Unless you've been living in a hole, you've probably noticed that President Joe Biden and his surrogates have been more vocal of late in responding to Donald Trump's increasingly unhinged and fascist rhetoric.
From Semafor, we unsurprisingly learn that this move is intentional.
The [Biden] campaign has also been publicly pushing the press to more extensively discuss reports detailing [Trump’s] potential plans to use the federal government against enemies, implement sweeping immigration crackdowns, and more. A series of press releases warn about “Trump’s America in 2025,” accusing the former president of being “hell-bent on undermining our democratic institutions” while warning that “a national abortion ban is on the ballot in 2024” (which Trump has so far not endorsed).
A Biden campaign official told Semafor that their team planned to highlight under-the-radar policy planks proposed by Trump and his team “every day between now and Thanksgiving.”
“What we see is a failure to properly cover Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda,” the campaign official said. “I think we are filling that void.”
The unnamed campaign official might as well have called out The New York Times by name. The Times has consistently downplayed the horrific extremism of Trump's speeches and his campaign's plans. Calling his opponents "vermin" that he would "root out" of the nation—a line that echoes Nazi propaganda justifying the Holocaust—was shrugged off as Trump taking a speech in "a very different direction." Even as Trump takes credit for being "the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade," the Times pretends that the "vagueness" of his language on other occasions muddies his record on abortion—a "vagueness" that Semafor seems to accept since being a sucker is at this point a requirement of political journalism.
The Associated Press objectively examined Trump's stated agenda, including his desire to fire tens of thousands of government workers so that they can be replaced with others seen as more loyal to him. He has promised deportations on a scale never before seen—and not only of undocumented residents but also of citizens with "jihadist sympathies"—while imposing an "ideological screening" system on immigrants. He vows to end birthright citizenship, forcibly move homeless Americans into new government-constructed "tent cities," execute suspected shoplifters, and deploy the National Guard to Democratic cities.
Most importantly, these are not glib campaign promises. An enormous amount of time and money is going toward plans to enact them. The fascist Heritage Foundation is spearheading efforts to build out policy books and vetted lists of loyalists willing to bend laws for the sake of those policies.
The Heritage Foundation wants to do to our government what they did to Iraq during George W. Bush’s presidency: stockpile it with inexperienced ideologues whose main qualification is an unwillingness to let facts and consequences intrude on their plans to turn their newly captured nation into a supposed utopia. And the lists of loyalists being assembled this time are not likely to be of higher quality. Axios reports that "immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs" and that "[t]hose queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected."
Have you ever questioned Trumpism? Or had a thought you didn't hear from Steve Bannon’s podcast? Then kiss your position in Trump’s administration goodbye.
Why, then, is it the Biden campaign's duty to point this out to the majority of the political press? Why are so few national outlets reporting that Trump is promising to implement an explicitly fascist agenda? We are less than three years removed from Trump attempting a coup that left people dead. Why won’t editors believe that Trump and his allies mean what they say?
For the record, Biden and his campaign probably can’t convince The New York Times to take the threat of fascism seriously. The Times caters to elites who are agnostic about the direction of the country so long as they get both the largest piece of it and continued cocktail party rights.
But if the AP and other outlets continue to report on the actual, published agenda of the Trump campaign and its associated groups, then there is indeed some hope that other papers, if not the Times, can get this right as well. Protecting democracy is what the press is supposed to be doing. It's not a "both sides" issue, and it shouldn't be on the not-seditionist party to goad reporters into covering it.
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Republicans are challenging labor leaders to fights and allegedly physically assaulting one another. Donald Trump says he will abolish reproductive rights entirely and is openly calling for the extermination of his detractors, referring to them as “vermin” on Veterans Day. The Republican Party has emerged from its corruption cocoon as a full-blown fascist movement.