Trump’s scandals ‘priced in’ by media, warns Guardian columnist

Donald Trump’s social media posts are erratic. He appears to fall asleep during meetings. He has stated he is not considering Americans’ personal finances “even a little bit” in negotiations with Iran. He repeatedly lies about the purported success of the Iran war he initiated without justification.

These are just some elements of Trump’s second term, which critics describe as disastrous. They cite damage to the Kennedy Center, construction of a ballroom or bunker replacing the White House East Wing, and Supreme Court rulings that undermined voting rights for Black Americans. Ongoing self-dealing and misuse of the Justice Department’s mandate have also been noted.

Yet mainstream media outlets do not provide sustained coverage of these issues.

The shocking excesses and corruption of Trump’s second term are being treated as “priced in.”

These outrages are largely framed as Trump being Trump.

It is as if much of big media has decided it is too burdensome to focus consistently on developments that would have generated weeks of headlines—or even impeachment and conviction—in the pre-Trump era, and certainly during the Biden administration.

“I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79-year-old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all,” observer Jamesetta Williams wrote on X.

Next month, Trump turns 80. He functions with no apparent restraints, and it seems doubtful the situation will improve soon.

Some extreme outrages do surface, prompting mild reactions.

The New York Times recently gave its lead print news position to Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” of $1.8bn. The fund is intended to use taxpayer money to compensate his allies—potentially including January 6 rioters who attacked police officers—for being prosecuted by an earlier iteration of the Justice Department.

Reporters quoted Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog organization, calling it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.” A sub-headline made a carefully distanced reference to “critics” who call this a slush fund.

Ah, the critics. There they are again.

Mainstream media largely shrugged off the slush-fund story, depicting it as politics as usual—no cause for alarm or sustained coverage. NBC’s evening newscast by Wednesday had moved on, focusing instead on Raúl Castro’s indictment, California wildfires and a car explosion in lower Manhattan. Fox News offered cursory coverage, giving an obligatory nod to Democratic lawmakers’ objections but mostly handing the microphone to Trump allies such as JD Vance and loyalist acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Granted, a few recent pieces have addressed Trump’s apparent physical and mental decline, including one by Jonathan Lemire in the Atlantic. He acknowledged Trump has not faced the same scrutiny for age-related decline as Biden did, and pointed to “questions about his health and increasingly erratic behavior.”

But that coverage received little attention, as is typical.

One problem is the sheer volume of outrages.

Journalists gear up to cover one scandal—$1bn for ballroom security—when another emerges: $1.8bn for the slush fund.

Now Trump dismisses Americans’ worries about their family budgets, but that fades as he schmoozes the next authoritarian dictator or threatens a “friendly takeover of Cuba.”

“Flood the zone with shit,” former Trump aide Steve Bannon once described the media strategy. It has proven highly effective.

Overwhelmed citizens can hardly be blamed for wanting to hide their heads in the sand, despite the extraordinary dangers of doing so.

Corporate news media remain highly distractible and largely deferential. They are also not unhappy because Trump provides constant outrage, which generates news, and then he moves on.

Often, independent voices—not associated with corporate media—state the obvious, loud and clear.

Terry Moran, formerly of ABC News and now on Substack, called the slush fund “plunder” in a recent post and urged mainstream media to stop using “weasel words” like unusual or controversial. He called a related development—shielding the Trump family’s entire tax history from scrutiny for all time—”breathtakingly corrupt.”

That language is absent from evening news and mainstream media.

By the time you read this, they will have moved on.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture.