Trump Voters Aren't Owed Empathy And Media Should Stop Saying They Are

 Beltway media, don't absolve dangerous, anti-democratic behavior.

By Eric Boehlert

Since Trump's lopsided re-election loss, his supporters have been loudly denouncing the results as a fraud. Tens of millions of them think the election was stolen and that a sprawling criminal conspiracy has denied Trump a second term. Some have made threats on public officials who have overseen the careful counting of votes — even threatening Republican office holders who don't back Trump's fantasy of a "stolen" election.

Cheered on by his relentless propaganda campaign to denigrate free and fair elections, Trump voters are at the forefront of a radical and dangerous political movement designed to undermine democracy. And that's when they're not busy dismissing as a "hoax" the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, staging public tempter tantrums over wearing masks, parroting the rhetoric of a dangerous right-wing cult, or raising $2 million to get a teenage gunman released after he opened fire on a Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin, killing two people.

So why does the press so often portray these people through such a loving and understanding lens? And why are high-profile journalists offering public empathy for Trump supporters as they strain public debate to the breaking point by embracing a ceaseless stream of lies? ("There’s millions and millions of Trump votes that were just thrown out.")

In an interview with Vanity Fair last week, CNN's Jake Tapper said he felt sorry for Trump voters. “I feel sympathy for them, is the truth,” he said. “I feel bad. They’re outraged because they’re being told things that aren’t true. And that’s a disgrace for the people who are telling the lies, not the people who are hearing them and getting outraged.”

Tapper acknowledges that Trump's claim of a stolen election, which has been widely endorsed by the Republican Party and its members of Congress, is obviously bogus. (Courts all across the country have come to same conclusion since Election Day.) But Tapper doesn't think Trump voters are to blame. He absolves them of any responsibility in peddling lies about Joe Biden, about Nancy Pelosi, about the Democratic Party, about the U.S. postal service, about voting fraud, about Democratic cities. On and on that list of lies goes, as Trump followers purposefully careen down a post-election rabbit hole, the likes of which has never before been seen in mainstream American politics.

Now is not the time for the media to cast a sympathetic eye. By forgiving Trump voters, the press is also pardoning Trump and the GOP. It's suggesting that in the end, nobody is responsible for the fact that one of our two mainstream political parties now lies about everything, and that conservative supporters eagerly spread those lies every chance they get, thereby attacking our democratic traditions. Soaking up the press coverage, the weird, detached idea is that all of this just happened and it's not really anybody’s fault.

In his Vanity Fair interview, Tapper does point a finger of blame at "the people who are telling the lies, not the people who are hearing them and getting outraged." In this case, that would be Trump, Fox News, the right-wing media, and other prominent Republicans. But this madness only works if millions of Trump voters hear those lies, embrace them, and then happily spread them, which is what they're doing in-person and on social media.

Trump voters all have a choice. They can choose to believe there were more than six million fraudulent votes cast, which cost Trump the election, even though his lawyers haven't been able to document six bogus ballots during the last three weeks of failed litigation. They can choose to believe that Trump's FBI and Department of Justice are in on a wild plan to steal the election from Trump, as he now claims. These are reprehensible choices Trump voters are making and they deserve no "sympathy" from the press.

In fact, their actions ought to trigger the opposite response from the D.C. press. "This [Trump] movement is what is interesting, because it's ultimately, about the rise of American fascism," Salon's Amdanda Marcotte recently noted. She's right. Yet how many Beltway news accounts have you seen suggesting Trump followers are part of American fascism? Probably the same number I have — zero.

“If President Trump comes out and says: ‘Guys, I have irrefutable proof of fraud, the courts won’t listen, and I’m now calling on Americans to take up arms,’ we would go,” a Trump supporter in Texas recently told Reuters, which never suggested that kind of armed rhetoric was fascist. Because that's not a conversation the mainstream press wants to have. Instead, journalists extend their "sympathy" to Americans who increasingly worship autocratic rule — journalists who remain in denial about the prevalence of racism as a principal motivating factor among Trump voters.

