Thursday's postcard, and how an exalted sociopath broke journalism

August 15, 2024

Deception Pass, between Whidbey and Fidalgo islands in the Washington San Juans

Lies that defy gravity

With spare introduction, allow me to propose a thought experiment, with this angular set of facts.

•A week ago, Vice President Kamala Harris’s airplane—a modified Boeing 757 known as “Air Force 2”—landed in broad daylight at Detroit’s Wayne County Airport. On board with the Vice President was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who, a day earlier, had been introduced by Harris as her choice to be her running mate. A large crowd met the airplane on the tarmac and also greeted Harris and Walz inside a nearby hanger where a temporary red, white and blue stage with podium had been set up. In an age where most portable phones incorporate a camera, numerous photographs of the plane’s arrival and the crowd inside the hangar exist. A local news service estimated the crowd at approximately 15,000. Several reporters were there, including journalists from the nation’s two most prominent newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

At least in one man’s mind it was all a hoax. His name is Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States. As of July 18th, he is also the Republican Party’s nominee to become the 47th president. Unconvinced by the reporting or the photography, Trump declared the large crowd to be an “AI” (artificial intelligence) composed fake. Here’s what he wrote on his social media platform, “Truth Social”:

So here’s the thought experiment.

What would be the consequences if we just reversed this? Instead of Trump authoring this insane screed, what if it was Kamala Harris—baselessly accusing Trump of using AI (artificial intelligence) to make it appear as though Trump had been speaking to over 10,000 people at a rally, when the venue was empty?

Can you imagine the shitstorm? I can.

Apart from the legions of pundits, columnists and broadcast personalities calling upon her to resign, I can imagine at least dozens of people in her own party sounding an alarm about her sanity and calling upon her to step aside for another candidate.

But for Trump, it’s crickets.

We’re so used to his all-CAPS bluster and lying that gobsmacking whoppers just sort of pile up beneath the gears of the news cycle. Within hours the next belch of Trumpian swamp gas bubbled up—a Trump press conference from which National Public Radio fact-checkers counted over 160 “misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes.”

Perhaps because it was funnier than the rest, the one that garnered the most attention from Trump’s brain-dumping press conference was his tale that he’d been in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willy Brown who, long ago, dated Kamala Harris. According to Trump, Brown “told me terrible things about her (Harris)” before the helicopter malfunctioned and had to make an emergency landing. When asked about it, Brown just laughed and said he’d never been in a helicopter with the former president. Apparently, it was a case of mistaken identity but with collateral insults aimed in all directions, including Trump attacking New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Maggie Haberman (he called her “Maggot” Haberman) for questioning his pronouncements.

The ‘baked-in’ madness

This is just how Trump rolls. I was going to answer my own question about how the press just sort of shrugged at Trump’s unhinged and easily refuted charges about the Detroit airport scene. But, as I was working on this piece, one of my favorite journalists—Talking Points Memo Congressional reporter Kate Riga—answered it during a podcast with her editor, Josh Marshall. Here’s what she said:

“I mean, imagine if it was Harris who was saying ‘his crowds are AI.’ Right? ‘Those people weren’t real.’ It would be wall-to-wall coverage of how one of the major candidates has lost her goddamn mind. Right? But for Trump, it’s a blip. It’s baked in. It’s expected. It’s not even a headline story.”

Other observant journalists have noted this. Riga just gives it the right tone of exasperation. Earlier this year, The Atlantic’s top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote about journalists’ “bias toward coherence.” Here it is, in context, from editor’s notes that Goldberg shared with readers a couple months ago:

Trump overwhelms us with nonsense. This is the “banality of crazy,” as the Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas calls it. By “us,” I mean, of course, the voting public, but I especially mean the editors and headline-writers of my industry, who sometimes succumb to one of the most pernicious biases in journalism, the bias toward coherence. We feel, understandably, that it is our job to make things make sense. But what if the actual story is that politics today makes no sense? (emphasis added).

