danger to Democracy

What we need from the political media is a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the danger Trump’s undermining of the election process poses to democracy.

The closest thing I saw to that was a New York Times news analysis by Peter Baker, with the promising headline: “A Trump Obsession That Carries a Cost for Democracy.”

But Baker’s weak language undercut the article’s impact. He wrote that Trump “intimated” that “if his party loses this fall’s midterm election… that may not be an honest outcome.”

When it came to explaining Trump’s motivation, Baker cast the obvious truth as an extreme view held by “critics.” Trump, he wrote “seems intent on laying a predicate that, at the least, could explain away a defeat and, at most, his critics fear, potentially justify direct intervention aimed at changing the results.”

Toward the end of the article, Baker timidly acknowledged that “The idea that Mr. Trump might opt to take action if the election does not go the way he wants it to is not unthinkable.”

But then he threw up his hands, concluding: “The question for many Americans will be whom do they trust.”

What Next?

Political reporters also need to start seriously examining what Trump might do to steal the midterms.

On MS Now’s “Morning Joe” today, Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee offered up one scenario:

It’s 9 o’clock on election night and he realizes that he’s going to lose control of the House of Representatives, which is very likely, and maybe even the Senate, right? And so what he does is you know he says “I’ve just gotten a report from the director of CIA or, you know, the director of national intelligence, that the Iranians are currently conducting an operation to damage the voting totals in California and Georgia and Michigan, and therefore I have ordered federal agents to take custody to save our elections from the Democrats”…. And they will seize the ballot boxes in order to keep those ballot boxes secure. Now you have ballot boxes being loaded in the back of DHS vans, the chain of custody is lost in those very sensitive locations where, you know, the races could be won or lost by a couple hundred votes --and what do we do? What do we do? The chain of custody is lost. We will never know, if that scenario in fact plays out, who won the election. And that is what last night was about.

Thursday’s speech, as transparently dishonest and inept as it was, was a shot across the bow of our democracy.

What will he do? And what will we do? Those are the most urgent questions that reporters – and the pro-democracy community – must explore.