We know who Trump is already

[babylonsister]

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_media_coverage_january_6.php

We know who Trump is already
By Jon Allsop, CJR
February 8, 2022


More than a year after Donald Trump’s presidency came to an end, the Trump news cycle seems to be speeding up again. Last Saturday night, he said that he would pardon supporters charged in connection with the insurrection should he become president again. Last Sunday night, he said in a statement that Mike Pence, his vice president, should have “overturned the Election!” Last Monday, CNN reported that Trump advisers drafted two executive orders that would have directed the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines in the wake of the election; the same day, the New York Times reported that Trump himself was “more directly involved than previously known” in the voting-machines plot and tried to rope in the Justice Department, too. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that a memo circulated among allies suggested that Trump have the Pentagon and National Security Agency fish through communications data for proof of supposed foreign interference in the election. On Friday, Pence told a meeting of the Federalist Society that Trump was “wrong” to say that he had the power to overturn the election. All of these stories have driven yet another breathless round of Trump commentary in the political press and on liberal cable networks.

Journalists discussing all this have sometimes explained to their audiences why they’re still talking about Trump so long after he left office, often pointing to the importance of the historical record but also his de facto ongoing leadership of the Republican Party and the intensifying Congressional probe of the insurrection. The debate as to how central Trump should remain to the news cycle has simmered since he left office—ex-presidents don’t tend to get this much attention, but they also don’t tend to behave like Trump. Last April, a Pew analysis found that roughly half of stories about the nascent Biden administration mentioned Trump; in July, Julia Ioffe spoke with White House correspondents, at least a couple of whom seemed to yearn for a return to the days of loose-lipped Trumpian intrigue. Citing both these reports in his introduction to a recent issue of CJR, Kyle Pope, our editor and publisher, took aim at the media’s “damned Trump fixation,” writing that “coverage of January 6 soon devolved into an excuse for the political reporting class to sustain Trump-scorn content, even as they purported to be covering his successor.” Other media critics, by contrast, have argued that major outlets are generally downplaying the urgency of the Trump story, in framing if not in quantity.

As I see things now, the bar for centering Trump in the news should be very high; there is ample news to cover on the Biden front that is of immediate relevance to the lives of millions of people, and as I’ve written before, covering democracy necessitates engagement with such everyday issues. News organizations can cover Trump and Biden, of course—and Trump stories, including some of those I outlined above, often clear a high bar given the urgent stakes of his ongoing assault on democratic institutions. That said, a good deal of Trump coverage (or more accurately, in many cases, Trump commentary) feels less useful—so much flotsam washing back and forth, back and forth, in an endless sea of outrage. On the whole, our focus could use some sharpening.

snip//

Whiplash can be induced, too, by news organizations simultaneously treating Trump as an existential threat to democracy and a political candidate seeking reelection within the normal rules of the game. This is related to a third problem, as I see it: punditry that continually channels surprise at things Trump has said and done, or that casts new revelations as a shocking new low when, in reality, they sometimes fall short of things we already saw him do with our own eyes. After Trump said Pence should overturn the election, various outlets concluded that he “said the quiet part out loud,” the rationale for this being that Trump, to this point, had only spoken about wanting to root out fraud. His new wording might be significant in the context of the January 6 investigation. But we shouldn’t pretend that there was ever a “quiet” part here, or that Trump’s deranged fraud lies were ever anything less than an attempt to subvert the election. On The Daily, meanwhile, Michael Barbaro described the voting-machines plot as Trump’s “most brazen attempt yet” to overturn the election, even though it happened before he incited a mob of his supporters to storm Congress. Assessing the sweep of last week’s Trump stories, the Times published a news analysis headlined “Trump’s Words, and Deeds, Reveal Depths of His Drive to Retain Power”; a news analysis in the Post led with the headline, “This was the week when Trump revealed all.” But his intentions have been clear all along.

“The media” is a big place, and a lot of these problems manifest in an aggregate that no single editor has the power to address. But all of us, by this point, should know exactly who Trump is and what he tried to do to the election result, and wide-eyed commentary about his brazenness and character is mostly hot air at this point. The full facts of his subversion attempt are not yet known, and it’s right that they be reported out with due urgency—but even here, we needn’t look for a smoking gun; we can already see a smoking armory. The most important thing we can do now is lay out clearly, and with as little extraneous noise as possible, how Trump’s actions last time might shape what he does next time. The Trump news cycle isn’t done yet.

[nykym]

1. If the media would

ignore him then he will fade away.

[MyOwnPeace]

2. OMG - I LOVED this line:

"we needn’t look for a smoking gun; we can already see a smoking armory."

A really great read - thanks for the post!!!