Could any Trump scandal make a difference?

SPEECH TO TEXT DEP'T. 

Presidential Crimes Are News If You Keep Putting Them in the Newspaper

THIS AFTERNOON AND evening, my social media feed suddenly got excited by a rumor about a possible story about maybe a video that could possibly be devastating, scandalous news about Donald Trump—the kind of news that historically would have destroyed a presidential campaign. The evidence that any such news was really incoming seemed highly tenuous and untrustworthy, but people wanted to believe. 

Could any news story possibly deliver the country from the threat of another Trump presidency? Thinking about the desperation, and the impulse behind it, I realized I'd already addressed the issue from the other direction, this very morning, while riffing on today's newspaper for the Indignity Morning Podcast. When I looked up the transcript, it was a very long riff, on a problem with the  press that I'd more than halfway been meaning to write about anyway. 

All through the third Trump presidential campaign, people have been complaining about how the mainstream press has been treating Trump as an ordinary candidate, even with his shocking record of criminality and official misconduct, and even as he leads his political movement into ever more explicit fascism. And the mainstream press has been complaining back: We're just covering the campaign news! It's not our job to take sides! What would you have us do instead? 

But today, in the print edition of the Times, the paper tried to do something different—belatedly and inadequately, yet clearly enough to suggest what major journalistic outlets could have been doing all along, if they'd been willing. 

So below, transferred from audio to text, is the podcast segment.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, packaged as a moderately important lead news story, two columns wide with no front page photo, is a remarkable piece by Peter Baker, dateline: WASHINGTON. The headline is, “A Scandal-Plagued Career Nears a Decisive Moment / Trump has been accused of wrongdoing at scale unseen at presidential level.” 

Here on October 23, less than two weeks before Election Day, is when the Times has decided to pull back and try to reckon with the enormity of the fact that Donald Trump has returned to within reach of the presidency. 

Once again, the headline treatment runs a little soft. It's not that Trump has been ”“accused of wrongdoing.” It's that he has done wrong—obviously, copiously, unequivocally, by any legal or journalistic standard. 

The piece notes right away that Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Baker then writes: 

Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high octane campaign, heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America, for the first time in its history, may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to retribution.

Yes, there's plenty to quibble about in the premise that the public has never before knowingly sent a criminal to the Oval Office. Both Georges Bush, for instance, had pretty clearly committed crimes by the father's election or the son's reelection. But the point that Trump occupies his very own plane of degeneracy is entirely valid. 

The issue, naturally enough, is how exactly it came to be that the New York Times is writing about that fact being lost in the coverage of the campaign, when the New York Times has been covering the campaign. “Whether in his personal life or his public life," Baker writes, "he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.” 

That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that he has done so many wrong things across so many different areas of activity that a newspaper that had gone to the trouble of maintaining a scorecard could have incorporated his relevant misdeeds into basically any story they ever wrote about anything. Why is the fact that he dodged the draft not germane to every story where he says anything about the armed forces? Why doesn't every story about his positions on the tax code and tax enforcement clearly and explicitly bring out his lifelong record of tax fraud? 

In the two-page spread after the jump, where Baker tries to lay out a full litany of Trump's misdeeds, one paragraph is: 

He monetized the presidency for himself as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines. Critics took him to court, charging him with violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, barring the acceptance of gifts from any king, prince, or foreign state. Although the Supreme Court threw out legal challenges.

Fine. But just because the Supreme Court put the Emoluments Clause on its list of clear constitutional provisions that Donald Trump magically enjoyed immunity from doesn't mean that the New York Times couldn't have prominently referred to how much money Trump and his family have taken from foreign governments in every news story where Trump says anything about relations with or policy toward all those countries. 

It's institutions like the New York Times—afraid of seeming partisan, and unable or unwilling to adjust their habits in response to a criminal president—that allowed this two-page litany of abuses of power and acts of corruption to recede into the background or to fade out entirely. If it was worth reminding the readers of today's paper about all these things, it would have been worth reminding them on hundreds of other occasions as well.

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, October 22, 2024

★★★★ The haze of a fine July morning—the atmosphere of setting up the archery range before Cub Scout day camp, decades ago—hung over the October trees in Central Park. By late morning, shorts and a t-shirt were the suitable choice. A gibbous moon stood wan but fat on the blue. On the East Side, the air was the air of Kowloon in December. A white-brick building glowed like it was lit from within. Sherman's gilded horse strode forth in the sun with a mass of shadow looming behind it. The surface of the Pond was thick with fallen leaves. Grill smoke rose up from a cart, snagged on the umbrellas, then rose a little more to make a broader canopy. The light caught on the edges of the window frames of the Time Warner Center, speckling the usually featureless glass faces with rows and columns of pale line segments. Uptown along Central Park West, the sun was fully beating down on the wide sidewalk. Honeylocusts on the uphill block had gone from losing leaflets to dropping entire compound leaf clusters at once. 

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.

Indignity Morning Podcast No. 354: He made it seem like fun.

THE PURSUIT OF PODCASTING ADEQUACY™

INDIGNITYTom Scocca

Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.

INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST

Tom Scocca reads you the newspaper.

INDIGNITY MORNING PODCASTTOM SCOCCA

SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE WOULD HAVE liked to present instructions in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 'Please, M'm, The Butcher!': A Complete Guide To Catering For The Housewife Of Moderate Means, With Menus Of All Meals For A Year, Numerous Recipes, And Fifty-Two Additional Menus Of Dinners Without Meat, by Beatrice Guarracino, published in 1903, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all; however, availability-wise, the latest communication from the Internet Archive reports:

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MARKETING DEP'T.

We are down to the last 14 copies of the second printing of 19 Folktales, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! The nights are getting chilly and longer, but the stories are each concise enough to read before your bedtime tea cools off.