The Press Needs to Start Taking Trump Literally

As Donald Trump thinks media shutdown he does not like and involvement of military force to dissenting critics, the national political press comes up with the soothing message it patented during his 2016 election: He probably doesn’t take it seriously. This is the main burden New York Times Reporter by Sean McCreesh campaign mailing “Trump Supporters Who Don’t Believe Trump”. As Trump unleashes a blizzard of authoritarian threats and incitement to racist political violence, McCreesh panders to MAGA enthusiasts who think there’s nothing to see here.

Yes, Trump did follow through on many of his ugliest campaign threats of 2016, from a Muslim immigration ban to legal persecution of political opponents (you know, the phenomenon he and his supporters call “weaponization” out of the other side of their mouths) before the January 6th coup attempt. But all the talk is about this cycle Cleaning-style an unlicensed police show? The specter of the mass deportation of millions of immigrants, regardless of their legal status? It’s all for show, say McCreesh’s informants; after all, Trump never attacked Hillary Clinton the way he threatened to during the 2016 campaign, and as McCreesh’s clumsy, faux-wise pundit puts it, “many of his strong jaws have remained just that.”

“I think the media is over sensationalism,” Michigan publishing executive Mario Facchini told McCreesh after Trump’s speech on economic policy to the Detroit Economic Club earlier this month. Retired financial officer Tom Pierce of Northville, Michigan, echoed the same jaded refrain, dismissing the candidate’s vows of mass deportations and 200 percent tariffs: “He can say something and then it gets people going, but then he turns around. and says, “No, I don’t.” These are negotiations. But people don’t understand that.”

This late-campaign revelation of Trump supporters rejecting and distancing themselves from his fascist appeals echoes the oft-quoted 2016 directive from Trump-sympathetic pundit Selena Zito to take Trump “seriously, but not literally.” (This disastrous advice, as it happened, surfaced on another economic forum with a swinging state during Trump’s first campaign, a shale industry summit in Pittsburgh; It’s fair to say that something about the hub of industry executives inspires prestigious commentators to see all truth claims as mere social constructs.) At a time when threats of a Muslim travel ban and mafia-style political retribution from Trump’s Justice Department should have raised alarm at the gatekeepers of political discourse, instead reverting to the narrative they deployed during Trump’s siege of the Republican primary cycle. It was all glorified reality TV, they told themselves, and so it didn’t require them to exercise the due diligence reserved for more conventional presidential candidates. Trump was playing a different game, and the basic rules of candidate responsibility simply did not apply.

This first-rate denial of journalistic responsibility has allowed Trump to waive fundamental requirements of openness and disclosure for presidential hopefuls — from withholding his tax returns to allowing a family trust that runs his businesses to profit wildly from his presidency in flagrant violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. On the final stretch of the campaign, with the infamous leak Access to Hollywood tape that documented Trump bragging about his record of serial sexual assault — a revelation that would have proved fatal for any other candidate — Trump was able to survive the scandal. He even succeeded milking it for more credulous press coverage inviting women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to sit in the crowd at his final debate with Hillary Clinton. The toxic tape was another extra show in the 2016 performance when the reporters and producers behind it were suddenly confused by Trump’s Teflon candidacy.

This delusion was unforgivable then, and it’s doubly so now that Trump is running on a clearly fascist platform that proposes an overhaul of the entire federal government in line with the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project. done by transcribing the alibi of Trump supporters who will happily give up the remaining safeguards of our formal democracy for more tax cuts.

Indeed, McCreesh’s dispatch is particularly egregious in that it glosses over the actual substance of Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club, which was an incoherent hodgepodge of gimmicks masquerading as an economic agenda. Trump again called the tariffs a panacea for the nation’s economy, even though they likely will be slow economic growth and a spike in inflation with a de facto consumption tax on ordinary Americans of nearly $4,000 a year. (McCreesh only briefly touches on Trump’s fantasy of 200 percent tariffs, mainly to quote the candidate’s own rationale for creating them on Fox News: “I use it as a number. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500. I anyway.”) He also touted tax deductions for auto loans—a policy that would overwhelmingly benefit wealthy Americansbecause they are the ones who most often itemize their credit transactions, and because Trump has already limited the deductions available to lower-income earners in his 2018 tax package. As for the next round of Trump’s proposed tax cuts, they too are designed to benefit the economic power elite, with no discernible benefit to the economy as a whole. How Columbia Journalism Review‘s Bartholomew Gem writes“Overall, Trump’s fairground economic proposals would result in an average tax increase for every income group except top 5 percent wages, according to the Institute of Tax and Economic Policy. That’s, of course, not to mention Trump’s impersonation of a statue of Mitch McConnell for five full minutes before his speech, or his derision of Detroit as an unlivable dystopia at a Detroit event.

No, the Paper of Record’s main takeaway from this latest Trump display of babbling, dementia and resentment is that Trump’s smarter followers know that he indeed means and what he will really do when he gets the most powerful job in the world again. If our elite press weren’t so stubbornly amnesiac and resistant to ideas, McCreesh and his editors might pause to remember that Selena Zito’s own career as a MAGA whisperer from the heart was based on nonsense. When she published her 2016 report in a 2018 book titled The Great Rebellionit was revealed that she took some of her accounts from other sources without attribution and repeatedly quoted GOP political operatives as frustrated ordinary voters. Recently, she was taken to pimping Elon Musk as an apostle of the Trumpian “ethos of the American working man” and contemplating divine intervention on behalf of Trump in the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. This kind of payoff comes from taking Donald Trump seriously, not literally, and the wish-fulfilling fantasy of Midwestern business boosters, duly echoed by Gray Lady stenographers, only works to fuel them further.