(Press Watch is a nonprofit fully funded by donations from the public. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution.)
Mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is a disaster.
The incremental daily stories utterly fail to convey the extent of the danger he presents to the functioning of government, to national security, and to democracy itself.
Even the news analyses rarely put Trump in anywhere close to his full context.
Political journalists and their editors will tell you they don’t craft their stories that way because it could create the appearance of partisanship. That’s a garbage argument, but there’s no convincing them otherwise.
As it happens, however, there is a different framing of Trump that is even more accurate — and explanatory — than describing him as a fulminating would-be dictator.
It’s also completely non-partisan, because it has nothing to do with political views.
That framing is simply this: That Trump is a con artist.
He is, in the words of investigative journalist and author David Cay Johnston, “the greatest con artist in the history of the world.”
“You’ve got to stop covering him like he’s just another politician, with a different agenda,” Johnston told me recently. “He’s a criminal and a con artist. And that has to be central to everything you cover about him.”
That framing has a lot going for it: It’s easy to grasp, fully substantiated by the facts, and explains pretty much everything about Trump past, present and future. It’s the unifying theory of Donald Trump.
The con artist M.O. is to get people to suspend disbelief – to believe things that aren’t true. Then they grab money or political power — or both. Sound familiar?
Eventually, they leave town, promises unfulfilled, but with their coffers full. (Unless, that is, they get run out of town on a rail, which is a possibility.)
For journalists, failing to situate Trump’s words and actions in the context of an ongoing con is tantamount to deception. It’s not just failing to tell the whole story, it’s failing to tell the central story.
It also has the huge advantage of preparing readers and viewers for what’s to come: The inevitable betrayal of the suckers who voted for him.
If you recognize that Trump is all about accruing power and money at others’ expense, then you also can see that he will inevitably let down those who counted on him to make their lives better.
In reality — and in stark contrast to Joe Biden’s strongly pro-worker agenda — Trump’s actions will hurt ordinary Americans. The downtrodden will be even more trodden upon.
A political journalist’s obligation going forward, then, is to expose the con and chronicle the betrayals.
That’s the big story. That’s the job.
Some of his con is coming undone already, even before he takes office. By giving billionaires leading roles in his administration, he has shown that he will not rule as a populist.
In his “Person of the Year” interview with Time Magazine interview, Trump acknowledged that what was arguably his single most effective promise — to lower grocery prices — is no longer operative.
At an August rally in North Carolina, for instance, Trump told the crowd, “From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again.” He added: “You just watch. They’ll come down fast.”
But in the December interview with Time, Trump said “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.“
That’s the first con unraveling before our eyes. It should have made for banner headlines and days of follow-up stories, but was largely buried in the mainstream press.
And there are so many more betrayals to come.
Tariffs will not be paid for by foreign countries; they’ll be paid for by the American consumer, which will increase inflation.
Mass deportations – if they even occur — won’t make anyone’s lives better, they’ll simply destroy communities, devastate a critical part of the American labor force, and disrupt the economy.
Although Trump promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare, it seems likely he’ll break that promise, too, in order to enrich himself and his friends.
Although he promised not to pursue a national abortion ban, he will almost certainly do so.
And although he promised to end wars, he is more likely to start them.
Once you acknowledge that Trump is a con artist above all else, everything becomes clearer. For instance, it’s no longer surprising that he has no idea how to govern. That’s not his thing. Nor does he have a clearly definable political agenda, other than seizing power and destroying enemies.
He is the proverbial snake-oil salesman. That’s the accurate framing. But it’s not what we’re getting from the traditional mainstream media.
What we get instead are articles like this one from New York Times reporter Nate Cohn, embracing the fiction that Trump has policy views supported by analysis.
You sometimes get tiny little whiffs of the con-man narrative, but not often and not much. For instance, the Post’s perpetually credulous news analyst, Dan Balz, wrote on Dec. 15 that Trump’s “personnel decisions raise questions about whether his true priorities square with those of the people who voted for him.”
Raises questions, indeed!
You have to go back to a Paul Krugman New York Times opinion column in late October to get the real story in the traditional media. Under the headline “Trump’s Biggest Con: Pretending He’s on the Side of Working Men and Women,” Krugman wrote:
Donald Trump has always been a con man. As a businessman, he left behind a trail of investors who lost money in failed ventures even as he profited, students who paid thousands for worthless courses, unpaid contractors and more. Even amid his current presidential campaign he has been hawking overpriced gold sneakers and Trump Bibles printed in China.
