Even when Trump tells the truth — miracles can happen! — the press doesn’t know what to do.
A number of media critics have cataloged the problems faced by the press in the age of Trump. I’ve been especially impressed with the insights of NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen (PressThink) and Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (you can follow them on Twitter at @jayrosen_nyu and @sulliview, respectively); they often put words to issues that are rattling, unclear and unfocused, in the back of my mind.
I don’t count myself in their league, but I have been frustrated by a couple things that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere.
I wrote about one already: the problem of anthropomorphizing Trump — that is, ascribing intelligible human motivation to his actions, reactions, announcements, tweets, etc., when in fact he’s a black box; we have no idea what thinking leads to the things he says or does.
But recently I’ve noticed another issue. For some reason, the press seems to think there is value in identifying when Trump reverses a position, claiming that he has somehow “admitted” something that he had previously denied — a kind of mild “gotcha” journalism, perhaps arising out of the journalistic desire to hold power accountable.
I’ve seen this for some time now, but it took on an almost frenzied scale in post-impeachment coverage of Ukraine. Google “trump admits” and (at least, as I write this) most of the first page offers some version of “Trump admits sending Guiliani to Ukraine”:
- Trump contradicts past denials, admits sending Giuliani to Ukraine (CNN)
- 8 days after his acquittal, Trump openly admitted sending Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Joe Biden — reversing a key part of his impeachment defense (Business Insider)
- Trump just comes out and admits to entire Ukraine scam (Vanity Fair)
- Trump Admits He Sent Rudy Giuliani To Ukraine After Denying It (HuffPost)
- Trump Admits to Sending Guiliani to Ukraine, Despite Past Denials (New York Magazine Intelligencer)
- Despite past denials, Trump now admits he sent Giuliani to Ukraine (Mercury News)
Those are all from just the first page of Google results. There are links to articles about a few other things that he “admitted,” but most hits focus on the Ukraine/Giuliani story.
Here’s the problem: Trump is willing to say just anything (a lot of just anything), and there is no necessary connection between what he says and the truth. And since we can’t really say why he says any particular thing (that would be anthropomorphism), we can’t assume that he knows or cares when he is telling the truth. I mean, if he says just anything often enough, he’s bound to say something true sooner or later.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
In fact, in this particular instance, Trump’s “admission” was a response to an interview question from Geraldo Rivera:
Was it strange to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine, your personal lawyer? Are you sorry you did that?
From everything we know about Trump, is there any way at all that his answer — “No, not at all” — could have been any different?
As far as I’m concerned, this “truth,” this “admission,” is sheer accident.
And that’s my issue with the “Trump admits [fill in the blank]” narrative. Trump never admits anything, even if he happens to tell the truth. Admitting requires acknowledgement. To admit something is to say, literally or in effect, “I know I said something else before, but what I’m saying now replaces that.” But Trump never does that. Each utterance exists in its own moment. He acknowledges no past that would need to be overturned.
The press struggles because — as with so much involving Trump and his enablers — journalists have never encountered anything like this, at least not at this scale (16,000+ false and misleading claims, and counting, as of January). Yet they try make sense of it, either through anthropomorphism, or by stringing together his utterances as if there is a meaningful relationship among them.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the ability to get away with saying just anything is a huge advantage. This is especially true when dealing with the press. Professionally and structurally, journalists are trained to present a story — a narrative of connected and coherent events. But Trump offers only discontinuity.
The two just don’t mix.