The past week’s media coverage of Donald Trump was dominated by two things: his claim that thousands of Muslims celebrated 9/11 in New Jersey, and – while defending this untruth – his mockery of a New York Times’ reporter’s disability. In the process, Trump insisted he had seen media reports from 2001 that didn’t exist, and that he had never met a reporter whom he actually knew.
It’s been this way for months. If you’re following political coverage, Trump’s candidacy has unfolded as a parade of outrageous statements, each compounding the outrage of all the previous, adding on some new dollop of provocation.
This has been great for ratings and web traffic. Every day Trump transgresses the known boundaries of American political behavior. Two problems here: negative coverage of these transgressions does not harm Trump, nor does it do much to inform the public. (See Jay Rosen's analysis of the structural problems that put the media in this bind.) Indeed, what was shocking a few months ago —Trump says something, it doesn't hurt him — is now just a fact of life, which means even on the media's own terms, this storyline is getting stale. If you're watching it out of the corner of your eye, you're going to turn away. If you like Trump, you're also going to turn away. What should reporters do? Call him a “liar”? (Well, if the shoe fits.) Ignore him? (No. For the moment, he is a genuine political force.)
Here’s an important — and under-appreciated — piece of this problem. Trump coverage has been driven by outrageousness, but not all of his transgressions are created equal. The fake 9/11 memory and disability mocking illustrate this point. Mimicking a disabled reporter is boorish, offensive, and harmful; maligning American Muslims as terrorism-supporting traitors is demagoguery. And media coverage does not distinguish between these two distinct phenomena.
There is no clear point where Trump’s boorishness ends and his demagoguery begins. In this case, both attacks imagine a minority group as somehow alien and worthy of disdain. And the boorishness is what's truly novel here. In coverage, this means what's really politically consequential – the demagoguery — is trivialized. Everything is flattened and folded into a “there he goes again” outrage-a-thon. Anti-immigrant demagoguery has a long history in the United States. But here somehow it has devolved into questions of etiquette, the media’s arbitrary standards for what constitutes acceptable political behavior. Even for the political press, that's awfully self-referential and self-defeating. Here are some questions reporters might focus on instead: why are Trump's demagogic statements about Muslims and Mexicans stirring such durable support? What does this say about American politics? Can we even have a debate on these topics?
Trump's supporters don’t care about political etiquette. From their standpoint, Trump is distilling and giving voice to their beliefs. And the boorishness is telling truth to power, an attack on a corrupt political-media system that enforces the “politically correct” standards that are sending the country to hell.
To put it another way: not every boorish-yet-watchable TV showman can be Trump. What makes Trump Trump is the combination of boorish watchability and a political message which, despite being wholly improvised by the candidate on the fly, is quite coherent and compelling to a significant segment of the electorate. Trump's outrageousness is a shiny object that continues to capture the media’s attention. But it's not the real story.
