Screw Objectivity—With Trump All Bets Are Off

By Frank Van Riper

The old saying goes “There’s lies, damn lies—and statistics.”

Today, I would amend that to the following:

“There’s lies, damn lies—and Republicans.”

Now that the once-respectable GOP has been transmogrified into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donald Trump—a lying sack of shit who also happens to be a traitor, a rapist, and Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping‘s useful idiot—the future of serious two-party government in this country is in dire jeopardy.

This 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.

To wit: “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 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.

Still, Trump’s astonishing rise could not have happened without help—not just from spineless Republicans who dared not speak against him, but also from the internet—and Trump’s vaunted “base.”

Let me be candid: ever since Hillary Clinton (legitimately) badmouthed the “basket of deplorables” opposing her presidential run against Trump in 2016, the Trump “base” has gotten off far too easily, aided by willing left-of-center journalists trying to be oh-so-even-handed in describing these people, whose ranks are far too full of ignorant, racist, xenophobic, conspiracy-minded knuckle-draggers.

I’m certain of this: without the internet and social media giving Trump’s hare-brained views currency among society’s bottom feeders, Donald Trump would today be remembered only as a bankrupt former real estate broker from Queens.

“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.

I leave the last word to columnist David Brooks of the Times:

“Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.”

This is what we face this year as we head to the polls in November.