The conservative movement under Trump is gleefully taking a sledgehammer to facts, to science, to reason, and to common decency. It's all being done by design. The last thing Trump voters who traffic in this awfulness deserve is empathy from the press.

The Press Is Normalizing Trump's Multi-Pronged War On America

 A hallmark failure of the press for four years has been that it refuses to use the proper language to describe the truly lawless nature of Trump and today’s GOP.

By Eric Boehlert

Trump’s election sabotage campaign is running out of time, but the damage he’s inflicting will have long lasting consequences. Covering this unprecedented attack on American election integrity, the press is still not being honest about Trump’s ruinous final chapter.

The Daily Beast last week reported on Trump’s “quixotic and potentially destructive effort” to steal a victory. “Quixotic” and “possibly destructive”? He’s the first president in 240 years who has not accepted the election results, after losing by six million votes. Worse, he’s been on a three-month crusade to denigrate free and fair elections in America, and he’s making it impossible for there to be a smooth transition of power.

This is so far beyond “quixotic.” Of course it’s destructive to our democracy — does anyone think the Republican Party will soon return to the days of rationally accepting ballot results? The GOP has blown a permanent hole in our election process.

A hallmark failure of the press for four years has been that it refuses to use the proper language to describe the truly lawless nature of Trump and today’s GOP.

Instead of referring to his treasonous post-election behavior surrounding the would-be coup by a power-hungry authoritarian out to steal an election, we get news updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his legal “strategy” and “power play” while “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House. None of that captures the historic events that have unfolded since Election Day. Events that if they occurred in a foreign country would be covered much differently by the American press.

The idea that Trump’s harmlessly wandering the West Wing in a funk, despondent over his loss doesn’t match reality. In truth, Trump has spent weeks, with laser-like focus, actively trying to engineer the open theft of a presidential contest. He’s dispatched an army of lawyers who are committed to throwing out as many legitimate U.S. votes as possible. When that has proven to be a failure, he’s shifted to getting state Republicans to block or delay the certification of the popular votes in their states. And much of the Republican Party supports him, either publicly or tacitly by standing by and watching.

Trump’s just “sulking” and Republicans are nervous and upset about his actions — that’s the false narrative too many in the press are pushing.

“Senior GOP lawmakers grow anxious over Trump's effort to overturn election results,” read a recent CNN headline. But CNN could find just three Republicans who were supposedly “anxious” about Trump trying to overturn an election where more than 150 million Americans voted. One CNN report last week suggested Republicans had “no choice” but to back Trump’s election sabotage. Politico dismissed Trump’s ongoing rampage as nothing more than “performance art” and “bad sportsmanship.”

When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to making the stunning inquiry about throwing out legal ballots, the New York Times headline made it seem like a quirky strategy: “Lindsey Graham’s Long-Shot Mission to Unravel the Election Results.”

Amidst Trump’s stunning election sabotage campaign, the Times sat down with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for a lengthy Q&A. The paper did not pose a single question to McCarthy about how the Republican president was trying to get legitimate votes thrown out and overturn an election. Instead, McCarthy and the Times reporters discussed what a long-term asset Trump could be to the Republican Party after he leaves office.

Additionally, the Times cast a sympathetic eye on Republicans state officials who supposedly face the tough “choice” of certifying verified voting results, or helping Trump cast doubt on them as he tries to overturn an election. That’s a truly dangerous way to view, and to present, what’s currently unfolding.

Incredibly, Trump-appointed General Services Administrator Emily Murphy who refuses to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory — her call would officially begin the transition process — has been receiving kid-glove coverage as the press depicts her as simply caught in a tricky position. She’s “struggling” to do the right thing, CNN stressed, while quoting anonymous friends about how honorable she is. What’s the struggle? Biden won, period. Murphy is purposefully making the transition more difficult. Yet, the Washington Post framed the story as a partisan one, suggesting Democrats were “fuming.” Fact is, no GSA in history has refused to acknowledge the clear election winner, the way Murphy now refuses.

