What the Press Still Doesn’t Get About Trump
He’s not unprecedented. He’s not going to change. And 11 other lessons the media still haven’t learned about the president.
1. We forget what has always driven Trump.
Too often, the press forgets the very lessons Trump himself has taught us about how he operates and why it often works. For example, journalists often imply that Trump’s reliance on cable news is a liability because it leaves him ill-informed. And so it does—but it also leaves him highly attuned to that medium and able to respond to what he sees there with immediate, pitch-perfect tweets or other comments that come across as direct, authentic and trustworthy.
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2. Trump. Won’t. Change.
3. We still trust the polls too much.
4. ‘Trump is crazy’ has become a cliché.
5. We’re not only stuck in bubbles—social media is making them worse.
6. We’re still ignoring the people who elected Trump.
There was a brief moment after the election when the press said it would devote more coverage not to Trump but to the people who had voted him into office. What had driven 46 percent of the country to vote for an outsider billionaire with no government experience, despite serious reservations about his temperament and character, was a question that deserved an answer. Was it really the case that rising inequality and political polarization had separated the makers of news and opinion at our most eminent outlets from about half of the public they sought to inform?
I think it was. Washington and New York have done so well in the past 20 years that residents of those cities and their suburbs—and I am one—could not see beyond the geographic and economic and social boundaries of our lives. We were largely immune from the collective shocks of the early 21st century: the border shock of rising illegal immigration, the trade shock of Chinese imports, the economic shock of the financial crisis, and the confidence shock of disappointing outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are continually tempted to devote our attention and resources to parochial concerns, to the Beltway questions of who is up and who is down, which party is winning and which is losing, what controversy the president finds himself mired in today. But this is to miss the forest for the tweets.
If there is one thing the press still gets wrong about Trump, it is treating him in isolation from the very real and worrisome social conditions that brought him to power.
7. We’re falling for the ‘Trump exceptionalism’ trap.
