-Analysis-
PARIS — High on the list of sad-eyed and seemingly definitive losers coming out of Donald Trump’s stunning comeback is what we sometimes still call the press.
For nearly 10 years, the professional news corps has tried to keep up with this raging bull of a public figure. Reporters in Washington and New York and Palm Beach hunted for scoops of corruption in plain sight, and tried to unpack and denounce a constant stream of spite, incompetence and unpredictability that the nation (and world) seemingly couldn’t get enough of.
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The puzzle that Donald Trump the politician presented to the media establishment was apparent almost immediately. Just a few weeks into his unlikely candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination, The Huffington Post — which was then near the peak of its influence as a trailblazing and mostly respected digital media upstart — took the first real shot at responding to the challenge. It published a brief Note About Our Coverage Of Donald Trump's "Campaign":
After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won't report on Trump's campaign as part of The Huffington Post's political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump's campaign is a sideshow. We won't take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you'll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.
Five months later, as Trump was steamrolling over his Republican primary opponents with his now familiar formula of outlandish policy pronouncements and insulting nicknames, the website made a very sharp U-turn. In a post titled “We Are No Longer Entertained,” founder Ariana Huffington wrote that the press had the responsibility to take Trump very seriously, and call out his ugliness without pulling any punches.
“We will be changing how we cover him at The Huffington Post,” she wrote, calling Trump “an ugly and dangerous force in American politics.” After the announcement of his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants, Huffington made a point of praising a column by The Washington Post's Dana Milbank that opened: "Let's not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist." And no, of course, that didn’t work either.
Nothing “works” in a free press with a figure like Trump. His modus operandi is to use all means necessary to make himself immune to accepted democratic checks on his power: impeachment, court cases, common decency. If Ronald Reagan was the “Teflon president” because bad news never stuck, Trump is the throw-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-at-him-and-watch-it-stick president. Shamelessness is his defining characteristic, his superpower. And for the news business, it’s been a great story.
Waste of a career
Trump is perfect in the role of press antagonist by never playing by our rules. And he won — for good.
Still, not all is lost.
For starters, we too are still here. And just as Trump is preternaturally inclined to circumvent our systems, a free press is made to keep…pressing. Freely.
So what do we do now? There has been plenty of handwringing and finger-pointing, and just plain exhaustion. Simon Kuper in the Financial Times writes that “journalism has begun to feel like an enjoyable paid hobby which serves no apparent social purpose. Assembling facts and arguments has probably been a waste of a career.” He cities British lawyer and writer David Allen Green’s conclusion that: “There is no point, in and of itself, showing a candidate to be a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or [arguably] a fascist if people do not actually care if that candidate is a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist.”
As good a “five minutes” as any stand-up comedian could roll out.
Sorry, though, to our colleagues in Washington: you still have a lot of work to do to keep calling out the ugliness and exposing the corruption. There will be even more this time. And even if it can’t stop him, we must not disappear.
But it may also be worth returning to The Huffington Post’s first instinct back in July 2015. Take as recent Exhibit A one of Trump’s final rallies of the campaign. You may have seen a clip or photo of the event, in Green Bay, Wisconsin where Trump had decided to go on stage wearing an orange safety vest from his garbage truck stunt meant to capitalize on the controversy that followed a comedian at a previous rally calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Trump’s riff on the vest and the controversy — with a rare dose of self-deprecation about his weight — were as good a “five minutes” as any stand-up comedian could roll out.
Never boring
He is a lot of things, most of them awful, but Trump is also a born showman. His never-boring quality may be the most potent political weapon he has. The 2% margin in the popular vote could easily be accounted for by those who didn’t have a strong opinion and figured he’d be good for a few laughs. And even if you’re not laughing, you can’t stop watching.
All of the bogus post-election bashing of the Democrats for being the party of the “elite” pandering to some would-be woke agenda might better be recast by prodding them to figure out how to lighten up and ham it up a bit (and that includes their boring show business friends!)
In a past life, I covered Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, often considered a prototype of the outlandish tycoon-showman-politico that Trump has turbo-charged on a global scale. He too was never boring and largely un-coverable for the press, with Italian and foreign reporters alike caught in an endless feedback loop of outrage and entertainment.
At the end of a 2004 interview over lunch at his Rome residence — joined by seven or eight aides and unidentified hangers-on — Berlusconi began to describe to me something supposedly terrible his opponents had done, which he punctuated by calling them: pagliacci — Clowns.
Accompanying me to the exit, a press attache nervously whispered that Berlusconi didn’t really mean what he’d said, and there was no reason to use it in my article. I didn’t — by then, we’d heard the stories and insults a million times, and my article had a lot of other ground to cover, including Italy’s role in the war in Iraq. Looking back, I wonder if I missed the story, if the Felliniesque circus was always really the point of it all with Berlusconi.
Preserving democracy
From where I sit now at Worldcrunch, in Paris and beyond, the trepidation of the coming four years is also very much a question for the rest of the world. There is of course an air of panic around foreign policy and trade and climate, but other countries will also be looking to see how the institutions of American democracy, including a free press, hold up.
The story of Trump II will largely be a story about preserving that democracy. It is also a story about a man, one who makes others believe a lie, even while we’re never sure if he believes it too. Like a stand-up comic. Like a dictator.
Is there a way to embrace Trump on his own terms? As a show.
For the American press, like the other democratic institutions, the ultimate responsibility for the next four years is to find the ways to avoid the worst. One sign that the country has not ceded to authoritarianism will be if the press itself is still standing. So for all of us, establishment outlets and swashbuckling internet outfits, foreign and domestic, the central marching orders are familiar: Keep being a free press in all its twisted and sweaty and eternally insufficient glory.
Still I do have one unusual suggestion for achieving this that might horrify my elite comrades: Is there a way to embrace Trump on his own terms? As a show. It would be a new look for our buttoned-up line of work, but if late-night comedians and internet influencers can do the news, we news folk can find a bit of space for comedic influencing in our coverage of the reality-TV president.
Flatter and distract
I’m not really sure how it would work: Maybe hat tips to the trademark weaves. We could break down a zinger that knocked world leaders off their game, or chuckle at his “joking” about a third term. Or perhaps point out what's so funny about Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr. joining his cabinet.
Shifting attention to Trump's comic side may confuse and distract him from his taste for vengeance.
Laughing yet? We might also turn for inspiration to the good folk at The Onion, who just bought the InfoWars website that the despicable Alex Jones was forced to shut down.
However it might look, and despite the famous risks of “normalizing” his bad behavior, shifting attention to Trump's comic side will flatter the Donald, and may confuse and distract him from his taste for vengeance, and the agenda of the ideologues around him.
As he was in 2016, Donald Trump remains a bigot and a sexist, a narcissist and a pathological liar who may take a real stab at dismantling American democracy. He’s a man remarkably absent of conviction, with the rarest kind of political talent — and (yes, we must admit it) a public figure who is changing the course of human history. He’s all those things, but he’s also just a big fat clown.