We need to talk less about Donald Trump

Extensive coverage of the Trump indictment puts us at risk of repeating the mistakes of how the media covered the 2016 election.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Several weeks ago, I was scrolling Twitter when I came across an interesting thread involving a number of independent  journalists. They were discussing how media treatment of the Trump indictment would impact coverage of the 2024 US election. They hypothesized that extensive coverage of the eventual trial would be given priority over coverage of more moderate Republican candidates. Their belief that was similar to how Trump received more coverage than other candidates back in 2016 because of the innumerable soundbites he provided for members of the media to comment on, he would receive hours of broadcast time and countless pages in the newspapers as a result of his charges, where his name and ideas would be promoted to a wider audience than he could reach alone, especially now that he no longer has access to the social media channels he once relied upon. The result of all of this time spent covering the trial, they believed, would be that less attention would be devoted to more moderate candidates, and that when the time comes to vote in the Republican primary, voters will be under-informed about the actual range of options they have. 

My immediate impulse was to reject their theory. 

We’ve been through this before. We recognized that CNN and other major news networks and newspapers made a mistake when they devoted so much time discussing the outlandish things that Trump was saying during his campaign, rather than highlighting other, more reasonable, candidates. Surely, we know better now, eight years later, than to give Trump so much free advertising. We aren’t really going to repeat our history this quickly are we? 

But…

Every morning when I check the news, I see coverage of Trump’s indictment. Other than Ron DeSantis, who I could argue extensively is a worse option for Republican voters than Donald Trump, I cannot name a single Republican nominee. If stories are being written about moderate Republicans vying for the nomination, they are relegated to the margins in favour of the latest installment in the Trump saga. 

It’s a difficult balancing act that we are expecting the media to perform. It’s important to cover what is happening with the charges against Trump. It is a story that is both of interest to an audience in the United States and around the world, and something that has the potential to be legally significant. It would be both wrong and arguably irresponsible to remove the avenue for easy public awareness of the unfolding legal brawl, which the media provides. However, the attention former President Trump and his trial, needs to, at the very least, be proportionate with that afforded others running for the Republican nomination. 

In the lead up to the 2016 election Donald Trump was a fountain of content and entertainment for everything from news broadcasts to late night commentators to a drinking game in my freshman dorm. In 2015, we believed that all of this attention was harmless; it was a joke that we were all in on and aware of. This was a monumental miscalculation. What may have seemed like absurdist humour to some of us became the megaphoning of often dangerous messages that awakened and emboldened some very scary parts of American culture. 

Trump and his lawyers have made evidence that they are prepared to go down swinging on the ship of free speech. As entertaining and tempting as it may be to fill dead air and blank pages with jokes and snarky comments about what have truly been some astounding leaps of logic on the part of Trump’s lawyers, we should resist. 

This legal proceeding is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Those who believe that Trump mishandled classified documents, obstructed justice, and committed the other felonies he has been charged with do not need to be persuaded by anything other than the court’s verdict, whenever that is received. Those who believe that Trump did nothing wrong are unlikely to change their minds, the last eight years have clearly demonstrated that. Given this dynamic, it would be worthwhile to reallocate time spent extensively discussing each move of the trial to introducing voters to other Republican candidates representing less polarizing perspectives.