No Surprises

While it might be true that “Trump’s own version of reality continues to confound political actors and observers,” the people who support Mr. Trump are not at all confounded.

NPR’s Senior Editor and Correspondent for the Washington Desk, Ron Elving, notes that it may not have been surprising that Donald Trump referred to the possibility of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris as a “third debate.” The former President was simply counting his debate with President Biden in the list. But then Mr. Elving goes on to say: “But what was surprising was Trump’s claim to having won both debates.”

No professional journalist has any business still being surprised by Donald Trump continuing to privilege the worldview of his voter base over factual accuracy. It’s been more than a decade now. When Donald Trump says that “the polls” say that he won:

In fact, the only polls where Trump won were online polls of self-selected website samples rather than the randomized scientific samples actual pollsters use.

In other words, places where Mr. Trump’s supporters, people who would likely think that he’d clearly won both debates, could go and signal their beliefs and support for their candidate. And in return, Mr. Trump did as he always does; he tells them they’re right. This is his standard operating procedure, and he has yet to deviate from it. There should be no surprises here.

Donald Trump talks about things in a manner than mirrors how the voters he is appealing to think about things. Mr. Elving can say that economic growth was better under Presidents Reagan and Clinton. But the 1980s and 1990s are effectively ancient history at this point. I’m middle-aged now, and I wasn’t old enough to vote in either election that Ronald Reagan won. And for many of the young men who have moved to the political Right in recent years, Bill Clinton isn’t functionally much different from George Washington: someone who was President before they cared about politics. For many of Mr. Trump’s supporters, the economy under him was the best they’d experienced in their adult memory. It may not have been “the best economy” ever, but it’s likely the best of the ones they care about. And they don’t make a distinction between those.

What’s so difficult to understand about this, that “mainstream” journalism can’t seem to accept the truth of it?

When Vice Presidential candidate Sen. Vance says, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he’s not admitting to finding joy in falsehood. He’s saying that Trump/Vance voters believe that things are terrible, that they’re being ignored by a media that’s actively hostile to them and this is what it takes for their concerns to be covered.

Even Elon Musk’s comment on X that: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” plays into this, aligning with the Trump base’s suspicion that people with weapons managing to come within a few hundred yards of the former President is indicative of an “élite” plot to kill him, and thus strip his supporters of their champion. The Establishment, on the other hand, retains adequate protections.

Mr. Elving, National Public Radio and a good chunk of the “media establishment” seem to be almost willfully avoiding understanding that Donald Trump is not the disease; he is a symptom. “Political polarization” is not a thing unto itself. It’s being driven by a lack of social trust in the United States, and that is creating divisions in what various groups of voters understand is true about the world around them. National Public Radio’s listenership leans Liberal/Progressive. Accordingly, they have a worldview that is entirely different from, and suspicious of, that held by the Conservative/Reactionary voters who support Donald Trump. And the feeling is mutual. The electorate is no longer one large undifferentiated mass of people who have the same baseline understanding of reality and that expects anyone who speaks to them to adhere to that baseline.

When Mr. Elving notes that:

This entails also the sea change over the use of the three-letter word we were trained as journalists to avoid: lie. We might say a politician was misstating facts or making inaccurate claims. But we could never make the leap of imputing motive.

... he misses the fact that many members of the public have been imputing motives to the media for years, if not decades. The idea that “the media” lies, because it wants to advance its own interests and/or the interests of whatever shadowy cabal people might believe is actually in charge is well entrenched in American society.

When voters take clearly false or openly fabricated statements by Donald Trump or Senator Vance “seriously, but not literally” it’s because they view them as, if not necessarily accurate, necessary correctives to the open falsehoods that they believe are consistently perpetrated by people in “the media.” I understand that whenever National Public Radio airs a story on Latin American migrants in the United States, it’s going to be a sympathetic piece, highlighting the dire conditions the migrants left behind and their hopes and dreams for their lives in the United States. However, for the person who sees economic migrants, who they believe are only interested in enriching themselves, as undercutting them on wages and thus condemning them to unemployment or worse underemployment than they’re already experiencing, that picture is false and its goal is to ingratiate the political Left to people who they feel shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

Mr. Elving’s inability to understand the change in the people the message is being delivered to leaves him with no choice but to focus on the message and the messenger. And to wonder why they don’t conform to his expectations.