Authoritarianism has been on display for weeks now, as Trump throws all his energy into casting doubt over free and fair elections in the world’s oldest democracy. The daily news coverage needs to say so, and drop the idea that Trump’s simply passing his days feeling sorry for himself, in a state of “denial.” He’s been waging a multi-pronged war on America.

If Trump Was President Of A Foreign Country, U.S. Press Would Label Him Authoritarian

So why don't they call it out here at home?

By Eric Boehlert

The telltale signs of autocratic rule are not difficult to identify. And for American news outlets, they're often quick to tag authoritarian leaders around the world, as they move to curb liberties, skirt existing laws, and curtail press freedoms. Why is it so many of those same news outlets refuse to use the "A" word to describe Trump, even as he mimics the actions of authoritarian rulers here at home? Why is it considered ttaboo to describe a Republican president that way, when the description is apt and informative? It's likely because the press doesn't want to fend off cries of "liberal media bias,” and because the press doesn’t want to break protocol with its presidential coverage. In the process they’re allowing the unthinkable to become commonplace.

Trump often flaunts his anti-democratic tendencies, knowing the media won't hold him accountable by using accurate language. Trump's presidency has featured authoritarian moves from the beginning, like declaring a phony national emergency in order to to grab billions to build a border wall, trying to obliterate the country's checks and balances system of government, and attacking the validity of the free press with relentless, false about the news media. The tactics often mirror today's radical Republican Party.

That disturbing pattern has escalated in recent days, amidst a global pandemic, when Trump fired an inspector general who reviewed the whistle-blower complaint that led to his impeachment, arbitrarily removed the lead watchdog overseeing the $2 trillion coronavirus package, and attacked another inspector general who criticized virus testing shortages.

The extraordinary power grabs came the same week the Republican-controlled United States Supreme Court essentially threw out thousands of votes in Wisconsin when, in a stunning 5-4 decision that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "boggles the mind," the Court refused to postpone Wisconsin's primary election vote, despite the fact that the state's largest city is gripped by the coronavirus pandemic and scores of polling places there were shut down due to lack of polling workers.

As a result, Milwaukee voters had to wait hours in the rain on Tuesday to cast a ballot in an election the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called "the most undemocratic in the state's history." (It's all part of the GOP's autocratic commitment to making it harder for Americans to vote.) In addition, Trump this week launched a campaign of lies about the security of mail-in ballots, which will likely have to be used this year as the country struggles with social effects of the coronavirus, and the need to keep social distancing in public.

Indeed, the pandemic itself has sparked more authoritarian moves by Trump. Like undemocratic leaders in China and Russia, Trump's first response to the health crisis was to recklessly downplay the problem, to silence scientists, lie about the government's aid and response, and to lash out at critics. Note that Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom Trump has praised in the past, moved to establish emergency executive powers that effectively disbanded parliament, dispersing the country's nascent democracy.

Trump is not a dictator and cannot disband Congress, but his recent autocratic moves are unprecedented in our modern American democracy. And the maneuvers this month come after his February purges of officials who testified in the impeachment trial and Trump’s attempts to meddle in the sentencing of friends and political allies convicted of crimes. These are the type of disturbing actions that the United States traditionally condemned when they occurred in other countries, particularly among emerging democracies. Now they're happening here.

As for the Beltway press, you don't hear many warning about Trump's authoritarian ways in the news coverage. (That seems relegated to the opinion section.) Instead, his undemocratic consolidations are watered down and made to sound almost normal. Here's how the New York Times described Trump's stunning decision to sack an inspector general for purely political reasons: "The move came at a time when the president has been reasserting authority over the executive branch and signaling impatience with independent voices within the government that he considers disloyal."

Kneecapping domestic oversight = "impatience with independent voices"? That's quite a stretch.

