The media ignores the warnings
Republicans have lost the popular vote for president in every election but one in the past 30 years and they appear headed to lose once again, by well more than the 2.9 million votes they lost by last time.
“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump tweeted on Oct. 7, followed later with the all-caps demand:
“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!”
Trump never spelled out the alleged scandal/plot or the person being asked to act. But that very lack of specificity, together with the sweeping, grandiose claim of unprecedented evil, are hallmarks of how autocratic leaders seek to grab absolute power for themselves — justifying the elimination of all rivals. His outburst should have set off alarm bells across the political spectrum. Instead, it barely caused a ripple.
Beyond being inattentive, the media is routinely pernicious: It amplifies Trump’s efforts to undermine our democracy. A recent report from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society found that Trump was the primary driver of disinformation about alleged “voter fraud,” via elite media coverage. The methodology was “an elite-driven, mass-media led process,” the report noted, driven by Trump’s tweets, press briefings and interviews amplified via media coverage.
“Social media played only a secondary and supportive role,” the report stated.
In all, the study analyzed more than 55,000 online stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 public Facebook posts. The only peak in activity not personally driven by Trump came in response to the exposure of his administration’s interference with the U.S. Postal Service. Three media practices helped to spread the misinformation, according to the report: “elite institutional focus (if the president says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side.”
More precisely, the report explained:
[Trump] uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice [balance] to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation.
Thus, the media have played a key role in helping to spread Trump’s disinformation, attacking the legitimacy of our elections — and doing so in the specific form that Trump himself has chosen to maximally hurt his opposition. If enough mail-in votes can be suppressed — particularly in Pennsylvania — Trump will have a path to re-“election,” especially with the help of the courts that he’s been stacking with his appointees.
There are some who recognize the depths of what’s at stake, which is why three giants of science publishing — Nature, Scientific American and the New England Journal of Medicine — have made the first presidential endorsements of their histories, stretching back to the 19th century. And, while other institutions have wobbled, specific individuals have nonetheless stood out. Thus, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s recent attacks on infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and 60 Minutes interviewer Leslie Stahl made perfect sense:
They are the figures he perceives to be standing in the way of his effort to conduct this campaign in an entirely invented universe that he’d hoped to manufacture for this very purpose.
But other institutions are flailing badly in defense of reality, despite the clarity of evidence of what’s going on, and the potential dangers that loom.
“The producers of news aren’t capable of dealing with Trump within their present rules and formulas,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen told Vox recently. “There’s no emergency switch. … You would have to, for example, tear apart the Sunday shows and start again with different premises. And, there’s no appetite for that.”
Most in the media have long been reluctant to call Trump a liar, which amounts to complicity with him, in helping to obscure the truth of what’s going on in our country. This obscures both what he’s lying about, and why he’s doing it, as well as what should guide us in responding to him.
Ignoring Psychologists’ Warnings
Psychologists and psychiatrists have long warned about Trump — his pathological lying, and a host of other troubling traits reflecting narcissism, sadism, psychopathy and more — but the media have never taken their warnings to heart, never stopped treating him as if their observations and analyses were irrelevant.
Yet, their input can be invaluable. For example, Ian Hughes, author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy, shed light on the dynamics Sargent touched on above.
“Imposing their pathological worldview onto the world is what individuals with dangerous disorders do,” Hughes told Random Lengths News. “Doing so is not a conscious choice; it is a consequence of the fact that individuals with these disorders live in an internal ‘reality’ that is shaped by their disorder.”
“He reacts with anger at anyone who dares challenge his superiority — whether that is female journalists or scientific experts,” said Hughes about Trump’s sense of superiority. “He lives in a world of his own making in which he must control others or take them down before they harm him.”
Trump’s refusal to take the coronavirus seriously has resulted in more than a hundred thousand excess deaths. That’s typical of the dynamic Hughes went on to describe:
By acting out this worldview in their minute-by-minute relationships with everyone around them, pathological individuals make this internal world an external reality. People either agree with them, stick around and reinforce their pathological views, or disagree with them, refuse to associate with them and become enemies to be destroyed.
