Kevin Drum has a round up of certain pundits’ increasing alarm over the seemingly viable Trump candidacy and the media’s complicity in such state of affairs, which captures the appropriate level of disgust and fear:
First, Jonathan Chait:
I had not taken seriously the possibility that Donald Trump could win the presidency until I saw Matt Lauer host an hour-long interview with the two major-party candidates. Lauer’s performance was not merely a failure, it was horrifying and shocking....Most voters, and all the more so undecided voters, subsist on a news diet supplied by the likes of Matt Lauer. And the reality transmitted to them from Lauer matches the reality of the polls, which is a world in which Clinton and Trump are equivalently flawed.
Here's Matt Yglesias:
What Donald Trump said at Wednesday night’s Commander-in-Chief Forum on the aircraft carrier was shocking. He specifically defended Vladimir Putin as superior to Barack Obama, suggested women serving in the military should expect to be raped, hinted at a political purge of the officer corps, blatantly lied about his own past statements on Iraq and Libya, and called on the American military to commit war crimes.
....But this isn’t a media story. It’s a Trump story. And it’s about whether we, and the American public, are willing to stay shocked. We’re used to Trump’s lying and his nonsense because we’ve been hearing it for a long time. But it’s not normal.
And finally, for the win, here is Nancy LeTourneau:
Every now and then I have a “moment.” It tends to come when I realize that the Republican Party of the United States of American has nominated a guy to lead the most powerful nation on the planet who talks like this.
When those moments hit, I literally get speechless. I subsequently see headlines that talk about how the polls are narrowing or about pundits trying to suss out what a President Trump would REALLY do on immigration and imagine that I must have fallen into some worm hole in which an alternate reality exists simply to mock us. This can’t really be happening, can it?
What is as notable to me though is that while Trump is a uniquely ridiculous and dangerous candidate, he is not an anomaly within the Republican party. More specifically, the failure of the press to call out and correct Trump’s mendacity and incompetence is really only a smaller example of the overall failure and/or refusal of the press to call out identical and long continuing behavior by the Republican party generally. In short, if the press got its act together tomorrow as to candidate Trump, we would all still be in a boat load of trouble because an entirely duplicitous, bad faith set of Republican policies and talking points continues to remain unaddressed and firmly ensconced in our political culture.
Consider: the core Republican ideology is based on a theory of “trickle down” economics that has been entirely discredited and is no longer supported by many of its original proponents. The GOP is the only major party in the advanced world to deny climate change. Republicans and their voters no longer accept standard government statistics, like the unemployment rate. When arguing policy, Republicans assert that a universal health insurance program takes away people’s insurance, unemployment insurance causes unemployment, and defaulting on the nation’s credit would reduce its borrowing levels. As Congressional scholars Mann and Ornstein famously concluded:
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Indeed, if Trump was not the Republican nominee, consider who likely would be: Ted Cruz — the architect of the recent government shutdowns who appeared with Sarah Palin at protests against his own shutdown(!) Beyond Trump, the last Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, lied so compulsively that Steve Benen chronicled 533 lies in 30 weeks. Plus, his then VP nominee, Paul Ryan, was credited with giving the most dishonest convention speech in history to that point, and is rightly described as a “Flimflam man” when it comes to his actual governing.
While I could go on and on, the short story is that the Republican party has become a movement that, in the famous words of Karl Rove, mocks “the reality-based community” and boasts that “we [Republicans] make our own reality.”
In short, long before and separate from Donald Trump, the Republican party has declared war on the truth — and as a result the rest of our body politic, like it or not, admit it or not, is in the midst of a dangerous fight against Republicans to uphold democratic norms, societal ideals and a shared, respectful and reality based community.
Going back years now, the press generally has been unwilling to take this fight on. They have been unwilling to challenge the representatives of close to 50% of the country as liars, and have generally retreated into a “we transcribe/you decide” mode — all the more egregious and cowardly because it has applied most only to the belligerent Republican side. As a result, by the time Trump arrived, the press had been completely self-neutered. Trump is not challenged? Well, when have Republicans ever been challenged for the last decade or so? [This is a criticism, not an excuse.]
But . . . this also implicates Hillary Clinton’s strategy in this election too. As publicly reported, the Clinton campaign made a conscious, strategic decision to treat Trump as unique — as a “non-Republican” if you will — and to campaign for Republican votes and endorsements in a way that separates Trump from Republicanism generally. Thus, notwithstanding the reality addressed above, Ms. Clinton’s argument to date explicitly has been that “Trump is different from Republicans generally.” Trump then is a shared threat, and Republicans equally can unite to defeat what Trump represents . . . even though what Trump represents is in many ways the culmination of the Republican threat itself and is a threat which Republican voters continue to embrace whole heartedly today.
I originally worried about this Clinton strategy, but came to admit that I may not have the grounds to criticize what looks like a well run, well strategized, professional campaign. The highest imperative is HRC winning this next election, and her campaign seem to be positioning themselves well for that. But . . . the sad fact is that even in vanquishing Trump, the Clinton campaign is going to leave untouched the core problem facing the country’s future — a dishonest, dysfunctional and dangerous Republican party. Candidly, her strategy may take things worse, and help the Republican party continue to escape any responsibility for its misconduct that has long preceded the Trump nomination.
My message is not uplifting, but where does that leave us? It leaves us pretty much where we started. The unfortunate truth is that even if Trump is defeated, the real work has not begun. Yes, the press can lead one to despair. But it goes much deeper than that.
Put aside Trump. One of our two major political parties has gone off the rails, and abandoned notions of truth, good faith, scientific consensus, and shared community. Trump is but an example. Going forward, the press, Democrats, voters, and all non-Republicans are going to have to realize that they are already in the midst of a long fight, a struggle.
Right now, the press is falling down, the Clinton campaign is making other strategic decisions, the voters tune in or tune out, the Democrats message incompetently . . . . There is no one silver bullet. ALL of these constituencies, eventually, are going to have to step up their game and commit themselves to acknowledging, and then defeating, this threat.
It is crucial to shame Matt Lauer, but our collective work has barely begun.