Note that foreign journalists and commentators seem to have a better understanding of Trump's authoritarian streak, since they’ve seen more examples of leaders like that in their own regions. They also seem to have little hesitation in calling it out— they're not afraid of the GOP jabs. "Trump has repeatedly shown that he anyway believes that there are no legal or constitutional limits on presidential authority," warned Andrew Gawthorpe, a history professor who teaches in the Netherlands, just as the pandemic began to take shape in the U.S.

And from Russia's Garry Kasparov, surveying the wreckage of Trump's pandemic response: "It’s been compounded by another autocratic tendency in the Trump administration, incompetence and nepotism."

Trump's the most radical president this country has ever seen. Journalists need to break free from the culture of Beltway timidity and start describing him accurately. They have no problem labeling authoritarians overseas. So why not the ones here at home?

Journalists Jump High In Pursuit Of The Mythical 'President'

In the wake of White House briefing where Trump warned of 100,000-plus coronavirus deaths in the U.S., journalists marveled at how serious and "somber" he was. It's like the Normalizing Olympics.

By Eric Boehlert

If President Barack Obama had overseen the deaths of 100,000 Americans during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, do you think many Beltway journalists would have given him high marks for his "tone"? Me neither. Yet that’s what unfolded this week in the wake of White House briefing where Trump warned of 100,000-plus coronavirus deaths in the U.S. — journalists marveled at how serious and "somber" he was. It's like the Normalizing Olympics.

Or, to mix metaphors, it's a Moby Dick-like pursuit of a mythical 'presidential' Trump. That pointless search began weeks before Trump was even inaugurated, as Beltway observers calmly predicted that the Oval Office would soon change him and he'd grow into a statesman. Instead, Trump has unraveled in public view for more than three years while the press clings to this fantasy that underneath the narcissist and liar and bully is a man who wants to lead.

Even if Trump unveiled a completely new approach to governance and forever stashed away his usual array of insults, threats, and lies, that's no reason to give him credit. Especially not during a pandemic, when he wasted an entire month dithering about the coronavirus, famously announcing we'd soon have "zero" cases. (The government still hasn't secured enough test kits and respirators for the mounting crisis.)

The media’s Trump failures are all about tiptoeing around the truth and not being honest with news consumers. For instance, the New York Times this week published a lengthy and worthy article about how Trump has regularly lashed out at women in public office during the current crisis, much more so than men. Yet nowhere in the piece were the words "misogyny" or "misogynist" mentioned, because the Times and most of the press refuse to use clarity when analyzing Trump's deformed character. That's why the Times newsroom is not allowed to call Trump a "liar" or a "racists" even though he is both, as well as a textbook misogynist.

It’s that purposefully timid Trump reporting that mars much of the pandemic coverage. Responding to online critiques of the media's performance this week, one Politico editor, Blake Hounshell, responded, "You know, enough of this. It has taken entire teams of journalists to tell this story in all its many facets, and the press is by and large doing it extraordinarily well as the media industry collapses around them." He's right, the press has largely done an "extraordinary" job covering this once-in-a-century emergency. But in terms of the Trump pandemic coverage, that has been almost uniformly lacking, and by far the weakest link of the virus reporting.

Just look at the media rush to shower Trump with hosannas after he supposedly changed his "tone" on the deadly pandemic. "The grim-faced president who appeared in the White House briefing room for more than two hours beside charts showing death projections of hellacious proportions was coming to grips with a reality he had long refused to accept," the New York Times reported with urgency.

Over at CNN, White House correspondent Jim Acosta, following the pandemic briefings, announced Trump now "gets it," stressing, "I have never seen the president like this." Added NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, "The tone and seriousness was different today."

Oh thank goodness. Trump had finally come to terms with the significance of a pandemic that will likely claim 20-plus million U.S. jobs and perhaps 100,000 American lives.

