When democracy is at stake: the weakness of an ‘impartial’ press

      I view Donald Trump as sui generis—one of a kind. We simply have not seen in this country one politician who, by himself, is so off-the-charts narcissistic, ignorant, lazy, venal, dishonest and cruel.

      Add to that his designs on destroying our democracy—he tried and failed once on Jan. 6, 2021, and hopes to do it again, bigly—in 2025, and Houston, we have a problem.

      That, in turn, raises a question for me, a former White House correspondent and national political correspondent, who tried over 20 years with the New York Daily News—through Democratic and Republican administrations—to be as objective as possible in his political reporting from Washington:

       “How can one be objective in reporting on Donald Trump?”

      My answer: one cannot be.

      With Donald Trump, all bets are off in terms of objectivity. In fact, I would argue that slavish “on the one hand this; on the other hand that” objectivity when reporting about Trump, his increasingly bizarre meanderings and his lies, performs a disservice to this country and our democracy by effectively legitimizing what he says as acceptable political discourse.

      The old constraints on what one could say (or get away with) when running for office have been shattered by an obese, short-fingered vulgarian (thank you, Graydon Carter) whose mendacity comes seasoned with a rancid mix of racism, xenophobia, greed and stupidity. 

      Add to this now increasing dementia.

      If there ever were any doubt that Trump has jumped the rails mentally and emotionally, one only had to watch his presidential debate performance with Kamala Harris on Sept. 10.

      Were he not so pathetic and dangerous, it would have been comical to watch Trump jump at every provocation that Harris thew at him, growing red-faced and more and more incoherent as the evening progressed. (“they’re eating dogs … .”)

      But this is not new.

      For more than a year now, I and others like me (often ex-newsies not bound by the niceties of a newspaper, magazine or regular paycheck) have been shouting that Donald Trump is batshit crazy and getting worse.

      Don’t just take my word for it: scientists and medical folks have for some time now warned that Trump’s chaotic rambling is not his masterly “weaving” of many narrative threads, but in fact near-certain evidence of increasing dementia—the same dementia that killed his racist, antisemitic father, Fred C. Trump.

        [And let me note here: this is way worse than an enfeebled Joe Biden being forgetful or frail. Neither man should be president, but Trump is the one who could, with his willing MAGA helpers in and out of government, destroy our democracy once and for all.]

      And for way too long Donald Trump has been enabled by a compliant mainstream press, accustomed to covering politicians for whom lying is not simply the default mode. People who do not weigh everything (not merely many things) on a ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ basis.

      Most national political journalists are too nice, especially when dealing with loudmouth bullies—I’m looking at you, David Muir. Or, to put it more realistically: too concerned with losing access to their sources to actually piss them off with tough questions that show up the sources to be stooges, fools or liars.

      Once, the mainstream press held sway: pols needed the press more than the press needed the pols.

      But no more. Enter the bitch-goddess, the internet.

       “The formation of public opinion is out of control because of the way the internet is forming groups and dispersing information freely,” Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor and former dean, said in an interview three years ago with my former colleague Tom Edsall, now a columnist for the New York Times.

      Quoting Post, Edsall said: “Before the advent of the internet people were always crazy, but they couldn’t find each other, they couldn’t talk and disperse their craziness. Now we are confronting a new phenomenon and we have to think about how we regulate that in a way which is compatible with people’s freedom to form public opinion.”

      Or put another way: years ago, people spouting Trump’s views about, say, Mexican rapists overwhelming our southern border or about Clorox enemas to fight Covid, would have largely been ignored with eye rolls, not allowed to spout, cancer-like, via thousands of internet eyeballs.

      The ignorant, the foolish, the downright stupid (read: Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”) always will be tools of the demagogue. But there is just so much slack I will grant these people, based on their poverty or poor education.

      My mother’s people were dirt-poor Italian immigrants. They didn’t come here looking for handouts, just work—like the thousands of dog- and cat-eating immigrant criminals that Trump so despises. 

      Finally, I am reminded of two groups of people I so admire: World War II resistance fighters in Europe and 1960s civil rights workers in America.

      Neither group would say, as Trump did of the Charlottesville protestors: there are good people on both sides.

      The resisters and the civil rights workers knew then, as we should know now, that we are in an existential battle over the very soul of our democracy.

      To journalists of today, I would suggest, as both a friend and former colleague: in this year especially, even-handedness enables evil.