4 hours ago

Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’ | Margaret Sullivan

His social media posts are unhinged. He seems to fall asleep in meetings. He proudly proclaims he’s not thinking “even a little bit” about Americans’ personal finances in talks with Iran. And he lies constantly about the supposed success of the war with Iran he started for no good reason.

That’s just the start, of course, when it comes to Donald Trump’s disastrous second presidency. There’s the ruination of the Kennedy Center, the building of a ballroom (or bunker?) to replace the White House East Wing, and the wrecking ball that the Trump-aligned supreme court has taken to the voting rights of Black Americans. There’s the endless self-dealing and the abuse of the justice department’s intended purpose.

And yet, the mainstream media doesn’t make much of any of that, not in any sustained way.

The shocking excesses and corruption of Trump 2.0 are “priced in”.

These outrages, for the most part, are largely treated as, well, Trump being Trump.

It’s as if much of big media has decided that it’s too much trouble to focus, in any sustained way, on developments that would have resulted in weeks of headlines, if not impeachment and conviction, in the pre-Trump era. And certainly in the Biden era.

“I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79-year-old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all,” one observer, Jamesetta Williams, put it succinctly on X.

Next month, Trump turns 80. He functions with no apparent restraints, and it seems doubtful that the situation will improve any time soon.

Some extreme outrages do rise to the surface, provoking a raised eyebrow or two.

The New York Times gave its lead news position in print the other day to his “anti-weaponization fund” of $1.8bn. It’s intended to use taxpayer money to compensate his allies – maybe including the January 6 rioters who attacked police officers – for being prosecuted by an earlier iteration of the US justice department.

Reporters quoted Donald K Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog organization, calling it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history”. And a sub-headline made a carefully distanced reference to “critics” who call this a slush fund.

Ah, the critics. There they are again.

The mainstream media largely shrugged off the slush-fund story, depicting it as politics as usual – no cause for alarm or sustained coverage. The NBC evening newscast by Wednesday had moved on, focusing instead on Raúl Castro’s indictment, the California wildfires and a car explosion in lower Manhattan. And Fox News, home to the fervid Maga base, offered cursory coverage both on the air and online, giving an obligatory nod to Democratic lawmakers who voiced their objections, but mostly handing the network’s microphone to Trump allies such as JD Vance and the loyalist acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

Granted, there have been a few recent pieces about Trump’s apparent physical and mental decline, including one by Jonathan Lemire in the Atlantic. He acknowledged that Trump hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for his age-related decline as Biden did, and pointed out “questions about his health and increasingly erratic behavior”.

But it didn’t get all that much attention. Nothing does.

One of the problems, of course, is that there’s just so much.

Journalists get geared up to cover one outrage – $1bn for ballroom security! – when another one comes along: $1.8bn for the slush fund!

And ever onward.

Now he’s dissing Americans’ worries about their family budgets, but that fades as he schmoozes the next authoritarian dictator, or threatens “a friendly takeover of Cuba”.

“Flood the zone with shit,” was the way former Trump aide Steve Bannon once described the media strategy. It’s turned out to be a highly effective technique.

One almost can’t blame overwhelmed citizens for wanting to hide their heads in the sand, despite the extraordinary dangers of doing so.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential. Also, not really unhappy since Trump provides constant outrage, which makes for news, and then he moves on.

They do, too.

Often, it falls to independent voices – not associated with corporate media – to say the obvious, loud and clear.

Terry Moran, formerly of ABC News and now on Substack, called the slush fund “plunder” in a recent post, and urged mainstream media to stop using “weasel words”, like unusual or controversial, to report on it. Moran called an associated development, the shielding of the Trump family’s entire tax history from scrutiny, for all time, as “breathtakingly corrupt”.

You won’t hear THAT on the evening news or in the rest of mainstream media.

By the time you read this, they’ll already have moved on.