What if Trump wins? The media will need to be on a war footing.

I dearly hope our newsroom leaders have given some careful thought to how they’re going to cover the second Trump presidency, should that come to pass.

They sure muffed it the last time around.

At least initially, they had an excuse. People often forget that almost no one actually expected Trump to win in 2016 – not even Trump. That includes our major newsrooms.

With Trump the surprise winner, a rapid, massive course change in how they covered the presidency was required. But – in shock — they just stayed on autopilot. They continued to play by the old rules of political journalism. They covered him like they would have covered a normal president.

When Trump said something, they wrote it up. Maybe somewhere down the page they quoted a critic. They certainly didn’t call Trump out for lying, which he did constantly. They certainly didn’t call him unhinged, which he so manifestly was even then.

Where bold words were called for, they used soft ones. Where direct language was called for, they used euphemisms. They treated him, they acknowledged, with the respect due the office.

In my view, starting on Inauguration Day, we were in a constant state of national emergency. But the press didn’t sound the alarm. They just stayed the course.

And as time passed, they didn’t look back. They didn’t question their approach. They actually bragged about it.

Indeed, then-Washington Post editor Marty Baron famously rationalized the listless, credulous way his newsroom covered Trump by coining the phrase “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.” The Post was so proud they eventually mounted the slogan on a wall near the newsroom’s  national desk.

But here’s the thing: There was a war, whether Baron liked it or not. It was being fought against the truth. Baron just chose not to fight it.

The Post and other news organizations acted like the war wasn’t happening, so they lost. The public was underinformed and misinformed. Throughout Trump’s term, the American people were insufficiently alarmed.

(The nadir for both Trump and the political press was during the covid pandemic. As I’ve written elsewhere, political reporters paid way too much attention to whatever Trump said, such that whatever it was made headlines. They let Trump set the agenda instead of letting knowledgeable people do it. Political reporters also gave Trump way too much credit for trying. They covered up for his incoherence, ignorance, cluelessness, gaslighting, and yes, just plain stupidity. They remained complacent in the face of a massive death toll, instead of relentlessly demanding more forceful action.)

This Time It’s Different

This time around, our newsroom leaders will have no excuse for not being prepared. They know there is a plausible chance that Trump will win. And as it happens, he is far more dangerous than he was the first time around. His lies are even more outrageous, his delusions are even more troubling, his plans are even more destructive, and his hostility toward the mainstream press has increased exponentially.

If Trump returns to office, this time the media will need to fight back.

This shouldn’t be controversial. Baron himself grudgingly conceded in 2021 that the Post had failed to sufficiently call out Trump’s lies. He told Der Spiegel:

We had to be much more forthright about Trump’s mendacity, his lies over the course of the administration. We needed to call them that from the very beginning. We were very much operating on good principle; and let’s be fair, he was president, he was duly elected. But he was exploiting that. He was exploiting our principles. That said, I don’t think it would have made any great difference.

This time around, our major newsrooms need to be ready to write about the Trump presidency in a way that fully acknowledges the alarming context – the way he lies, the threat he poses to democracy, the chaos he embraces, the way he intends to pervert justice, his ludicrous, draconian and inhumane plans.

News reports must never make the outrageous appear normal. And, at the same time, they must find ways to help the public distinguish between the outrageous and the utterly outrageous.

If Trump becomes president, the coverage cannot simply be stenographic. It cannot outsource the fact-checking and the critiques to “critics” and “Democrats.” Newsrooms must call out the bullshit and the horror in their own institutional voices. They must not let right-wing talking points determine what they cover.

When Trump lies about something, the headlines should say “Trump lies about XYZ” not “Trump says XYZ.” When Trump starts to turn the Justice Department into a tool for his personal retribution, the reporting needs to say just that. When he fires special prosecutor Jack Smith, the ensuing stories should stress that this is an assault on the rule of law. If he gains the presidency through trickery and deceit, that must be acknowledged in every story. When he does something racist or misogynistic, that should be stated clearly.

The good news, if there is any at all, is that reporting about Trump from our top news organizations – including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press – has finally gotten a lot better about calling out his lies, addressing his cognitive decline, and contextualizing his extremist plans. Especially in the last week or so, words like racist and misogynistic have crept into headlines and opening paragraphs.

This time around, should it come to that, there’s no excuse. The political media must realize that the only way they can hold on to core journalistic values – a devotion to the truth and the democratic system of government – is if they go to war