To the surprise of nobody, days after Trump's "serious" briefing, he was back to his usual public antics while ostensibly addressing the national emergency — he bragged about his popularity on Facebook, mocked assembled journalists, tried to create a diversion by turning Wednesday's pandemic briefing into a press conference about a new drug trafficking initiative launched by the Department of Defense, and accused Democrats of launching a “witch hunt” against him. Trump also returned to taunting Democrats on Twitter, specifically a U.S. senator from New York, the epicenter of the deadly outbreak.

All if this is completely predictable, and all of this is why the press should refrain from claiming a mad man like Trump has changed his ways, or embraced a serious, somber “tone.”

Back in 2017, when Trump gave his first address to the nation from Congress (technically it was not a State of the Union since he had just been sworn in), cable news discussions of the address included more than 300 references to the optics of his speech -- including mentions of a “pivot," “presidential,” “reset,” and “tone," according to Media Matters. (Even the White House was reportedly surprised at how fervently the press praised the speech.) Trump, of course, did nothing following the speech to "pivot" towards more "presidential" behavior.

More recently in March, CNN's Dana Bash, after watching one of Trump's erratic pandemic briefings, showered him with praise: "He is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today, and yesterday, in a tone that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty." Over subsequent days and weeks though, Trump proceeded to mislead the nation about a possible virus cure, lie about dismantling the White House's pandemic team, accused hospital workers of stealing much-needed surgical masks, and told governors on a conference call that he hadn't heard complaints about a lack of coronavirus tests.

Trump's never going to change. It's the press’ job to accurately describe who is now, and who he'll be for always.

Eric Boehlert: 'Fox News Is A Cancer On This Country (video)

Joy Reid and Eric Boehlert dissect Fox News' pivot from COVID-19-as-hoax to COVID-19-as-serious concern, while still blaming China.

(Note: The video above was edited for brevity and clarity. It eliminates a 3-minute segment in the middle with former RNC Chairman Michael Steele)

Media critic Eric Boehlert explained why Fox News is such a menace to the country and especially to its own viewers on AM Joy Sunday morning.

After Joy Reid played an extended segment showing how Fox News began by declaring COVID-19 to be a "hoax" and a Democrat-led plot to smear Donald Trump and harm his "presidency," she then showed how they have now pivoted to calling it a serious concern while also blaming China. That supercut should be shown to every Fox News viewer before gently telling them they need to put the remote down and at least change channels to something more objective. BBC if they really can't handle CNN, for example.

It's almost 2020 and New York Times editors are still debating if Trump's a racist

Eric Boehlert for Daily Kos

Wasting untold time and energy, New York Times newsroom leaders continue to struggle with the not-very-difficult question of whether they ought to refer to Donald Trump as a racist. More than four years after Trump entered our national political conversation by announcing his candidacy for president, the Times still can't figure out if the paper should accurately label him for his obviously racist behavior.

Likely terrified of sparking a right-wing media backlash, journalists continue to tiptoe around Trump's open embrace of hate speech and his deeply racist leanings.

Top editors at the Times recently sent a memo to department heads offering guidance on the topic. “It’s about navigating through calling things what they are, not getting into the kind of name-calling that seems to pervade political debate,” one anonymous Times editor told Vanity Fair. "That’s a little bit of the tension. We’re in a real name-calling culture. We like to stay above the fray, yet we also like to avoid excessive euphemisms, so the attempt here is to say: Let’s not use labels so much as to describe things as they are."

This came after Times executive editor Dean Baquet last week stressed that the paper just can't tell if Trump's a racist. "I don’t know. I think Donald Trump  says racially divisive things. I think that’s a little bit different. I’m not in his head enough to know whether he says them because he wants to stoke his base," the editor told The Guardian.

Note that that's the same illogical defense the paper uses for not calling Trump a liar: Reporters and editors aren't in his head, so they can’t tell for sure. But it’s been documented that Trump has told certain lies more than 60-70 different times, which means there's zero doubt that he knows he’s telling boldfaced lies. Still, the confused Times just can’t make a tough call. Just like the paper can't make a tough call on Trump's misogyny.

