President Donald Trump prepares to sign executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on May 23, 2025. Mandel Ngan /AFP via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Early on in Donald Trump’s first term, a favorite riposte from right-wing accounts on social media to real and perceived cultural excesses from “The Left” was simply: “This is how we got Trump.”
Eight years later, we’re getting another round of this same clever retort, only this time the culprits are not progressive activists, but reporters who covered the Joe Biden White House. Apparently, we collectively conspired with Biden family members and aides to hide his worsening physical and mental condition from America.
It’s an amazing assertion, given that polls in early 2024 found that some 80% of Americans thought that Biden was too old to be president. Focus group participants said they were shocked he was even running again. It turns out that people drew their own conclusions from watching his halting public speeches and videos of his increasingly noticeable old-man’s shuffle.
This conspiracy, clearly, failed miserably pretty much from the get-go.
People who are surprised that the Democratic establishment stuck with Biden as long as it did do not understand presidential campaigns. The single biggest factor that determines an election is whether the candidate is already the sitting president. Incumbency offers tremendous advantages, from fundraising to the imagery of that big, blue-and-white 747 swooping in.
Had Biden announced in late 2022 or early 2023 that he would not run again, those advantages would have instantly evaporated for Democrats. Do people believe that an open field primary season would have produced a candidate who would have beaten Trump?
The great irony is that there absolutely was malfeasance by the media in its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign — not in how it covered the sitting president, but in how it covered the challenger.
Donald Trump assaulted the Constitution he had sworn to defend after he lost reelection in 2020. He invited his followers to Washington long after the votes had been counted, whipped them up into an angry mob and then sicced them on his own vice president and Congress to coerce them into awarding him a second term.
It was the closest America has come to losing our democracy since the first year of the Civil War. Yet within weeks of Jan. 6, 2021, reporters began making the trek to Mar-a-Lago to interview him and somehow managed to file stories that elided the day entirely. I recall listening to a podcast interview with one who was asked how Trump had explained his behavior on Jan. 6, and the reporter replied that the topic had not come up.
I was and remain dumbfounded by that.
As a young reporter, I used to cover criminals full time. The idea of agreeing to a jailhouse interview of a suspect with the understanding that I would not detail the charges against him in the story never would have occurred to me. Even if it had, my editors never would have tolerated such an arrangement.
And yet by late spring 2022, that is precisely what started happening. The political press corps began normalizing the hell out of Donald Trump. They downplayed or flat-out ignored the fundamental violence he had committed against our democracy in their coverage in return for the possibility of an interview or even just anonymous quotes from top advisers.
(Because, really, what kind of reporter are you if can’t publish a few hours ahead of time whether Trump is going to call Gov. Ron DeSantis “Meatball Ron” or “Fat Ron” in his rally speech?)
Just as one example: Trump, unlike every other modern presidential nominee, refused to take a traveling press pool with him. Instead, he and his staff handpicked reporters for each trip. You can probably guess which reporters were invited and which ones weren’t.
There was an implicit understanding that access to the Republican nominee meant you would not portray him as a fundamental, proven threat to American democracy. Which, of course, he was back then, and which he continues to prove himself to be now on a near-daily basis.
I don’t mean to overstate the importance of the media’s role in Trump’s return. With the exponential growth of niche news outlets, a great number of them little more than propaganda shops bankrolled by one anti-democratic billionaire or another, it is easy for those so inclined to choose information sources guaranteed not to upset their existing worldviews.
That said, repetition across a broad swath of the media matters. If reminders of Trump’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6 had been repeated as frequently as, say, Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email server, who knows what might have happened. A non coup-attempting, pro-democracy nominee could well have emerged from the Republican primary.
In the end, though, in a market economy, the customer is always right. And here, the customer was the voter who watched Jan. 6 unfold live on television, watched as Trump’s mob attacked police officers in his name, watched as prosecutors laid out a case for why what he did broke the law and then decided that all of that was less bad than Biden’s inability to control grocery prices.
The sad truth is that had inflation come back down close to 3% in late 2022, rather than in mid-2023, Joe Biden would likely be in his second term right now. For all the Sturm und Drang about his mental deterioration, he managed to pull the country out of a pandemic and, along with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, avoided a recession, delivering a solid economy with low unemployment and decent growth. He brought massive, long-needed investments in high-tech industry and low-tech roads and bridges. He pulled NATO together to stand against the most egregious war of conquest since 1939. Apart from the Afghanistan withdrawal, which actually happened before this deterioration, what bad decisions did he make because of his age?
While it’s absolutely correct that he had become terrible at the public performance part of the job — although he was never really good at that — there seems to be little evidence that his age affected his ability to analyze facts and make sound choices.
But inflation didn’t come down soon enough, and now we have a president who is almost as old as Biden, but with the temperament of a toddler and the mores of an 11-year-old boy from the “Lord of the Flies” island.
The political media’s efforts to normalize him notwithstanding, it was plain from all of Trump’s open talk about revenge and his vows to grab extra-constitutional power that America was risking a slide into autocracy if voters returned him to the White House.
An even sadder truth is that, faced with a choice between democracy and the promise of cheaper Doritos, America went with the Doritos.
We were never going to get the latter, and, as is becoming clearer by the day, we’ll be lucky to get through this with some semblance of the former.
