Keep up blanket coverage of Trump. It hurts him.
Some soul searching is taking place in newsrooms across the country these days over whether the mainstream media should be covering President Donald Trump’s every tweet and rally. My answer: Absolutely! It’s the right thing to do professionally, and, as last week’s election results indicated, it’s the right thing to do politically if you want to see a check on Trump’s power.
It appears the lying, bullying and unpresidential behaviors that Trump exhibits in his rallies and tweets — which we so incessantly cover — is turning off the moderate, best-educated Republicans and suburban women that Trump will need to hold the House’s GOP majority, let alone get re-elected.
So bring on the coverage. America’s unemployment rate is 3.9 percent, inflation is moderate, the stock market keeps setting records, and the president is coming off a crisis-defusing summit. And yet, the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump having a personal approval rating of only 43 percent, with 53 percent disapproving of his performance. And in a special election in Ohio held last Tuesday, the GOP House candidate — whom Trump and the entire Republican establishment went to bat for — is barely ahead of his Democratic rival in a district that has not sent a Democrat to Congress in more than three decades.
That does not speak well for Trump or his midterm prospects, but it does for the American people and for thinking Republicans. It turns out there are still Republicans who have not sold their souls to Trump the way virtually every one of their representatives in Washington has done.
It turns out that there are thinking Republicans for whom character, decency and truth-telling still matter in a president. There are thinking Republicans who have watched Trump’s twitter rants, his disturbed performance at Helsinki and the bile that he emits at his rallies — and the blind, ecstatic response of his core base — and found them unnerving and unworthy of their support.
Imagine how well
Trump would be doing if he weren’t Trump — if he weren’t such a lying jerk. But that is exactly what he is. So bring on the coverage.
The dominant political fact of Trump’s first 18 months in office is that despite some good economic trends in the country, the president has not been able to widen his coalition beyond his core 40 percent to 45 percent. It is partly because he has not tried. But it is also because the very applause lines and abusive and divisive behaviors that appeal to his base turn off more-moderate and more-educated suburban Republicans.
I want every American to hear of Trump’s tweet that CNN’s anchor Don Lemon, who is African-American, was “the dumbest man on television” and that Lemon made LeBron James “look smart, which isn’t easy to do.” Lemon was interviewing James about a school he had opened for underprivileged children.
I want every Republican running for office to hear Trump’s bullying, when he warned that he destroys any GOP politician who dares to defy him, saying, “I only destroy their career because they said bad things about me and you fight back and they go down the tubes — and that’s OK.”
I want all of this heard and spread from sea to shining sea. Because though these words do rally Trump’s base, they also rally Democrats and evidently embarrass Republican moderates and alienate independents.