But Trump’s biggest, potentially most consequential con has been political: portraying himself as a different kind of Republican, an ally of working Americans.
The truth is that to the extent that Trump’s policy plans — or, in some cases, concepts of plans — differ from G.O.P. orthodoxy, it’s because they are even more antilabor and pro-plutocrat than his party’s previous norm.
Trump is a con artist and ordinary people are going to get hurt. That’s the all-encompassing story of the next four years. To the political journalists out there, I say get on it or get lost.
They surrendered (aka began their collaboration) in 2016 by refusing to use the word “lie,” and refusing to place every Trump statement in every article quoting him in the context of the fact that he CONSTANTLY lies.
The big question I have is WHY? Why do they (MSM, also others) twist themselves into pretzels to pretend Trump has ideas? Surely they know, they can _see_, that he’ll say anything to get what he wants?
Then I thought maybe they have to pretend, and pretend hard enough to try to convince themselves. The alternative is to know that a conman has them by the throat and will squeeze out everything they have.
Because Trump is petty, twisted, moronic little man.
They know that if they push him into a tantrum over something they say, he may cutoff their access – and any political media outlet without access to the administration isn’t going to go very well.
It’s stupid, it’s shouldn’t be so, but it’s also reality.
They fear for their jobs. Now that the Internet has SUPPLANTED the media, finding a journalist job is very difficult. Most Americans have lost so much of their CRITICAL REASONING SKILLS that they cannot differentiate between plausible, and probably true, and implausible/improbable. They eat up propaganda of the most ridiculous and inherently contradictory type. They embrace garbage from people like Alex Jones or “magical thinking” and turn away from the truth as too pedestrian.
The biggest news story of 2024? The deliberate destruction of the Washington Post under the supervision of its owner Jeff Bezos and its publisher Will Lewis who are trying desperately to please the incoming authoritarian President Donald Trump and his authoritarian Trump administration.
I’ve already cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post (effective in August as they wont give money back). Others have, too. Sadly it will put some good reporters out of work, but the entire paper should be out of work if it is going to do nothing but censure what its reporters write.
I’m sticking with reader supported papers like ProPublica that does investigative journalism. I also read HuffPost co-founded by Arianna Huffington Republican turned Democrat.
Also, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, the WaPo killed yet another story about the departure of Managing Editor Matea Gold. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we have a definite pattern set.
My question is why the media hasn’t tracked down the investors that lost money, the students who lost their shirts with Trump U, the unpaid contractors and even city gov who were not paid for campaign rally space. Isn’t that what good reporting is about?
Also, reporters should interview cheated and sexually assaulted Trump pageant and modeling agency victims and document their resulting abortions.
I’ve been saying this for years. Every insane utterance from Trump is treated as a serious policy issue by the press–buy Greenland, get rid of the Dept. of Education, etc. The convicted felon has no serious policy except to grift as much as possible.
The article is perfect — it only misses that Orangejuliusceasar is a master of misdirection as part of his con…..buy Greenland, take over Panama….the press skitters around this shit like roaches on floor crumbs. Meanwhile the story about the truly horrific cabinet picks dies on the vine.
That’s why I quit subscribing to the New York Times and Washington Post . The media is essentially dead and it deserves to die because they can’t tell the truth. This has been going on for almost 10 years.
This kind of reporting is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for over a considerable amount of time now. Go figure it takes a non-profit to frame the most appropriate narrative accurately, although there have been whispers about it from solids like Krugman. Trump IS all about the con; it’s the centerpiece of everything he is about and everything has done since he was a little bully-boy sociopath. Check out any Trump crime, and there are many, but always it’s back to the con, sometimes so beyond obvious you want to scream at the moon.
This is great, I’m in and I will pay for this service.
This is the best article I’ve read on this important topic. It is clear, concise, and accurate. Our mainstream media is guilty of enabling Trump’s success in the biggest con our nation has ever suffered. The fact that so many people have been taken in by his con says a lot about human intelligence. We will all suffer from the outcomes of his supporters’ stupidity, naiveté, and tribalism. Great article!
He’s more than a con artist, although he is that in spades. He’s also a borderline(?) psychopath whose distorted ego requires constant obeisance and especially the public humiliation of whoever had the temerity to oppose / criticize him.