Will Trump's next crimes make the front page?

And will there be a political party willing to protest them?

Dec 09, 2024

Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.

Thank you to everyone who reached out with positive thoughts ahead of my heart procedure. on Thursday — they worked! I am now home and on the mend after having my valve replaced. This was step one of fixing unforeseen after-effects of my gigantic February surgery, and because it was minimally invasive, it left me feeling like I got hit by a moped instead of a truck. The good news is that I can breathe again, so hopefully I’m back to normal soon enough and can go for years without another procedure or surgery.

Although I’m still recovering, I wanted to check in to discuss an important story, how it was covered nationally, and its broader implications. I could have skipped it, given my condition, but as we’ll discuss tonight, when the information pipeline breaks down, all hell tends to break loose.

We’ll return to regular coverage, including both features and deep dives, this week.

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Will anyone care when Trump tears up the constitution?

Donald Trump promised to violate the constitution and commit mass deportations of American citizens on Sunday, though you wouldn’t know it from most news coverage.

Where major media outlets devoted time to covering the president-elect’s wide-ranging interview on Meet the Press, they largely focused on soft statements Trump made about wanting to imprison members of the Jan. 6th Commission. His promise to end birthright citizenship via executive order, however, was covered by major newspapers as an afterthought, even though it would represent an extraordinary violation of the constitution.

Here’s how the NY Times covered it: “And although he vowed to end birthright citizenship, Mr. Trump said he would try to work with Democrats to spare immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers, from deportation.”

And here’s the Washington Post’s coverage, which came nearly 40 paragraphs into its story on the interview: Trump also repeated his promise to end birthright citizenship on day one of his administration, even though it is a constitutional right granted by the 14th Amendment. ‘We’re going to have to get it changed,’ Trump said. ‘We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.’

As the paper and Trump himself noted, it would technically require a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship, which is perhaps one reason why news coverage downplayed his threat today. But relying on institutions has proven foolish during the Trump era, and there’s ample reason to believe that they wouldn’t pose much of an obstacle this time around, either.

Trump’s promise was immediately backed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, the one-time champion of immigration reform, who said he would also be filing legislation to strip Americans born to immigrants of their citizenship. That little wrinkle did not make any of the news coverage, even though it indicates that the GOP will not stand in the way as Trump tries to replace established American law with his own bigoted whims.

If the assumption is that the Supreme Court will step in to stop Trump, that’s more than a bit shortsighted, considering its decision this past June to give him immunity for crimes he commits while acting in an official capacity. Trump doesn’t actually have to pass through a constitutional amendment so long as loyalists in positions of power are willing to carry out his directives, and now there’s no legal reason for him to accept no for an answer.

So why haven’t we seen anybody make a big deal out of this?

Empty warnings have consequences

One of the most perplexing challenges that Donald Trump poses to his political opponents is that the more that one sounds the alarm about his crimes and demented promises, the less people seem to care about them.

There are a number of reasons for this national nihilism, starting with a pliant Republican Party that refuses to criticize him. They have an enormous media apparatus that oftentimes dictates the public conversation, both in partisan and mainstream political coverage.

Coming in a close second is a Democratic Party that raised billions with hysterics about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies but never actually held him to account. At some point, waiting two years to address Trump’s role in the insurrection and outright refusing to investigate corrupt Supreme Court justices rendered Democrats’ dire warnings pretty meaningless, and they largely lost steam with the media.

Not that they’ve given the media much to work with over the past few weeks. Democrats have been almost entirely silent on the birthright citizenship issue, cowed by the belief that Trump has them beat on immigration. Worse, some of the party’s most prominent leaders are calling for President Biden to pardon him and wipe away his 34 felony convictions.

That’s right: Kamala Harris’s entire campaign was premised on Trump being unfit for office due to his rampant criminality — there was a whole ad campaign around “the prosecutor vs the felon” — yet now Democrats seem eager to not only bury the hatchet, but actually vindicate Trump’s arguments about his prosecutions being politically motivated.

Beyond being stupid and pathetic, granting him such an enormous concession would delegitimize every criticism that Democrats make of Trump going forward. For at least the next two years, public opinion is the only weapon they’re going to have at their disposal, and they’d be preemptively surrendering it with a pardon.

The third reason why there seems to be little attention paid to what Trump is promising is that the political media has surrendered to its worst instincts.

No matter how clearly Americans voted for Trump based on economic concerns, his entire agenda is being treated as popular and thus unimpeachable by many mainstream outlets, which are desperate to retain public trust. There are even bigger problems at outlets like the Los Angeles Times, which is being pushed toward the right at the whim of its billionaire owner, who wants to curry favor with Donald Trump.

So now what? With Democrats conceding ahead of time, the media seemingly sanguine about assaults on human rights and the constitution, and the American public numb to the horrors that Trump is promising, we’re faced with an unprecedented entropy that will likely get much worse before it gets better.

Our best hope is in finding new leaders and forging new kinds of media, because it’s clear that the old guard has failed.

News coverage matters

If you need more convincing that my obsession with how the media covers politics isn’t just a self-regarding journalist thing, a new study offers fresh proof of how vital an independent press is to the survival of democracy.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in U.S. history, but in news deserts – counties lacking a professional source of local news – it was an avalanche. Trump won 91% percent of these counties over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, according to an analysis of voting data by Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project.
While Trump’s national popular-vote margin was just under 1.5%, his margin in news deserts was massive. He won these counties by an average of 54 percentage points. In the few won by Harris, her margin was a comparatively slim 18 points, the analysis shows.

There are 206 counties that qualify as news deserts, and unsurprisingly, most of them are poor, rural, and frequently in red states. Already prone to being culturally conservative, these counties lack news outlets that cover issues that most impact local residents. That leaves them reliant on national organizations that don’t provide relevant information about how policies might impact their communities or their own lives.

In one small Texas news desert county, Trump won by 91%, while his largest vote margin in a news desert county came in the Cincinnati suburb of Boone County, KY, where he won by more than 25,000 votes. In 2022, Gannett shut down four local papers in northern Kentucky, including the Boone Recorder, as part of a larger downsizing after a merger that saw the company take on $1.8 billion in debt in 2018.

If you’ve ever wondered why people in some parts of Michigan and Pennsylvania are more concerned with what’s happening at the southern border than whether manufacturing is going to return to their abandoned factories, you can place at least some of the blame on the dearth of local news. The same goes for why rural people are often more obsessed with crimes in cities that they’ve never visited than with the policies that cause their hospitals to go bankrupt and farms to be destroyed by multinational agricultural corporations.

There are powerful forces shaping the information that we receive, and it’s on us to make sure that we push back when necessary and create our own media infrastructure where possible.

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