OK then
By What about the coverage that doesn’t live in black and white, that is more ambient? The obvious story that everyone brings up, which I almost feel duty bound to ask about, is Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.
I know this is going to get everybody riled up again, but I don’t have regrets about the Hillary Clinton e-mail stories. It was a running news story. It was a serious F.B.I. investigation. The stories were accurate. My God, we were writing stories about Donald Trump harassing women—we did the first of those. We wrote the first story about Donald Trump where we got a sheet of his taxes—or Sue Craig got a sheet of his taxes. I don’t buy that we were tougher on Hillary Clinton than we were on Donald Trump. There were a lot of stories where I think, if I had to do them over again, I would have done them differently. There are a lot of people on Twitter who like to parse out everything I say. There’s nothing I can do about that.
I don’t think that anybody had their arms wrapped around the mood of the country that allowed for the election of Donald Trump, including us. I don’t think people—including the New York Times—quite had a handle on the anger, the amount of racial animosity. I don’t think any of us thought that Donald Trump was going to be elected President. Anybody who says they did, I don’t buy it.Dean Baquet, New Yorker interview, Feb. 18, 2022
One of the most compelling points Rick Perlstein makes in his excellent The Invisible Bridge is that Ronald Reagan was consistently and radically underestimated as a potential political force by the national media, public intellectuals, DC insiders, etc., until practically up to the moment he was on the edge of winning the GOP nomination in 1976.
This makes me at least begin to wonder if something similar might not be happening with Donald Trump. Now obviously there are enormous differences between the backgrounds, the careers, and the personalities of the two men, but there are also some striking similarities:
(1) Both mastered the art of manipulating their contemporary media environments.
(2) Both manifested a fine understanding of how to make outrageous statements in a way that ingratiated them with their political bases, precisely because the national media reaction to those statements allowed them to pose as victims of supposed media and/or elite bias.
(3) Both spent a good part of their lives as at least putatively wishy-washy Democrats, before discovering that selling racial demagoguery to the contemporary Republican party base was about as hard as selling beer at a baseball game on a 90-degree day.
(4) Both spent most of their careers being dismissed as clownish lightweights.
In a GOP presidential field that isn’t exactly stacked with political talent, the notion that Trump can’t win the nomination is at least premature. As is the idea that he can’t be elected president.
LGM July 9, 2015