For a multitude of reasons, some readers may be tiring of seeing my takes on the national political scene. That’s fine. Feel free to skip them.
But I did get an email from a friend and brilliant reader—someone who actually attended the Stephen Colbert tapings in Chicago during the DNC that I highlighted in the post Freedom—who said he “couldn’t wait” to read my posting about the debate.
I’ve been encouraged!
Brad added that “we haven’t crossed the finish line just yet because he still has a concept of a plan.”
Brilliant.
You can take heart that this is a post primarily drawn on the thoughts, words, and perspectives of others. In fact, the working title was “better minds than mine.” It is a long post, but these brilliant writers have a great deal that is worthy of our consideration.
What took you so long?
It took a real-time meltdown by Donald Trump on national television for the country’s political journalists to realize that the man is a “disgrace”—to quote many of our nation’s military leaders—and should never be allowed near the Oval Office again. I’ve said that our political reporters haven’t been able to rise to the moment. Better minds than mine are now driving this point home on a daily basis.
With the exception of some intransigent outlets (e.g., Fox News, the New York Times), most political observers used the debate to open their eyes ever so slightly—some for the first time—to the dangerous nature of the former president and his policies. In part they were forced to do so. As media critic Margaret Sullivan noted, a few smart commentators started using the word “sanewashing” just before the debate to describe the way journalists translate the rambling and nonsensical “word salad” that Donald Trump cooks up and turn it into something coherent.
“Like whitewashing a fence, sanewashing a speech covers a multitude of problems. The Urban Dictionary definition: Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public … a portmanteau of ‘sane plus ‘whitewashing.’”
Sanewashing is harder to do when the practice has been called out and especially when more than 67 million Americans are subjected to 90 minutes of Trump craziness in real time.
The moderators—David Muir from “World News Tonight” and ABC News anchor Linsey Davis—gave us some hope for the political media. A broad range of commentators have praised their no-nonsense approach. “They followed up when Trump wouldn’t answer a question. They fact-checked Trump’s nonsense multiple times, on everything from abortion to the 2020 election.”
A dangerous and unhinged lie long attached to immigrant groups
Moderators couldn’t help but offer a forceful and repeated fact check when he insisted the racist lie that “Haitians are eating dogs and cats” is real, a lie pushed by his own running mate (who just yesterday admitted to CNN that it is fabricated). Harris burst out laughing during the debate. It was “next-level unhinged” and has featured prominently in post-debate clips and coverage.
Not surprisingly, it isn’t new.
As Merrill Kaplan, the director of Ohio State University’s Center for Folklore Studies wrote in the Columbus Dispatch,
“The pet-eating rumor is just the latest iteration of a legend that has long attached to assorted immigrant groups in the US. In the 1890s, recent German immigrants were accused of using people’s pets for sausages, as a popular folk song of the day attests.
The core of this legend was updated in later decades to attach to other groups.
In the 1980s, Asian immigrants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong) were accused of stealing and eating pets in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, documented by folklorist Roger Mitchell in the 1987 Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore piece “The Will to Believe and Anti-Refugee Rumors” (freely available online through Hathi Trust here).”
As professor Kaplan notes, her students “frequently learn to their own surprise” that some knowledge of tradition may reveal that “today’s hateful rumor was once applied to one’s own immigrant ancestors.”
It is also very dangerous.
As Adam Serwer at The Atlantic noted, because Trump and JD Vance have been unable to race bait Kamala Harris they’ve turned instead to demonizing a small, vulnerable community to stir up hatred and keep immigration in the news, even if someone gets hurt or killed. In fact, it is a type of permission structure for MAGA types to commit political violence. Historian Heather Cox Richardson provided both the immediate backstory to how this lie was developed and the historical context for how it is being used by Republicans to recapture the Senate. As both Serwer and Richardson’s work demonstrates, this is a highly cynical and despicable form of politics that deserves to be called out in the press and defeated at the polls.
Of course, the right-wing echo chamber screamed that Trump was “fact checked 4 times and Kamala Harris was never fact checked.” That may be because she wasn’t the one on stage saying crazy stuff. The former president could have been fact checked 30-50 more times, according to CNN. And it isn’t like Trump and his advisors didn’t know what was coming, as Rep. Jared Moskowitz notes.
Let’s hope the stupid finally comes to an end
At least some political journalists also course corrected their lazy assessments of the Vice President after the debate. In opening his September 11th show, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell began by saying:
“The three full years of stupid press coverage of Kamala Harris has finally come to an end.”
In a stinging critique backed up with facts and stories, O’Donnell—who has covered Kamala Harris for much longer than the major news outlets—showed that the public didn’t think the Vice President was up to the job because the Washington press corps spent three full years telling the American public that she wasn’t up to the job. And it wasn’t based on facts or her record. It was simply lazily reporting gossip and depending on misogyny and racism to do the dirty work.
Debates are funny things. They usually don’t have anything to do with how well someone will do the actual job of being president. But every now and then debates can be revealing.
