(Dobbs) Should We Stop Giving Donald Trump Oxygen?
One can argue that the more we hear about him, the worse he looks.
Plenty of people say that we should stop talking about Donald Trump. Stop talking about him, stop writing about him, stop thinking about him. What they demand is, “Stop giving him oxygen.” As my friend Wayne Feinstein wrote in his own Substack column, “If they ceased to put his crazy claims on the front page… he’d be starved of the ‘oxygen’ he needs to live.”
Maybe so, but for three reasons, I think that’s wrong.
The first one I say as a lifelong journalist: for better or worse, I don’t think the media should arbitrarily ignore a former president of the United States, and especially one who is running for the office again. It would reinforce a bad precedent, pronouncing some serious candidates worthy of attention and some not. In my mind Donald Trump is anything but worthy, but like it or not he is a serious candidate and has serious prospects to win back the White House. What’s more, he still commands the cult-like loyalty of millions of Americans. Ignoring him is ignoring them.
The second reason is, Elon Musk has just lifted the ban that for almost two years now has kept Trump off Twitter.
The ex-president has suggested in the past that even if allowed to tweet again, he might not bother. Let’s just say, I’ll believe it when I see it. At his peak he had 90 million followers. For a man like him, that will be too tempting to pass up. What this means is, if we try to cut off his oxygen, he can make his own.
The final reason is politically pragmatic. If Donald Trump once had the ability to “read the room,” he has lost it. Americans have made it clear that two years of whining without evidence about the “rigged election” that he roundly lost is tiresome at best, dangerous to democracy at worst. Most of the candidates for major office who got on Trump’s bandwagon about the 2020 election lost. The more he lies, the worse he looks.
Here’s proof.
In the latest average of post-election polls compiled by the website FiveThirtyEight, his “favorability” rating still came in at roughly 41%, but his “unfavorability” rating was almost 54%.
What’s more, some one-time enablers are deserting him in droves. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, an old friend of Trump’s and for a short time the leader of his transition team in 2016, said this weekend, “In my view, he’s now a loser. I don’t think there’s a Democrat he can beat because he’s now toxic to suburban voters on a personal level, and he’s earned it.”
Even worse for Trump, reflecting his fall from grace in the Murdoch media empire, the New York Post buried its story about his Tuesday night declaration of candidacy on page 26, with a satirical report worthy of Saturday Night Live.
Bitingly referring to him as “a Florida retiree,” the article said “avid golfer Donald J. Trump kicked things off at Mar-a-Lago, his resort and classified documents library.” The end of the terse five-sentence story said, “He has stated that his qualifications for office include being a ‘stable genius.’ Trump also served as the 45th president.”
That can’t be good for an unquenchable ego like his.
On top of that, when he made his low-energy low-impact announcement and claimed in his list of “achievements” that the tax cut he signed as president had been the “largest” in history, maybe he was counting on the fact that everyone listening wasn’t enough of a policy wonk to know it wasn’t. The reality, according to the Treasury Department, is that as a percentage of the economy, Ronald Reagan’s was history’s biggest. As a raw number adjusted for inflation, Barack Obama’s was.
When he claimed that “the wall was finished,” maybe he figured that everyone listening wouldn’t know that along our 1,900 mile border with Mexico, of the 453 miles of wall that his administration did build, not even 50 miles of it was new.
When he claimed that he has been persecuted over the top-secret documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago when “Obama took a lot of things with him” too, maybe he assumed that most people hadn’t read the National Archives statement affirming that it took possession of every single document from the Obama presidency when he left the White House.
But it was on the price of gas that Trump went off the rails. When he claimed “now it’s sitting five, six, seven and even eight dollars,” it didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was lying. All it took was a trip to your local gas station.
For the record, the national average that day was $3.76 and in California, which consistently has the nation’s highest prices, it was $5.43.
And there’s the price of Thanksgiving turkey too. In his ceaseless campaign to smear the man who beat him two years ago, Trump warned, “Good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. Number one, you won’t get it and if you do, you’re gonna pay three to four times more than you paid last year.” Except you’re not. The Department of Agriculture says the average advertised supermarket price is 97 cents per pound, which is higher than last year but only by 10%, not “three to four times more than you paid last year.” It doesn’t take a genius to see that, either.
Another sign that Donald Trump might be cunning but not always so smart, especially since his first three motivations for almost everything he does are money, money, and money, is that by announcing his candidacy as unconventionally early as he has, he is forsaking any financial help from his own Republican National Committee to pay his legal bills, which are soon to be boundless. That would be considered “in-kind” contributions to the candidate and the party’s “neutrality policy” prohibits it. Doubtless Trump knew that, which underscores the likelihood that he announced anyway in the hope of forestalling Justice Department prosecutions against him.
That isn’t working either.
Friday, a “special counsel” was appointed to oversee the federal investigations of the ex-president: the documents he illegally kept at Mar-a-Lago and the seditious invasion of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Trump embraced martyrdom as he told Fox News, “I have been proven innocent for six years on everything… It is so unfair. It is so political." Yet another lie. He hasn’t “been proven innocent,” he just hasn’t been convicted.
Wednesday night, President Joe Biden underscored the difference between a decent leader and Donald Trump. When the Republican majority in the House of Representatives was secured, Biden publicly congratulated presumptive Speaker Kevin McCarthy. If the shoe were on the other foot, can you even begin to imagine Donald Trump showing that kind of class?
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg, well reasoned as always. And i understand that journalism standards prohibit ignoring a former president. I do wonder, as indictments begin to hit him, will his large loyal following crowd brainlessly accept that these are only the stuff of political witchhunts?
trump is the classic example that sensationalism has magnetism. Any publicity is good publicity.
Roy Cohn did his job well.