On Ayman Mohyeldin’s MSNBC show Sunday night, regular commentators Tara Setmayer and Tom Nichols lit into the Trump faithful, their guy, and the media.
Setmayer called Trump’s promises to jail opponents and deport thousands of immigrants if he wins “insane.” But she added, “and yet there’s very little coverage of it, or it’s ‘Well, that’s just Trump being Trump.’”
Trump didn’t name journalists among his enemies in the rant Setmayer referred to. But he has threatened to send members of the Fourth Estate to the calaboose, too. (Click here, here,here, here and here.)
Doubtless Setmayer and Nichols are on any enemies list that Trump sycophant Stephen Miller, Madame Defarge-like, might be compiling for the boss.
Nichols said Trump “doesn’t care about policy. His followers don’t care about policy.” Their protestations that they do care is merely “top cover for them saying, ‘I just love the fact that he makes people mad and he hates the people I hate.’”
Setmayer is co-founder and chief executive officer of the Seneca Project. Nichols is an academic who writes for The Atlantic. He also authors RadioFreeTom on X, formerly Twitter.
Setmayer said the “Trump being Trump” media narrative would be okay if he were still hosting The Apprentice. “He’s not. He’s running for president of the United States again. He will have control of the nuclear codes.” She said it’s time to “stop giving people a pass for still supporting someone that’s this dangerous to our country.”
Nichols faulted the Fourth Estate for not focusing enough on Trump’s bizarre, disjointed and often outrageous screeds. “A lot of reporters, I think ... find themselves thinking ... ‘I can’t write that the GOP nominee is this unhinged, emotionally unstable, you know, deeply messed up person.’”
Sometimes, reporters paraphrase Trump’s nonsensical comments to make them sound more coherent. Critics call the practice “sane-washing” that benefits Trump. On his Monday night MSNBC show, Lawrence O’Donnell singled out the The New York Times, a leading purveyor of “fake news,” according to Trump. O’Donnell maintained that Harris will be facing Trump in tonight’s debate and the “sane-washing” media reviewers afterwards.
This election is not Bush I v. Dukakis, Bush I v Clinton, Clinton v Dole, Bush II v Gore, Bush II v Kerry, Obama v McCain or Obama v. Romney. Our democracy wasn’t at stake in any of those races. It is now, which seems like a truth too uncomfortable for the media to address boldly.
Earlier on Monday, though, Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce addressed the truth full-on in his latest musing, and also targeted The Times. He wrote that Trump “is now running as a mentally unravelling out-and-out fascist” and blamed the mainstream media for enabling him — however unwittingly — in the name of objective reporting.
“He is a mortal threat to everything that is vital to the survival of this republic as we know it,” Pierce argued. “To write about him as such, and to write about him as such every damn day from now until the first Tuesday of November, is the proper, truthful, and, yes, objective thing to do. What is not proper, truthful, or objective is the weak-tea approach taken by A.O. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, who comes right up to the edge of doing what is right and then scurries back to that airy place that has proven to be helpless in the face of the [Trump] threat.”
Pierce concluded by likening The Times’s reporting on Trump to the first lines in A Tale of Two Cities, the Dickensian classic in which Madame Defarge appears as a minor character: “The NYT’s political coverage has demonstrated nothing more clearly than it has illustrated that neutrality is a perilous fetishism in the best of times. These are not the best of times.”
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