The old saw says that you can write a trend story once there are three examples, and so here goes:
The New York TImes Magazine ran a story on Sunday noting Trump this time around is explicitly running as an authoritarian: “No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does.”
George Stephanopoulos on his ABC Sunday show elaborated on a similar theme: “It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year.”
And then there’s the Time Trump interview that David wrote about yesterday, which bluntly described his plans for an “imperial presidency…which would concentrate the powers of the state in the hands of a man whose appetite for power appears all but insatiable.”
This seems like exactly the kind of “stakes, not odds” coverage that media critic Jay Rosen has been calling for, along with the straightforward description of exactly the promises (in the broad sense) Trump has been making on the campaign trail.1
Which leaves the question David asked - will it make any difference? - along with the cynicism about the media that my old Bloomberg Opinion colleague Frank Wilkinson expressed over the Time story: “Morbidly curious if Trump all but declaring himself a fascist will influence elite bothsidesism but I guess I know the answer.”
Indeed, one could look back to previous rounds of “Hey look what Trump and his supporters are up to” that first detailed much of the same material, only to be followed by suspiciously both-sides-ish stories about Joe Biden’s age. The charge of “both sides” reporting, properly speaking, isn’t that the media refuses to cover the many things wrong with Trump. It’s that either deliberately (as a matter of policy) or inadvertedly (because it sort of feels wrong to be constantly ragging on just one candidate), media outlets wind up giving about the same amount of negative coverage to the other candidate.
And because news consumers generally get vague impressions rather than thoroughly analyzing the information that’s presented, similar quantities of negative coverage matter more than lopsided stories that coverage tell. Or at least, that’s the complaint.
What’s not so clear is how much of a difference it makes.
What we probably can do is to stake out some extremes, with reality falling somewhere between them.
On the one hand, I agree with David that a lot of stuff that draws breathless criticism really doesn’t have any effect on the outcome at all. Remember: Most voters are partisans who will vote for their team’s candidate no matter what, and those who are not partisans tend to be the people who are least likely to pay any attention at all to news coverage, especially months before the election. Those of us who are heavily involved in politics can find that hard to believe. But think of your own gaps in interest and knowledge, and realize that others are passionately interested in whatever you totally ignore even when it shows up in your news reading or TV watching or social media browsing.
On the other hand are claims that nothing matters, and that if anything negative coverage of Trump only makes him stronger. That’s pretty much nonsense. Trump was an unpopular candidate in 2016 and 2020 who probably ran behind what a generic Republican would have done in both elections, and he was an unusually unpopular president especially during a time of relative peace and prosperity whose approval ratings dropped significantly between election day in 2020 and when he finally left office in January.2 Especially after January 6. Folks sometimes confuse his enduring popularity among his strongest supporters for something more significant, but every president has a core group who remains in their corner no matter what. What’s different about Trump is that he’s always unpopular. But the levels of his unpopularity do vary as one would expect with events (and coverage of those events).
So:
We’re proabably stuck with at least some both-sides coverage in the “neutral” media no matter what. But we really don’t know what would happen if one of those sides is as negative as some of these Trump stories suggests. Nor do we know how it woud affect voters on the margins if enough “this is not normal” cues (including literal claims that what Trump is doing is not normal) find their way into coverage.
What we can say is that Trump has managed to cross whatever the threshold was that would free “neutral” outlets to bluntly describe him as campaigning as an authoritarian, something they mostly resisted in 2016 and 2020. So we can expect more of that kind of coverage.
Beyond that, what we probably can safely say is only that it could have some real effect. Even if it’s a small one. And that even a small shift away from Trump could wind up being the difference in the election.
In other words: While a whole heaping lot of caution is advised, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this kind of coverage could matter a whole lot.
Yes, this item is more of an “odds” than a “stakes” piece, although I certainly do try to be clear about both. And I don’t apologize. People want to know who will win and why, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.
As with his pre-pandemic approval ratings which were especially low given the conditions of mostly-peace and popularly perceived prosperity, Trump’s post-election slump is especially bad given the context. Most exiting presidents, including those who lose re-election, usually have had their approval ratings trend upwards after the election.