Greg Sargent calls attention to the ways in which the media is failing to inform the public of Trump’s monumental dishonesty and the ways in which they fail to properly “convey just how deeply corrupt and absurd Trump’s explicitly stated positions really are.
He adds this to mix as well and I think it’s among the most important:
[T]here’s [another] way in which Trump challenges the media that generates far less attention than either of those: the ways in which the conventions of political reporting often constrain reporters from conveying just how crazy, depraved and saturated in malice and hate some of his rally performances are.
Vox’s Aaron Rupar has a fascinating but deeply dispiriting look at one such example. After Trump’s rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, an NPR segment basically sanitized away all of the wretchedness and insanity.
As Rupar notes, at the rally, Trump delivered on those qualities in a big way:
Trump bragged about war crimes. He joked about former Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson perhaps being in hell and about his possibly serving more than two terms in office. He said he’d like to see Hillary Clinton locked up and trashed “filthy, dirty” blue cities like San Francisco in a manner that’s highly unusual for a president.
NPR ran this brief report from a journalist at a local member station:
President Trump addressed thousands of his supporters in Milwaukee on his quest for a second term. He snapped back at Democrats for bringing impeachment proceedings, repeated a debunked claim that Mexico would be paying for a wall, and defended the fatal drone strike of an Iranian commander. Trump was taking on Democrats in their own territory, ahead of their national convention there this summer.
Sargent points out that Trump didn’t “snap back” he raved insanely about San Francisco being filthy and disgusting. He didn’t “take on” Democrats, he called for Clinton to be jailed and egged on the “lock her up” chants. And he didn’t defend his decision to assassinate Suleimani he swaggered around bragging of his plans to hit so much of Iran it would have “taken 30 years to rebuild if that was even possible” had they killed an American.
I watch his rallies. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of them over the past four years. And I know that if you don’t watch them you can’t really understand what is happening between him and his base:
The insanity of that does not come through at all in the NPR report and it’s extremely dangerous. If people don’t see how demented he is — and how much his followers love it — they are not going to grasp the imperative of getting him out of the White House.
I can’t tell you how often IRL I’ve related something that Trump said in his rallies to some mainstream liberal pals and they are floored. They know he’s crude and that he’s dumb. But people who are not obsessive political junkies like me simply don’t grasp just how insane he and his cult really are.
As Sargent observes, that’s a problem:
One key question is whether Trump can supercharge those parts of the country with such tactics without activating a backlash — among young and nonwhite voters, and among the sort of suburban and educated whites who remain alienated by Trump — that overwhelms the numbers in even hyper-energized Trump country. This plainly worries Trump’s advisers, who know the base might not be enough.
Press coverage that sanitizes away the wretched, hateful sides of Trump’s performances could help his appearances carry forward Trump’s mission of electrifying the base, under the radar, without clearly conveying to all those other voters — those who may not be tuning in as attentively to the 24/7 manure show that is this presidency — the truly depraved nature of what he’s dumping in their backyards.
I would just add one more thing, especially about NPR. In rural American where talk radio dominates the airwaves, NPR is often the only alternative. This kind of whitewashing is actually contributing to the political polarization by failing to give the people who depend on them the unvarnished truth of what Trump is.