This is exactly what has happened with COVID-19.
The media has generally failed to realize how experts like Hughes can help make sense of Trump’s actions for their audiences. But that’s as foolish, in its own way, as Trump’s refusal to listen to and learn from Dr. Fauci. Like Fauci, they can help us grasp things we already experience, but don’t know how to make sense of.
A paper published in spring showed that ordinary Americans — Trump supporters and conservatives as well as liberals — perceive the same sets of Trump’s psychologically dangerous traits that experts have been warning against.
“We found that, on average, those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Clinton did not have wildly different views of Trump’s personality,” the lead author Jacob Fiala told PsyPost. “Both groups saw him as particularly sadistic and narcissistic, and even though the two groups disagreed about how prominently he displayed these traits, his own supporters still judged him to be more sadistic and narcissistic than 90% of people.”
This didn’t surprise Hughes.
“In the context of an extremely divided society, even majorities can believe that choosing leaders with traits that correspond to the clinical diagnosis of psychopath or malignant narcissist is the smart thing to do,” he said.
But if that’s what they’re choosing, it should be a central matter of debate.
Attacks On Democracy Also Ignored
Similarly — though not so completely — the media has also done a poor job of describing Trump’s multifaceted attacks on American democracy. In September, the Washington Post ran a story, The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn. And, while it wasn’t the first such story, there’s no spillover into changing day-to-day reporting on what Trump is doing, despite widespread agreement amongst political scientists, such as the V-Dem project, involving 2,800 national experts around the world.
We’re now in a “third wave” of autocratization, they tell us. The first two waves, from 1926 to 1942 and from 1961 to 1977, were characterized by sudden events, such as military coups, but the third wave, starting in 1994, is characterized by gradual erosion (at least initially) most often driven by elected leaders like Trump, who undermine democratic norms and institutions to remain in power.
“Once in power, the ambitious autocrats work to change constitutions, undermine independent electoral authority (domestic and international), weaken the opposition, besiege civil society and persecute critical media,” Armando Chaguaceda, a V-Dem national expert, explained in 2019. And V-Dem’s 2020 report noted that “The United States of America is the only country in Western Europe and North America suffering from substantial autocratization.”
This is where America stands today, less than a week from Election Day, with a very real chance of significant democratic erosion, depending on what kinds of results come in where, and how, and when — and how other actors respond to Trump’s continued efforts to undermine our democracy.
Trump’s tax cut is his sole piece of major legislation, vastly overshadowed by the volume of judges he’s appointed, aided by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s practice of sabotaging almost all of Barack Obama’s nominations in the last two years of his term. While intended most broadly to win support from the GOP establishment as well as the base, Trump has also made it clear he expects “his” judges to protect him — up to and including the Supreme Court, where his latest nominee was confirmed at record speed. And so far, that’s exactly what they’ve done.
On Oct. 19, the Supreme Court declined to overturn a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling to allow late-arriving ballots to be counted up to three days after election day. But with Amy Coney Barrett on the court, that could easily be reversed, and one theory being argued could allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to simply ignore the popular vote and send their own slate of electors to the Electoral College.
Even more arcane power-grab scenarios are possible — predicated only on the willingness of GOP enablers to carry out Trump’s wishes. In a suddenly tightening re-election race, Texas Sen. John Cornyn has let slip a few modestly Trump-critical comments. The GOP could also lose two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia and one each in South Carolina and Mississippi, which they once assumed were all safe — signs that an epochal power-shift may be underway. Joe Biden could conceivably win Texas and Georgia as well, effectively outflanking Trump’s threatened Pennsylvania shenanigans.
There are too many possibilities to specifically discuss, but there’s a common thread: Trump’s instinct to stay in power no matter what will diverge from the perceived interests of long-term power-players like McConnell to a greater or lesser degree. And here, again, a combination of psychological and political science frameworks can help illuminate what may come.