The Atlantic’s McCay Coppins takes up the subject of how the media is going to adjust to not having the incredible, astonishing, addicting Trump story after January 21st. I’ve thought a lot about this myself, recognizing just what a drug it has become to me and everyone else.
It’s not a pleasurable drug. It’s more like cigarettes, which I quit with a lot of difficulty, decades ago. I hated smoking but I couldn’t stop and it felt to me like its only purpose was to make me want to smoke more. It did nothing for me, no high, no pleasure, only the need to do it and the relief I felt when I got that hit of nicotine. That’s how covering Trump feels to me. The question, of course, is how hard he’s going to make it to move on.
Coppins asked some journalists what they think of this question:
Few reporters have been at the center of more high-profile spats with the Trump White House than CNN’s Jim Acosta. A veteran TV newsman with salt-and-pepper hair and a concerned-dad demeanor, Acosta has spent the past four years picking fights with Trump flacks in the briefing room. Once, he walked out of a press conference after then–Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to say reporters weren’t enemies of the people; on another occasion, the White House temporarily revoked his press credentials. Detractors have accused Acosta—who published a book in 2019 titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America—of showboating. But he insists that his on-air indignation has always been genuine. “You can’t just go and trash the press and totally lie to the American people and tell them real news is fake news,” Acosta told me. “I couldn’t stomach it.”
The drama has made him famous, but Acosta said he doesn’t expect to bring the same crusading style to his coverage of the next administration. “I don’t think the press should be trying to whip up the Biden presidency and turn it into must-see TV in a contrived way,” he said.
If that sounds like a double standard, Acosta told me it’s not partisan—it’s a matter of professional solidarity. In his view, Trump’s campaign to discredit the press has constituted a “nonstop national emergency,” one that required a defiant response. “If being at the White House is not an experience that might merit hazard pay,” he said, “then perhaps it is going to be approached differently.”
Daniel Dale, the former Toronto Star correspondent who rose to stardom at CNN for his exhaustive cataloging of Trump’s lies, says his beat will necessarily expand come January. “It will not be a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job to fact-check Biden,” he told me. Though he stressed that the same “intensity and rigor” should be applied to the incoming president, the simple reality is that Biden doesn’t lie nearly as often as Trump does. Consequently, Dale hopes to spend more time debunking online disinformation and digging into claims made by congressional leaders.
The Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker notes that the Trump story won’t end once he leaves office. “You’re going to have a former president pretending he really won the election, threatening to run again in 2024,” he told me. “You’re going to have a Republican Party torn between Trump allegiance and a desire to cleanse itself of these past four years.”
“I do think the story of politics in America is not going to suddenly become boring on January 21,” he said. At least, that’s what Rucker is banking on. Next year, he’ll take a leave from the Post to write a follow-up to A Very Stable Genius, the best-selling Trump White House book he co-authored with his colleague Carol Leonnig.
For those remaining on the White House beat, pivoting to a more conventional administration presents its own odd set of challenges. Should the press strive for a similarly adversarial relationship with Biden? Will their new fans revolt if they start doing tough stories on Democrats? And has the bar for presidential conduct been so lowered that any criticism of Biden will look like both-sides nitpicking?
Yamiche Alcindor, a correspondent for PBS NewsHour, told me she hopes her colleagues will retain the lessons they’ve learned from covering Trump. The default skepticism toward government officials, the aversion to euphemism, the refusal to accept approved narratives—to Alcindor, these are features of a healthy press, not signs that something is amiss. She attributes this attitude to her background covering race and policing. “When something is racist, we should just say it’s racist,” she said. “When someone is lying, we should just say they’re lying.” (Trump has repeatedly singled Alcindor out at press conferences, calling her “threatening” and her questions “nasty.”)
White House coverage may get more “wonky” in the coming years, Alcindor told me, but she rejected the notion that it would be less interesting. She rattled off a list of questions that hang over the incoming administration: How will Biden address the effects of the pandemic? How will he reunite immigrant children separated from their parents? Will he make good on campaign promises related to climate change and policing and health care? These are rich story lines with high stakes that will demand strong accountability journalism. “As a journalist,” Alcindor said, “I don’t think it’s going to be boring.”
I think Alcindor has this right. The press made some strides under Trump in being more straightforward in their reporting. They should keep at it.
But they are also going to feel under pressure to even the scales by blowing up minor Democratic missteps, spin and political maneuvering into Trump level scandals, using “hypocrisy” as a weapon (which has no effect on Republicans because shamelessness is their superpower) to tie them up in knots.
I would just remind you how this looks in practice:
I feel quite confident that this will be a problem. It always has been in the past. And it serves GOP purposes. It makes everyone even more cynical by reinforcing a myth that “they all do it.” Yes, Democrats can be corrupt, sneaky, self-serving, hypocritical and shallow. They are politicians, not saints. But the differences between the two parties in the institutionalizing of all those traits on an unprecedented scale is massive and “both-sidesing” it empowers Republicans to go to extremes knowing they will pay no greater price than if they acted like decent leaders.
I can see already that there will be great pressure to pooh-pooh anyone who points out the double standards and reminds people of the abject irresponsibility of the GOP during these years of Trump, particularly their acquiescence to his corruption and betrayal of democracy in both campaigns and their aftermaths. They will say “get over it!” and what they did will be relegated to to “that’s old news!”
I’ve watched this happen over and over again in the past 30 years. It always gets worse. Which means that Trump was not the low point. Think about that.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):