The media is failing to cover Trump again

Plus, Tucker rises anew

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I have to confess that even though I wrote about American politics for national outlets for most of the Trump presidency, I’ve rarely actually watched an entire Trump rally or interview since 2016. Sure, I’d read the transcripts in search of news, but it takes a huge amount of mental stamina to sit for an hour with the full firehose of idiocy and falsehood shooting directly into your face. That, at least, was part of it. The other part was that watching these events created in me a deep unease about the inability of the media to cover Trump in a way which didn’t just enable his campaign against American democracy. Every media outlet in America has been struggling with this question since 2015, and none of them have got it right.

I’ve also struggled with this dilemma personally. During the Trump presidency I was asked several times to moderate events involving spokespeople for his administration. In each case I refused because I didn’t think it was possible to run an event like that in a way which didn’t just involve bestowing credibility on someone operating in bad faith. A debate between Trump and his detractors is one thing, but just giving a platform to someone to lie while you nod along is something I refuse to be a part of.

It was hence with a great deal of trepidation that I sat down to watch Trump’s CNN town hall last night. As I expected, the event turned out to be a disaster. That CNN decided to give Trump an hour of national airtime to lie and filibuster is bad enough, but that they let him do it in front of a crowd of cheering supporters is unforgivable. To her credit the host, Kaitlan Collins, didn’t just nod along - she did a great job of challenging Trump and calling out his lies. But like everyone always does, she got drowned by the firehose. The lies come so thick and fast and are delivered with such conviction that there is no way to counter them. What was left was exactly the sort of media spectacle that serves Trump best, and I have no idea why CNN did it.

Seeing the reactions of the crowd should at least be a sobering experience for Democrats and democrats who may have been tempted to view a Trump resurgence as too outlandish to actually occur. Here was a living, breathing reminder that tens of millions of Americans still live on Planet Trump, something the former president confirmed when he had them cheering along not just to standard GOP classics like inflation and abortion but also to Trump’s Greatest Hits. They clapped when he questioned the validity of the 2020 election and said Mike Pence should have overturned the election. They clapped when he said he would pardon the January 6th rioters. And they laughed as he told his version of the E. Jean Carroll story.

Many of the voters seemed to get that their function was to provide the canned laughter for The Trump Show, but some engaged in the quixotic endeavour of asking Donald Trump questions about serious policy issues. It was mildly interesting to see Trump having to weigh in on the issues of the day rather than just posting about the 2020 election on Truth Social, but none of what he said was really surprising. For instance:

• Trump said he would be “inclined” to pardon “a large portion” of the January 6th insurrectionists, who he said were “great people” who had participated in a “beautiful day”.

• He didn’t rule out again implementing a policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and claimed that it had stopped people coming last time (it didn’t).

• He called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “a great victory” but declined to say that he would sign a federal abortion ban.

• He said he would reinvigorate the American economy by drilling for oil, claiming that U.S. energy production is way down under Biden (it isn’t).

• He said that he is in favor of the Congressional GOP causing a default if the Biden administration won’t agree to big spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

• He claimed that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in “one day” by having a phone call with Putin and Zelensky. He also denied to say he wanted Ukraine to win the conflict.

Some of these specific lines might be news, but generating them certainly doesn’t justify the event. The media is still a long way from figuring out how to handle Trump, but this town hall at least showed what not to do. Hopefully the rest of the media learns from it.

Tucker is back

I was also somewhat rocked this week by the news that Tucker Carlson is entering some sort of ill-defined partnership with Elon Musk in order to bring his show “to Twitter”. What that means exactly I still don’t know, but a collaboration between America’s richest man and its foremost far-right propagandist is not going to end well.

More than anything else that has happened in the past year, it is making me seriously consider leaving Twitter. Musk has already stacked the algorithm in favor of the far right and rolled out the welcome mat to them, but him bringing Tucker onboard means that staying on Twitter is directly contributing to the revenue of a company which is promoting Carlson’s values. One reason Fox dumped his show is because many advertisers boycotted Tucker for that exact reason, and I feel like that logic applies to Twitter users as well.

On the other hand, unlike Fox, Twitter is still in many ways a genuinely open and competitive space for all sorts of different ideas. A lot of entertaining and useful and liberating discourse flourishes on there still, and there’s a good chance that the Musk era won’t last for ever. Ceding that space entirely to the right and just letting it wither into another version of Truth Social feels short-sighted and counterproductive. What Twitter used to be and in many ways still is is worth fighting for. So maybe I’ll stick around for now. But I’m one step closer to the door.