Well, let’s give credit where due. The media is at least startled; they are struck. But these actions are not mere "departures"—a term that suggests a slight change of frame; unorthodox maneuvers that are nevertheless within the parameters of acceptable. Behind the sugarcoating are offenses that can be related in plain English, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. Here at TNR, for example, Matt Ford’s piece about how Trump’s military payroll gambit was a baldly illegal seizure of power got this headline: "Trump’s Military Payroll Gambit Is a Baldly Illegal Seizure of Power." See, folks, it can be done.
Suffice it to say, avid readers of political news should be on their guard for other things Trump does that get labeled as "departures" or otherwise presented in a more anodyne frame. Just as TNR’s Tim Noah instructed that any time the media refers to someone as "fiery" what they really mean to say is "bugfuck nuts," any time you see the word "departure" invoked, they are referring to a crime. And Trump’s crimes, in particular! I’m not sure you’ll see a bank robber assessed as having made "a startling departure from traditional cash withdrawals."
It’s been something of a bleak period, watching the press make startling departures from telling the straight story about the Trump administration. TNR contributor Parker Molloy noted that, after Trump responded to the No Kings protest with an AI-generated video depicting him dumping gallons of shit on the protests from a fighter plane, the media was at great pains to sand off the edges of the story. There was a time when even the perception of this kind of antipathy toward ordinary citizens—say, when you label them as "deplorable"?—would invite the fury of the media. (Heck, there was a time when the political media launched a fatwa against Howard Dean for shouting at his own rally.) But this never became much of a scandal—though I will concede that Democrats could have done a better job pushing the issue.
And as we learned this week, pushing the issue can work wonders. Steve Bannon, as is his wont, seeded the media pasture with his announcement that there is a "plan" in place to run Trump for a third term. From there, an entire news cycle blossomed, one in which reporters peppered Trump with questions about his plan to run again, all of which he sidestepped—and so those same reporters told their readers that he is not ruling it out. Perhaps my favorite piece from this "Will Trump do a new crime?" boomlet was a Time magazine piece titled "Why Trump Keeps Talking About a Third Term" that suggested, "Whether Trump actually plans to run again for President, in defiance of the Constitution, merely bringing up the possibility so much, some observers say, may be strategic in its own right."
The one problem with that contention is that Trump wasn’t bringing it up—a bunch of reporters were, and in so doing turned what should have been a confrontation ("Why do your allies keep saying you plan to abrogate the Constitution?") into a jocular spitball session where they help Trump go over his options. (We are reliably informed that the president finds the maneuver where he runs as vice president "too cute.") Trump, for once, seemed to understand what game was afoot. "Am I not ruling it out?" he responded to one inquiry, "I mean, you’ll have to tell me." And so they did, in the pages of their publications.
If you’re wondering what is causing the media to fall down on the job in this manner, and infect coverage of a constitutional crime wave with limp euphemisms, I think it’s very much akin to the reason Democratic senators keep voting for Trump’s judicial appointments: It’s an act of desperation; a frantic need to suggest that our democratic institutions are still in proper working order and the duly elected president isn’t guiding the ship of state into tyranny. For if the members of the fourth estate were ever forced to report the truth of what’s happening, they would also have to confront how their own neglect helped pave this path. Based on the number of "startling departures" that are piling up, I reckon that day will come soon enough.
