Donald Trump’s Tirades Barely Make a Blip

Donald Trump is poised to win the Republican nomination. If the polls are right, though they often aren’t, he’ll handily win Iowa and New Hampshire, at which point there will likely be very little chance of any non-Trump candidate slowing him down (not that they put up much of a fight to begin with). He’s also racking up endorsements, with prominent Republicans, including representatives Tom Emmer and Steve Scalise and Senator Tom Cotton, throwing him their support this week. And if you believe the polls pitting Trump against Joe Biden—I, for one, am skeptical—then the quadruply indicted former president is positioned to return to the White House.

Around this time last year, I argued that someone who tried to overturn the 2020 election shouldn’t be covered like a “normal” 2024 candidate, and yet, even four criminal indictments later, it feels like he is being treated that way. Whereas Trump enjoyed $ 2 billion worth of free media to dominate the news cycle during his 2016 run, these days he rarely sits down with mainstream outlets and opens himself up to scrutiny. His autocratic plans and extremist rants, while garnering some headlines, seem to quickly be forgotten amid the latest polls. Given that Trump and his allies have already told us that he plans to target the news media, whether “criminally or civilly,” it’s worth pausing and considering whether we’re adequately covering his unhinged behavior.

Take Trump’s holiday tirade, for example. On Christmas Eve, Trump accused “JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH,” the DOJ special counsel investigating election subversion, of “COMING AFTER ME, AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY”; he called the January 6 committee “POLITICAL HACKS & THUGS.” On New Year’s Day, Trump accused former January 6 committee vice chair Liz Cheney of having “ILLEGALLY DELETE[D] & DESTROY[ED]” evidence that could have been used in his legal defense, while pushing the long-debunked claim that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” turned down his request for 10,000 soldiers to go to the Capitol. Smith’s request for a ruling on whether Trump is immune from federal prosecution, he said, “is now completely compromised and should be thrown out and terminated, JUST LIKE THE RADICAL LEFT LUNATICS DID TO THE EVIDENCE!”

Close your eyes and imagine Joe Biden had written something like that. You can’t, of course, because Biden isn’t fundamentally unhinged. Yet Biden got beat up during the same period for saying that he’d been eating a lot of chicken parm while neglecting to mention his consumption of ice cream. The fact that Biden “forgot” he’d also recently eaten ice cream, and had to be nudged by Jill Biden during an interview with Rockin’ Eve host Ryan Seacrest, reached tan-suit levels of outrage on the right. The clip was boosted by the RNC’s rapid response team and picked up by conservative mainstream outlets like the Daily Wire, the New York Post, Radar Online, the Toronto Sun, and Sky News Australia. While Trump, 77, has his share of verbal slipups, Biden not immediately mentioning ice cream plays into the narrative, fueled in part by the media, that the 81-year-old president isn’t mentally up to the job of being president.

Meanwhile, Trump’s free to muse about “Crazy Nancy Pelosi turning down 10,000 soldiers” on Truth Social, a platform most Americans aren’t paying attention to. (Trump has about 6.5 million followers.) During Trump’s 2016 campaign, and the four years of his presidency that followed, his tweets generated entire news cycles. Journalists would follow a Republican politician down the hallways of Congress, begging him or her to weigh in on the latest tweet. Republican politicians pretending they didn’t see a tweet became such a common occurrence that journalists started printing out the tweets in order to question said members of Congress. “I didn’t see the tweet” was shorthand for Republicans refusing to confront Trump’s basest nature.

Trump doesn’t tweet anymore. His account was “permanently suspended” after the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” He was later allowed back by far-right favorite Elon Musk, but has not heeded that siren’s song—at least not yet. Besides, Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore; it’s X, a weird, abandoned mall in New Jersey. 

Yes, developments in Trump’s legal cases grab headlines (while raising major constitutional issues), but the former president seems to keep skating by; according to the polls, he’s thriving. The MAGA faithful have surely seen his mad rants, but persuadable voters, who aren’t plugged into Truth Social or far-right media, could’ve missed them given the relative lack of mainstream attention. Journalists may no longer be shocked or even surprised by Trump’s words and actions, but it’s no time to ignore them.

Maybe Trump benefits from the last eight-plus years of lowering the bar—his history of tweeting incendiary things, making racist remarks, and lying incessantly about the last election has perhaps made him essentially immune from accountability, and so nothing sticks. In 2016, Trump rode the outrage news cycle to victory, and now, two elections later, his abhorrent views and wannabe dictator behavior barely make a blip on the media radar. Will such “business as usual” coverage lull less plugged-in voters into thinking that Trump is behaving like a conventional candidate and would, somehow, act like a “normal” president?