Donald Trump has a knack for grabbing the spotlight. Even when it casts him in a bad light. He just never goes away. For his supporters, that’s a godsend. For the rest of us— and that means most of us— it’s like a plague.
But that’s what Trump’s good at, spreading a plague and sucking the oxygen out of the room. That’s why his social media post last weekend that he would be arrested on Tuesday— although totally inaccurate like most every word the man mutters— became the political story of the week. As Dan Rather put it in his own commentary yesterday here on Substack, Trump has “immense gravitational pull.” More’s the pity.
But it’s a fact, and because of that, although plenty of Americans say, “Just ignore the man,” he cannot be ignored. I’d even take it a step further: he should not be ignored.
Here’s why. For starters, the man has millions of minions in his movement. You can find a story in the news every day of the week about movements of thousands of people or even just hundreds who are trying to change society. This man has millions who stand ready to love, honor, and obey him, and change society more to his liking. By definition, that alone, however perilous to the nation, makes the man newsworthy.
Second, we cannot ignore him just because he’s a bad man, even a dangerous man. Vladimir Putin is a bad and dangerous man too. He has waged an illegal and immoral war. His missiles relentlessly strike a sovereign neighbor nation. But we don’t ignore him. Donald Trump has waged war against American democracy. He fires missives, not missiles, but it is in the interests of the American people to understand where his missives strike next.
And third, whether it’s a disgrace to democracy or not, the man is a candidate for the presidency of the United States. Forget the fact that he faces criminal indictments not just in New York but also in Atlanta and Washington DC. Forget the fact that he was impeached twice and it was only because members of his own party in the Senate had no spine for his vengeance that he wasn’t removed from office. Those might speak to his low character but they don’t change the fact that he still is a front runner for his party’s nomination next year. One could find reasons to ignore other presidential candidates too because their behavior is repellent, but that only raises the question, where do you draw the line?
Which raises the bigger question: at what point would we ignore a public figure like Trump?
In yesterday’s commentary, Rather asked three questions of his own about coverage of Donald Trump:
— How do you find the Goldilocks approach to coverage? Not too much, not too little, but just right?
— How do you bear witness to the outrages and injustices without allowing him to suck the oxygen out of everything else to which we should be paying attention?
— What is the tradeoff between reporting and amplifying?
Obviously the answer to the first question is subjective. Some would say that any coverage is too much, some that anything less than complete coverage is too little. To the second question, there is an obvious answer: cover Trump, but not onlyTrump. And third, from where I sit, reporting on any story amplifies it. It’s the nature of the beast. Journalists make decisions in newsrooms every day about what to cover and what not. When a former and now potentially future president speaks, for better or for worse, his words are important to some segment of the population. When newsrooms start making decisions based on who’s listening and why, let alone on whether a newsmaker is saintly or evil, they are taking us down a road we don’t want to travel.
Anyway, as it turns out, even the inordinate attention given to Trump’s pronouncement of a forthcoming arrest had what you could characterize as a positive outcome, positive because despite his call to his crusaders to “Protest, take our nation back,” they didn’t. Outside the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday, there were more reporters than protestors.
That said, this former president of the United States probably will be arrested, and probably soon. Too many signs point in that direction to write off as rumor. He will, of course, use that to his advantage, and when you realize that his two biggest fund-raising days ever followed on the heels of the FBI’s search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, you realize that while he has lost some supporters ever since January 6th, the most zealous still stick to him like glue. They are a force we dare not ignore.
The more we know about them, the more we know about him, the better off we are.
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.
Like all cult leaders DT has physiological control over his acolytes who are weak people who are unable to think for themselves. Therefore, they look to their leader for knowledge and truth. DT is in effect a black hole. Followers drawn into his lies cannot escape. They fear that they may lose their tenuous hold on their own reality based on his falsehoods. They are blinded to any view that may conflict with indoctrinated truths and prejudices.
Sure, Donald may get a boost in contributions when he is charged, but he should never get a "get out of jail Free card. He should be prosecuted for all of his offenses and taken to task for flaunting his contempt for the laws of the land. It should be remembered, he is just a criminal.
I argue that we know plenty about him, it’s his minions that don’t…or don’t WANT to know the truth; or worse, know the truth and don’t care and are all in with the evil.
Reporting on him does nothing to change anyone’s mind. People are either all in for him no matter what, or despise him because we understand who and what he is. Giving him air time/oxygen is exactly what he wants. I feel it hurts him to ignore his antics. He craves attention even if it’s negative. Starve him of it.