I think Philip Bump’s analysis of the Trump interview problem is on point. The rest of the media should know this by now:
Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican nominating contest was, at its essence, uncomplicated.
Running against a cadre of sitting and former elected officials, Trump said things they wouldn’t — mostly the things that were being said in the right-wing media and by pundits on Fox News. The reputation for “truth-telling” his supporters embrace was born of his willingness to elevate false, popular claims, particularly about the left. He wasn’t elected for his policies; in fact, he broadly rejected the idea that people cared much about policy.
The only thing that’s changed over the past eight years, really, is that everyone should know the playbook by now. We should know that he will 1) flood the zone with things that are burbling on the right-wing fringe, 2) make sweeping promises without much follow-through and 3) reject any criticism out of hand, spinning it into a reason to praise himself.
And so it was with his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday.
One of only a few interviews with a traditional news outlet since he announced his 2024 candidacy last November, the discussion began precisely as his 2015 announcement at Trump Tower had begun: He would make America great again in part by repelling the hordes of criminal immigrants flooding into the country.
“They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions, insane asylums,” he said as he was answering the first question from host Kristen Welker. “They say, ‘Sir, please don’t use that term,’ but it’s true.”
As was the case eight years ago, this is not generally true. Some of those seeking to enter the country may have criminal records or even mental illness, of course, but there’s no indication that this constitutes a significant component of those seeking asylum or work in the United States. It’s almost certainly true that the universe of people who have served in senior positions on Trump’s political campaigns is more densely populated with accused criminals than the pool of recent immigrants.
Welker didn’t push back on this claim, in large part because Trump quickly moved on to another bit of patter. Flooding the zone.
She did offer some resistance to his attempt to present the film “2000 Mules” as a legitimate indictment of the 2020 election. Created by Dinesh D’Souza, recipient of one of Trump’s first presidential pardons, the film’s allegations of drop-box-stuffing have been completely eviscerated. When Trump told Welker, for example, that “we have thousands of essentially motion pictures of people stuffing the ballot boxes,” he’s referring to a common belief about the movie that is entirely false. The movie shows only a few examples of someone casting more than one vote at a drop box; none has been shown to have been illegal. One clip, described in the film as committing a crime, was determined to have depicted a man legally adding the ballots of family members. That man is now suing D’Souza.
Welker rejected Trump’s assertion, eager to move on to a different subject. There was probably a way for someone well-versed in the arcana of the allegations to push back harder on Trump’s claims; it’s very safe to assume that his ability to defend the movie is untested and flimsy. But this would almost certainly have simply led to Trump shifting the goal posts somewhere else, until he made a claim that his interviewer didn’t rebut. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories will always find a sturdy enough foundation on which they can rest.
Once you hand Trump a megaphone, he’s going to do with it what he wants. He knows how to use it. This is why it’s better to pretape his interviews, allowing for obvious dishonesties such as the one about “2000 Mules” to be elided or presented with context. For whatever reason, despite taping the interview in advance, NBC chose not to make such edits.
The interview was very difficult for me to watch. My rage at the fact that almost half the country supports this obviously corrupt, lying, imbecile has become almost too much to bear. If an interviewer ever actually did what Bump suggests I think I would feel a lot better but they don’t seem capable of it. They just let him go on and on and on with chaotic word salad perhaps in the hope that his ignorance and narcissism will be obvious to the audience. But after years of this his absurd meanderings have been normalized and I’m not sure that many people see him that way anymore. Certainly, you have to assume that young people who’ve grown up listening to him over the last 8 years think it’s normal. It’s all they know.
I guess the conventional wisdom is that the mainstream media does this for ratings (and that Chris Licht episode at CNN certainly corroborates that.) But I have to wonder if they’ve thought this through. Wouldn’t they get good ratings if they did something creative like fact checking a recorded interview like that on MTP, within the broadcast? It would be arduous but I’ll bet people would watch it. It might result in Trump refusing to ever appear with them again, but so what? He’s not on there very often anyway and there will be plenty of public appearances to cover.
As I wrote in my Salon piece this morning, Trump is not a novelty as he was in 2015 nor is he a sitting president. He’s just another and he doesn’t deserve any special deference. In fact, he deserves less deference than any of the others. After all, he’s also a criminal defendant in four separate cases. Treating him like a respectable government official is ridiculous.