The media and Trump

Lance Manion

There is a common challenge confronting all of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls: how to take on Donald Trump while maintaining their dignity, sanity and message control… 

With the campaign in its infancy, candidates are muddling through how to best take on Trump without sinking to his level of discourse…—Maeve Reston and Stephen Collinson for CNN, January 22, 2019.

 Know who managed it? 

Hillary. 

And the media hated her for it because it was BORE-ING!


She even managed to force Trump to try to act like a serious potential president. 

During all three debates, he struggled to lift himself up to her level. 

She of course wiped the floor with him while maintaining her dignity, sanity, and control of not just her message but the terms of the debates, keeping them focused on issues and policy and demonstrating her superior knowledge, experience, and expertise. 

Which caused Chuck Todd to declare her “over-prepared.”

. . . .

Bruni:

We can also allow his challengers to talk about themselves as much as they do about him. 

In 2016, Carpenter said, that didn’t happen. 

“It was deeply unfair,” she told me... 

“When the whole news cycle was microphones shoved in Republican candidates’ faces and the question was always, ‘What’s your reaction to what Trump just said?,’ there’s no way to drive your own message.

The Democratic contenders are going to have to establish themselves as more than just anti-Trumps. The question is will the media let them?

Reston and Collinson make clear that the media is going to put up a fight on that. They want it to be all Trump all the time

They're also going to do their best to make it all about personality. 

You can already see how they're framing it: opposition to Trump is all about what HE is not what he's DOING.

. . . .

He’s an ignorant and incompetent boob is different from look at the damage his incompetence and ignorance are causing. 

But that’s all the media want to hear the Democrats say because they want them to sink to his level. 

That has the effect of putting them on the same level and they can cover the race as if it it’s between equally substance-free candidates and that saves them from the work of having to understand policy and make judgments they know they’re not qualified to make. 

Dueling insult comics and drama queens means they can practice the easy sports reporting and theater reviewing instead they’re good at. 

Politics is a performance art, but the way the media would have it, that’s all it is, which lets them pretend the best performance artist will make the best president without having to think about what else the job entails.

Trump didn’t change the rules. 

He understood the rules.