When the media take MAGA liars at their word

Whether it’s cluelessness or complicity, it’s toxic to democracy.

There was a remarkable statement in a recent New York Times story about tensions between Elon Musk and Trump Cabinet members:

“Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.”

“Reducing waste, fraud and abuse.” Is that really what NYT reporters Jonathon Swan and Maggie Haberman think Musk is trying to do?

Seems to me Musk is trying to seize political power without accountability, suck up citizens’ personal data, kill investigations of his companies and grab a huge federal contract from a competitor. He’s oligarching.

When veteran journalists like Swan and Haberman embrace right-wing spin like Musk’s, is it cluelessness or complicity? That question, which has lingered over political coverage for a very long time, has grown in relevance since Trump took his ride down the escalator in 2015.

That’s when Trump transformed politics with a spigot of hate and lies. The outrageousness of it took Republican politicians by surprise. They knew hate and lies played well with many of their voters. But they didn’t know anyone could express it so shamelessly and survive in American politics. When they learned they could, they jumped aboard the Trump train because they cared more about getting elected than being decent human beings.

Trump took journalists by surprise, too, and they’ve been much slower to react than Republican politicians were. By and large, the news industry has failed to learn from its mistakes and develop countermeasures against the lies. The media have shown the agility of a three-toed sloth.

Journalism’s bad habits and gullibility have been badly exploited by the right. One especially embarrassing example came last October when Politico wrote a story headlined “Trump team preps list of banned staffers” about how a second Trump administration supposedly would refuse to hire people involved in the radical Project 2025. At the time, Trump was desperately trying to distance himself from Project 2025, which was a loser with the voting public.

“Clearly people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted,” an unidentified Trump insider told Politico.

But, surprise, surprise: Project 2025 authors are now in key positions in the Trump regime. Russell Vought is director of the Office of Management and Budget, aggressively undermining the power of Congress. Tom Homan is “border czar,” terrorizing immigrant communities and threatening cities that don’t submit to his will. John Ratcliffe is CIA director, helping Trump betray Ukraine and cozy up to Russia. Brendan Carr is Federal Communications Commission chair, in charge of harassing the news media.

They took power with the help of Politico.

In its October article, Politico said its unnamed sources who distanced Trump from Project 2025 “were granted anonymity to discuss private transition operations.” But when it became clear that their sources lied, did Politico “out” them? No. Will Politico stop using those sources in the future? I’m guessing not.

Cluelessness or complicity? You decide.

Over this decade-long Trump nightmare, the tsunami of corruption has been accompanied by a near-total lack of a learning curve in the news business. If a politician lied to you in every public appearance, you wouldn’t believe anything they said without documented proof, right? Yet, when Trump says something today, too many journalists act as if he might be telling the truth this one time.

I don’t think this is cluelessness. I think it’s a false posture of “fairness.” It’s complicity.

Giving Trump the benefit of the doubt was common after his election in 2016, even though he had already shown who he was by boasting about grabbing women's private parts, calling former prisoner of war Sen. John McCain a coward, mocking a disabled person, trying to ban Muslims from coming to this country, and planting a bogus rumor in the press linking Ted Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Yet at the start of Trump 1.0, celebrities ranging from Dave Chapelle to Mark Cuban to Charles Barkley said we should “give Trump a chance.” Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote: “We are not Weimar Germany. … Let’s give him a chance.”

Of course, the comparison to pre-Hitler Germany seems especially valid now. Maybe we’re even beyond the Weimar Republic, into the early days of an emerging dictatorship. Yet even after Trump won a second term, journalists were doing a memory wipe and hoping he’d grow into the job.

According to media writer Oliver Darcy, CNN’s CEO Mark Thompson told his top journalists in January to “be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump,” as Darcy summarized it. Thompson instructed them not to remind viewers that Trump was a twice-impeached convicted felon.

In other words, he ordered his journalists to forget what they know – to fail to have a learning curve.

Last December, USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques urged Americans to keep an open mind about Trump. This was after Trump had tried and failed to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general despite credible allegations that Gaetz had paid a 17-year-old for sex. Nevertheless, Jacques wrote that “given everything Trump has overcome to once again become president of this great country, all I am saying is, let’s give him a chance.”

Sure, Ingrid, let bygones be bygones. It’s possible that Donald Trump will turn into Abraham Lincoln any minute now.

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