O’Donnell discusses how both the Washington press corps and Donald Trump bought into a “pile of journalistic trash” and were not ready for the strength of the Vice President’s performance on September 10th. While Trump had already demonstrated that he didn’t know how to be president of the United States, O’Donnell argued that this debate showed that he didn’t know how to be a human being, beginning with that handshake. And Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Bulwark, made the point on several shows that in this particular debate, voters used Trump as a stand-in for foreign strongmen to see how the Vice President would react to bullies and liars. Harris more than passed the test.
Historian Kevin Kruse—who makes a living looking into the past—had a similar take: the Vice President has been preparing for this her entire life.
“I’ve always been puzzled by the pundits who worried that Kamala Harris wouldn’t do well in a debate. Again, this is the senator who reduced Brett Kavanaugh to rubble.
Yes, her 2020 presidential campaign didn’t pan out, but that was largely because she was running in a very crowded lane of center-left candidates and had little opportunity to break out of the pack. Her debating skills had nothing to do with it. Her one bright moment in that race, in fact, was this memorable exchange with Joe Biden.
And of course, once Biden tapped her to be his running mate, she had a chance to show off her debate skills in the vice-presidential debate against Mike Pence. And once again, she came off very well.
So I had fairly high expectations for Harris in this year’s presidential debate. The line she repeats on the campaign trail — that she’s an experienced prosecutor, and she’s dealt with law breakers like Trump her whole life — isn’t just a good zinger; it’s an apt description of her experience and her style. She’s been preparing for this for decades.”
There were scores of exchanges in the debate that continue to live on in clips and press coverage. As the Vice President said so eloquently in pushing yet another button in the fragile Trump ego, 81 million Americans fired Donald Trump, and he is clearly having a hard time processing that fact. But for me, a reminder of her policy smarts, strength with bullies, great political instincts, and ability to tell the truth came through in her “Putin would eat you for lunch” moment.
Sabrina Haake, a lawyer who writes for the Chicago Tribune among other outlets, said that “to be fair, Trump was up against a master, intellectually outmatched from the jump.” Harris looked directly at Trump when making her charges.
“She landed her punches unflinchingly, sometimes laughingly, clearly unafraid of the man who would follow his mentor and execute rivals. Mike Johnson and other GOP toadies should take note of how it’s done.”
Marcy Wheeler has written perceptively that “for most of the campaign—indeed, for the last nine years—the press has convinced themselves that Donald Trump is the protagonist of the story of US politics. Last night, for at least two hours, Kamala Harris disabused them of that outdated notion.”
Kamala Harris is cutting off Trump’s political oxygen
Writing before the debate, David Lurie noted that not only is Kamala Harris playing mind games with Donald Trump, but she’s also refusing to take the bait from the press.
“It’s hardly a coincidence that over the past several weeks, the power of the press to impact the tenor and focus of the presidential campaign—and the power of Trump to do the same—has been suddenly thrown into question. By refusing to engage with Trump’s taunts or play by journalists’ rules, Harris has upended presumptions about politics that have dominated during most of the past decade. And that’s a good thing.”
Wheeler has been forceful in reminding readers that while we are in the 22nd month of Donald Trump’s campaign and as such it is 92% complete, Harris is just beginning the second half—the last 50%—of her run for the White House.
“In the first half of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris raised $361 million in a month and another $47 million in a day.
In the first half of her campaign, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris and encouraged 400,000 people to register to vote.
In the first half of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris pantsed Donald Trump in a debate, out-TVing a TV pro.
I’ve been tracking the weird timing of this race. Sunday begins the 22nd month that Trump has been running. Because his damn campaign has been going on forever, he’s been plodding through the 92% mark of his campaign for days, stuck in slow-motion.
Today marks the 54th day of Harris’ campaign, with 53 left. Thus begins the second half of her campaign.“
Wheeler makes the point that one reason Harris isn’t taking Trump’s bait or playing by the media’s rules is that she simply doesn’t have time to deal with that foolishness.
The accelerated timeline shrinks the time between the moment something — perhaps an endorsement from some disgusted Republican or seeing Harris’ stature in the debate — leads a voter to first consider the possibility of voting for her and the moment they have to decide. The endorsement by the Cheneys is about creating a permission structure for Republicans to do so — to help them believe they can be patriots even if voting for a Democrat. Swift’s endorsement makes it more likely younger women will make more effort that twenty-somethings normally do to turn out. With more time, the Vice President might convert more voters, might get more voters to decide to show up . . .
Donald Trump is making it clearer every day what a vote for him would mean. “But there are still far too many American voters who want the con he’s selling.”
What journalism isn’t
Why did it take Trump’s public meltdown and Harris’s mastery for the press to open its eyes to the obvious? Perhaps it is because they don’t practice journalism in this day of the attention economy.
Mark Jacob, the former metro editor of the Chicago Tribune, has an excellent reminder entitled What journalism isn’t. Here’s a brief sample, but I encourage you to read the full essay.
“Journalism isn’t the mere act of turning on the microphones and letting politicians talk.
