Like It Or Not, Trump Still Matters
– By Ed Kociela –
Dog bites man? As we learn in Newswriting 101, that’s not news.
But, man bites dog? Now that’s news because it just doesn’t happen.
The FBI raiding a house isn’t really news. It happens all of the time.
But, the FBI raiding the home of a former president? That is news. Especially when it is part of a criminal investigation.
And that is just one of the reasons why, a couple of years after losing the election, Donald Trump remains in the news cycle.
As much as we hate to admit it, he still matters.
Really, truly, honestly, those of us in the business would like nothing better than to put the former president in our rear-view mirror, a curiosity for future generations to contemplate and ponder. We’ve really had enough. From flood to famine to war, there are a lot of other places to spend our news reporting resources.
But, we cannot. We must persevere and continue the coverage on the former president because, well, as former president, he still has relevance and is newsworthy, especially with his continuing outlandish claims about the election and his attempt to control the Republican Party even though he lost the popular vote not once, but twice.
His past, including two impeachments, his present, including a ton of civil and criminal investigations, and his future, whether clouded by prison time or another run at the White House, makes him part of our continuing awareness.
We get accused of beating a dead horse with continuing Trump coverage, but the thing is this: That horse is still saddled and pawing the turf, ready to run at his master’s whip. The direction may not be clear, but, as the song goes, if you don’t know where you’re going any road will get you there.
He has ridden out some rough seas. He was originally impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress but was saved by Republican senators. He was also impeached for inciting insurrection but the those same senators threw him a second life ring.
Now, however, it is Citizen Trump who is being pursued and he has the law to deal with and not a bunch of GOP senators who heard the shot, smelled the smoke, and saw Trump standing there with a smoking gun willing to look the other way so as not to jeopardize the money and influence his team could send their way. No, this time it is real cops and robbers with missing classified documents at the heart of it all. And, oh, yeah, there is still the matter of charges possibly being leveled in Georgia for his attempts to fish out enough phony votes to give him the state after the last election. So, yes, we are still chin deep in Trump, like it or not, and pinching our collective noses to block the stench.
The nation’s watchdogs, otherwise known as the much-maligned mainstream media, have an obligation to wallow in this mess and continue to kick over the rocks looking for the next lead.
There is precedent, of course.
We can go back to “The Pentagon Papers” and subsequent reporting in The New York Times that revealed how President Lyndon Johnson had “systematically lied, not only to the public, but also to Congress” regarding U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, as reported in ongoing coverage by The New York Times.
That was followed up by a couple of rookie reporters named Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who blew the lid off Washington, D.C. with their reporting on the Watergate break-in. A supportive publisher and hardscrabble editor kept the two reporters pushing forward with their shocking stories for The Washington Post. At the time, the pieces didn’t fit together very well but Bernstein and Woodward kept digging until they found the mother lode, which forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency.
God only knows how long the tangled web of Vietnam would have continued without the coverage in the NYT and, of course, the corruption at the head of the Nixon presidency was effectively cut off as a result of the tenacity of those two young reporters.
There were plenty of reasons why, in both instances, coverage could have been cut. These days, with the insatiable appetite of the rolling news cycles, both stories could easily be kicked to the curb in search of fresh meat. The same goes for the continued investment in reporting on Trump. We do, you know, have a war going on in the Ukraine; Monkey Pox, COVID lingering, and polio rearing its ugly head; and growing environmental concerns that could portend an ecological apocalypse if we don’t get our act together quickly.
Still, The Trump abides.
Meanwhile, those who earnestly parse the news continue to clamp down with the ferocity of a hungry Rottweiler in the belief that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
So, it is not because anybody wants to continue writing about Donald Trump, it is because his behavior and demeanor require good men and good women continue to sound the clarion call to truth.
My biggest fear is that we are a generation away from clearing the air, a generation away from erasing this stain from our culture.
We have succumbed to the violence — verbal and physical — of his one term as a graceless president.
We see chatter now on our social media of executing our Attorney General, Merrick Garland, for having the audacity to enforce the law and conduct a perfectly legal investigation.
We see arms being drawn against each other and the authorities in place to guard the peace.
We are at war with ourselves, culturally, ideologically, morally.
There will be a reckoning, of course, someday, somehow when karma finally catches up to Donald Trump and I guarantee that it will not be pretty.
And, that is why he is still relevant, still in the headlines, still working his way into the nightly news broadcast.
Lord, have mercy.
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