My formative training as a journalist was in public affairs reporting. The ethic of balance is that you make a good faith effort to be fair; to seek comment from principals on both sides of a conflict. There are reasons this can break down, but in the Trump era there has been a purposeful effort to demonize journalists and sabotage journalism. It hasn’t entirely succeeded, but it has done considerable damage.

I’ve mentioned this before but it does go back to what Trump’s former advisor (who’s now in jail, by the way) Steve Bannon told writer Michael Lewis six years ago, that— “(t)he Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The core of the Trump movement is built upon his projection that it’s the media that is the “Fake News” and part of a broad conspiracy to take him down. Yet it is the reliably pro-Trump Fox News network that’s had to put up nearly a billion dollars, thus far, to settle a defamation suit for promoting Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election having been stolen. A nearly identical defamation suit against Fox is still being litigated. Three of the most prominent spokespersons for the bogus stolen election conspiracy—lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis—have pled or been found guilty by courts and/or bar associations for purposefully promoting the “Big Lie.”

Trump has thus far avoided criminal consequences for his role in fomenting the 1/6/21 insurrection. But, of course, he was recently convicted of 34 felony counts in New York state related to his efforts to suppress the disclosure of extra-marital trysts in the run up to his 2020 presidential campaign. The sentencing hearing is presently scheduled for mid-September. Speaking of projection, the reason New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg was able to bring felony charges against Trump is that he could show—and did show—that Trump’s falsification of records was aimed at suppressing publication of scandalous stories that he didn’t want voters to see. In other words, he was found guilty of election interference, the very thing he accused Harris of in his bonkers allegation that she’d used AI to create fake images of a crowd greeting her plane in Detroit.

How and why Trump followers—including millions who clutch Bibles—get willingly sucked into his vortex of lies is a question for another day. What concerns me is the large and smoking hole in our civic immune system, so to speak, which does rely on a vigilant and healthy corps of journalists who can apply sound and equivalent standards to opposing candidates. It does not do that now.

Trump’s rise revealed a clear double standard, one that Bannon and Trump knew they could create and exploit with their outrages. Reporters can report. But journalists are not soccer referees who can pull red cards out off our breast pockets and promptly remove liars and charlatans from the field of play, so to speak. We’re not empowered to do that, nor should we be. The only people who can do that are in law enforcement or, closer still, those in the political ranks who have the authority to reign in corrupt candidates like Trump.

Interventions can happen. In fact, the most memorable intervention did happen fifty years ago this month when Sen. Barry Goldwater (the Republican nominee in 1964) and the Republican leaders of both the Senate and the House requested a visit with the embattled president, Richard Nixon. At a meeting in the White House they delivered the news that he would be impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate for his role in the Watergate coverup. Nixon announced his resignation three days later.

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A similar move by party leaders in these times is unlikely, in large part because Trump has already broken or purged all meaningful opposition to him within the Republican hierarchy. That system is broken, and we head toward November with deep and legitimate concerns over how votes will be counted, and whether something like a repeat of January 6, 2021 is in the cards.

A day after Trump’s off the rails press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Tom Nichols—one of The Atlantic’s more conservative voices—wrote this about the event.

Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense. And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person.”

Nichols then referenced his editor’s “bias toward coherence” observation, and how “it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.”

That’s a fair summary of the problem—that professionally restrained reportage fills the space where a primal scream of disbelief is warranted, but stifled. Perhaps we need an emoji for that.

Journalism’s role is not save a broken democracy from itself. It’s responsibility is to be accurate and fair. But the profession is in disarray now because our weaknesses have been exposed. There are no easy answers. Frankly, Trump, his GOP enablers, and their followers can shout “fake news!” until they’re all hoarse. The truth will remain that Trump is the one who’s benefited most from the disarray that he and Bannon so purposefully created and continue to exploit.

—tjc