Some healthy soul searching is taking place in newsrooms across the country these days over whether the mainstream media should be covering President Donald Trump’s every tweet and rally. My answer: Absolutely. It’s the right thing for us to do professionally, and, as this week’s election results indicated, it’s the right thing to do politically if you want to see a check on Donald Trump’s power.
It appears that it’s the lying, bullying and unpresidential behaviors that Trump exhibits most in his rallies and tweets – which we in the media so incessantly cover – that is turning off the very moderate, best-educated Republicans and suburban women that Trump will need to hold the GOP majority in the House, let alone get re-elected.
America’s unemployment rate is 3.9 percent, inflation for the moment is moderate, the stock market keeps setting records, and the president is coming off a crisis-defusing summit with North Korea. And yet, the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump having a personal approval rating of only 43 percent, with 53 percent disapproving of his performance. And in a special election in Ohio held Tuesday, the GOP House candidate – whom Trump and the entire Republican establishment went to bat for – is barely ahead of his Democratic rival in a district that has not sent a Democrat to Congress in more than three decades.
That does not speak well for Trump or his midterm prospects, but it does for the American people and for thinking Republicans.
It turns out that there are thinking Republicans for whom character, decency and truth-telling still matter in a president. It turns out that there are thinking Republicans who have watched Trump’s twitter rants, his disturbed performance at Helsinki and the unrestrained bile that he emits at his rallies – and the blind, ecstatic response of his core base – and found them unnerving and unworthy of their support.
Imagine how well Trump would be doing if he weren’t Donald Trump.
The dominant political fact of Trump’s first 18 months in office is that despite some good economic trends in the country, the president has not been able to widen his coalition beyond his core 40 percent to 45 percent. It is partly because he has not even remotely tried. But it is also because the very applause lines and abusive and divisive behaviors that appeal to his base turn off more-moderate and more-educated suburban Republicans, and do nothing to attract independents or conservative Democrats.
That says to me that I want wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s every speech, rally, tweet and utterance, because they most reveal his character, and Trump’s character is the ceiling on Trump’s presidency – and he seems uninterested, and more likely unable, to change that.
Yes, I want every American to know that two Trump supporters were spotted at the president’s last rally, in Ohio, wearing T-shirts that read, “I’d rather be Russian than a Democrat.” That’s an interesting data point. That’s whom you’re voting with when you vote for Trump.
I want every American to hear of Trump’s tweet that CNN’s anchor Don Lemon, who is African-American, was “the dumbest man on television” and that Lemon made LeBron James “look smart, which isn’t easy to do.” Lemon was interviewing James about a school he had just opened in Ohio for underprivileged children.
I want every Republican running for office to hear every syllable of Trump’s bullying arrogance, when he warned at his Ohio rally that he destroys any GOP politician who dares to defy him, saying, “I only destroy their career because they said bad things about me and you fight back and they go down the tubes – and that’s OK.”
Veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg said, the full Trump – insulting black sports heroes, threatening conservatives who dare cross him, praising Vladimir Putin and attacking the FBI – “reminds evangelical conservatives of the devil’s bargain they made in supporting him. Seeing him in all of his overreach and mania and self-absorption doesn’t make them second-guess their choice, but it makes them uncomfortable about it.”
In a close election it doesn’t take many uncomfortable moderate Republicans to just stay home to make a big difference. That’s all I am looking for, not a tsunami.
No question that the media should not allow itself to be props at Trump’s rallies, and that can be dealt with by using a single pool camera that feeds all the networks, or reporters just sitting among the rally attendees, not in a special pen.
But the whole country needs to see every tweet, every rally, every word and every reaction so that they can ask themselves: “Is this who I want my kids to see as our president? Are these the people with whom I want to be aligned?” It’s too late to move Trump’s core base on these questions, but I would not give up on his passive supporters. The latest polls and special elections tell us we shouldn’t.
I just know that the GOP Congress and Fox News are too compromised to ever tell Trump, “Enough.” But there are decent Republican moderates who, while they may never pull the lever for a Democrat, just might get too disgusted to vote. It’s the best hope. So let’s keep them fully informed about our president.
The New York Times