Journalism isn’t inviting proven liars to come on your TV show and lie to your audience, and then thanking them for it. . . .
Journalism isn’t entertainment.
Journalism isn’t a game of access that’s won when you avoid asking hard questions and doing follow-ups. . . .
Journalism isn’t easy, but it’s damn important, and more people in the news industry need to start doing it before they wake up one day and realize that journalism has become illegal.”
Journalism also doesn’t depend on polls where there is a clear conflict of interest. Nate Silver, the celebrity statistician who gained notoriety for his FiveThirtyEight election models, is facing backlash over alleged skewing in his new model, which could be tied to his “gambling problem.” You see, Silver has been hired by billionaire fascist Peter Thiel at the crypto-based gambling company Polymarket. He is now pushing his model while promoting election betting opportunities. That’s not journalism and his polls should be dismissed for the conflict-of-interest they so clearly are.
Journalism depends on self-awareness and a willingness to course correct, something that the New York Times in particular finds difficult. Kevin Kruse noted that Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger authored a piece a few days before the debate in the pages of his competitor, the Washington Post *, chronicling the rising dangers to a free press in America.
[A]fter detailing the very real dangers posed by Trump, Sulzberger essentially argues that the press should still pretend everything is normal.“
Kruse shows that the Times has not been fair and balanced and has, despite Sulzberger’s protestations, “had a heavy thumb on the scale all along—it’s just that it’s been for Trump rather than against him.” As Heather Digby Parton wrote in Salon, Donald Trump’s incoherence makes the media’s double standard hard to hide. Special counsel Robert Hur made a gratuitous comment about Biden being an elderly man with a bad memory and “from that moment on almost every story about Joe Biden was framed in terms of his advanced age and the question of whether he was up to the job . . . No one in the media cut Joe Biden any slack for his performance.” But when it comes to Donald Trump, sanewashing has been the name of the game.
“Despite his regular protestations that he’s ‘like, really smart,’ he communicates at a 4th grade level (the lowest level of any of the past 15 presidents going back to Hoover) and uses the same handful of words and phrases over and over again to cover for the fact that he never really has any idea what he’s talking about.”
Oh, and better minds than mine are pointing out the obvious: that fact checking is dead. When you accept someone else’s framing, you spread that framing even when you are debunking it.
Good news
Jacob does see a bright side, as he notes that not all journalism outlets are lame. ProPublica comes in for special praise, but then he identifies 14 other bright spots in news and commentary. Just a handful of examples will do:
“Media Matters for America tracks right-wingers’ rhetoric in the most persuasive method possible—by documenting their own words.
It should embarrass U.S. publications to be routinely outdone on coverage of American politics by Guardian US, part of a British-based news organization. . . .
Among the finest columnists at mainstream outlets are Rex Huppke of USA Today and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer.”
But don’t expect miracles
Political scientist Brian Klaas notes that the press didn’t really seem to learn all that much from their miscalculations about the debate, and he says it is because of a phenomenon—the most easily fixable in American politics—that he calls The Banality of Crazy.
“I highlight the banality of crazy, in which the American press—and by extension, the voting public—grows numb to the insane behavior and statements of Donald Trump simply because they have become repetitive and routine.”
The day after the debate on what was the anniversary of 9/11, Donald Trump attended a somber memorial in New York. But when Trump and J.D. Vance visited a fire station in lower Manhattan on that same day, “they were accompanied by Laura Loomer, a white nationalist conspiracy theorist.”
“. . . Loomer has previously spread the bogus lie that September 11th was ‘an inside job,’ an attack carried out with the cooperation of the United States government. Call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t it matter that the Republican nominee for president of the United States brought a deranged 9/11 “truther” to a 9/11 memorial event?
And yet, there are no blaring ALL CAPS headlines in America’s major newspapers that Donald Trump’s guest of honor to a 9/11 memorial is a white nationalist 9/11 truther and self-proclaimed bigot. A day later, The New York Times noted Loomer’s presence in two sentences . . . The headline was—I promise I’m not making this up: ‘After a bruising debate, Trump is warmly embraced in Lower Manhattan.’ That’s the framing that The New York Times went with for a visit in which he brought a 9/11 truther to a 9/11 remembrance day.”
Thanks to the persistence of reporters like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, this story has started to have legs. Major media outlets are finally picking it up. But it still begs the question as to what took them so long.
As I said, better minds than mine see that our political journalists just can’t seem to rise to the moment. And as the Vice President said at rallies following the debate, we still have a lot of hard work ahead. “But hard work is good work.”
More to come . . .
DJB
*As many joked on social media, Sulzburger apparently had to run it in the Post because acknowledging the clear threat posed by Trump goes against the house rules at his own paper.)
Photo of Harris and Walz via Hopium Chronicles
MORE TO COME... 
Trump/Vance need to have a Pet Smear, lest it spread. It is striking how toxic language in the political sphere can parallel the patterns we see in global health regarding deadly viruses. An Outbreak in either sphere ought to be met with a global response.
I agree. Toxic language is very similar to a deadly virus, and it is clearly the virus of choice for those two.
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