There's "no question Donald Trump has trouble with women,” according to Baquet, who nonetheless oversees a newspaper that won't call him a sexist in its news pages.

That mind-reading defense is a convenient cop-out for the Times. But other publications and news agencies aren’t as reserved.

Note that the Associated Press assures journalists that they don't have to be telepathic in order to be accurate. In other words, when using "racist" as an adjective to describe comments or events, reporters and editors “need not involve examining the motivation of the person who spoke or acted, which is a separate issue that may not be related to how the statement or action itself can be characterized.”

Also, does it seem to you like Times editors are slow-walking this issue in hopes of playing out the clock? Trump entered the Republican race in June 2015. It’s now November 2019, and Times higher-ups are still grappling with this topic. Why do I get the feeling that right after Trump loses reelection next year, the paper is going to announce it's now comfortable tagging him as a racist? Not exactly a profile in courage.

To be fair, the Times is hardly alone in its timid approach to describing racist behavior in the Trump era. Instead of an honest conversation, news consumers have been served a feast of euphemisms — "racially tinged," "racially charged," racially incendiary, disparaging," "racially infused," "crass epithet," "crass denigrations," “bluntly vulgar language"—as journalists frantically try to avoid being truthful about Trump. This kind of media timidity was basically invented by the Beltway press in order to cover Trump, and to avoid telling hard truths.

Time essayist Anand Giridharadas recently revealed how in 2016 when writing a piece on Trump's name-calling campaign, an editor forced him to remove the accurate "racist" adjective from his piece. "Of all the biases that assist this normalizing, perhaps the supreme is the bias for sobriety, caution, restraint," Giridharadas lamented on Twitter. "These values build great publications. But we also need to have an honest conversation about what these values miss when we are living in extraordinary, ugly times."

HuffPost writer Julia Craven collected a wide sample of examples of reporters burning up their thesauruses in order to avoid typing the word "racist." From The New York Times: “disparaging,” ”racially tinged,” ”vulgar.” From The Washington Post: ”racially charged,” “crude reference,” “racially incendiary,” ”disparaging,” ”vulgar,” ”expressed a preference for immigrants from Norway.” From the Boston Globe: “the vulgarity,” ”crass epithet,” ”derogatory,” ”crass denigrations.” And from the Associated Press: ”bluntly vulgar language.”

Still, it's rather stunning to watch the Times' best and brightest treat this so-called conundrum like it's some impossible-to-solve physics equation, as editors gather around and try to determine the correct answer.

Fact: Trump is a racist. He constantly uses racist language, such as demanding that congresswomen of color "go back" to where they came from, and likens predominantly black American cities to rodent-infested hellholes. Recall that the bloody gun rampage that unfolded in El Paso earlier this year, just minutes from the Mexico border, was sparked by a white gunman whose manifesto explicitly cited Trump's "invasion" rhetoric about migrants as his motivation to kill as many brown-skinned people as possible by emptying his AK-47 rifle inside a shell-shocked Walmart.

So why the ongoing attempt to make this all way more complicated than it really is? Calling out racism is a moral imperative and by refusing to hold Trump accountable, the press is failing that task.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

Eric Boehlert: You Have A Major Political Party Signaling To The President That Crimes Are Okay

MSNBC's Joy Reid and her panel with a much needed discussion on just how dangerous to our democracy Trump, his party, and their feedback loop over on Fox "News" have become.



From: Crooks And Liars

They Never Learn: The Media LOVES Trump's Military 'Might'. Why?

It was hard not to have flashbacks this week to the Iraq invasion while watching the mainstream media cover Trump's Tomahawk missile strike against a Syrian air base. How could you not be put in mind of Chris Matthews' man-crush of GWB in his bunched up flightsuit when Brian Williams waxes rhapsodic on the 'beautiful images"…