Covering Trump

An insane press conference demonstrates that it's a hopeless task, so buckle in for four years of scurrying after nonsense.

Debates about how the news media should cover Trump on the campaign trail—where the stakes were presumably the election outcome—have now given way to debates about how to cover him as President (or for now, President-elect). The stakes now are, in a way, more concrete and serious, with actual policy and action potentially backed by his Presidential power. But those stakes are also rather amorphous and unclear, because we don’t really know what he might do or might be actively trying to do or planning to do.

Most of us harbor theories about the relationship between Trump’s public statements and his actual intents. But they are mostly just theories. I am sympathetic to the view that many of his pronouncements (say, annexing Canada) are frivolous whims meant to distract attention from more serious and potentially unpopular things (such as mass deportation). But who knows? And who can say for sure what belongs in which category—or when one might move from one category to the another? Is he serious about seizing the Panama Canal? Will he be serious about it a month from now? Editorial decisions made on any assumed answers are bound to go awry.

And that’s just one theory. Others insist that Trump’s spoken utterances have little or no connection with actual intention. Some declare just the opposite, that we should take all his claims literally and seriously. Still others say the news media should ignore him when he speaks; reporting only elevates and spreads his nonsense, they say.

What are the distractions, and what is serious? The answer lies, perhaps, somewhere in the best guess of the beholder.

That difficulty came into play Tuesday when Trump held a press conference at Mar A Lago, during which—in between complaints about his mistreatment, and boasts of his mighty accomplishments—he revived old policy items (water pressure regulations and wind farms, for example), introduced new ones (renaming the Gulf of Mexico), added to others (eg., suggesting he might use military force to conquer Greenland, but not Canada), and reiterated a bunch more while not even mentioning many, many other newsworthy initiatives. There are many, many of them after all, from announced appointments to a lengthy list of “Day One” plans.

The presser’s ostensible topic, which was not revealed in advance, turned out to be an announcement that UAE billionaire Hussain Sajwani plans to invest $20 billion building data centers in the United States.

Sajwani was effusive that he is doing this only because his good friend Donald Trump had won the election, although it was unclear exactly what about this ballot-box outcome made the business plan more attractive. Trump was somewhat less cagey, saying that he will give Sajwani a clear end run around pesky environmental regulations. Trump also suggested that his pal should consider building power plants adjacent to the data centers, to feed the enormous appetites of AI processing, and a little extra to sell to the locals.

If the idea was to drive news coverage of the investment, as part of a storyline about American economic resurgence under the incoming administration, Trump quickly killed that plan. He spent the next hour or so on what could charitably be called a “rambling” address, creating news where none was necessary, and taking questions that he turned into further news unrelated to the planned topic.

Along the way, Trump lamented Joe Biden’s half-out-the-door order banning new offshore drilling in some 625 million acres, a size that Trump found staggering, and possibly the size of an entire ocean, and the folly of which he summarized as a giveaway of roughly $50 trillion worth of assets. (For what it’s worth, the acreage is a little less than the size of Greenland, although perception of the latter benefits from the notorious Mercator projection used in most of our world maps.) Trump has already vowed to immediately reverse the ban, although it’s unclear whether that is possible, and it’s very clear that Trump has no idea what it would require.

News media outlets tried their best to present all of this in some reasonably responsible way, but what can you do? If, for example, you take seriously the President-elect’s claim that he wants to take a huge territory from an allied country with no justification whatsoever, by force if necessary, then by God that’s a huge, very serious news story. If you don’t take it seriously, and then he really tries to do it, then you’ve failed your duty pretty spectacularly. So, yes, you have to be distracted from all the other very serious things and write about this crazy thing. And maybe we’re all just cats jumping at red dots that Trump is making with his laser pointer. This is the second Trump Presidency, I’m afraid. Good luck to us all.