Call it the banality of chaos. Here is a checklist of Donald Trump’s recent activity. He promised on day one of his presidency to let January 6 convicts out of jail, close the US-Mexico border and “drill baby drill” for gas and oil. He feted Viktor Orbán in Mar-a-Lago as the best leader in the world and assured Hungary’s strongman that he would not “give a penny” to Ukraine. He took out a $91.6mn surety bond to pay defamation damages to his sexual assault victim, E Jean Carroll.
He purged the Republican National Committee with 60 staff firings — the opening move by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who he handpicked as RNC co-chair. He did a U-turn on TikTok, now saying its Chinese parent company should retain ownership. He mimicked Joe Biden’s stutter, insisted that America’s true inflation rate was 50 per cent and attacked Jimmy Kimmel as the worst ever Oscars host. It seems almost trivial to add that new detail emerged about Trump’s apparent soft spot for Adolf Hitler.
All this happened since last Friday. Now multiply that by 47, which is the number of five-day slots between now and the general election. Even the most diligent Trump observer would feel catatonic after a few such increments. It is thus little surprise that most of his recent episodes did not hit the headlines. In another time, with a normal candidate, any single one would hijack the news cycle. Trump’s candidacy is so far off the charts it is almost paranormal. That is the essence of his political appeal. It means he is judged by a different standard to Biden, or any other politician, Democratic or Republican.
Katie Britt, an Alabama senator, hogged the airwaves for two days last week after giving the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union address. On top of Britt’s otherworldly delivery style, her blunder was to have misled viewers with an anecdote about a Mexican sex trafficking victim. Every time Trump gives a speech, he dispenses a minimum of several full-blown lies. His untruths merit a shrug; everybody else’s qualify as a scandal.
This dual standard is to a large extent subconscious. In 2018, Trump’s then chief strategist, Steve Bannon, described his media tactics as “flooding the zone with shit”. The more bizarreness Trump generates, the less people notice. Economists would call this hyperinflation, except that the item being devalued is our capacity to be shocked. A good example is the gap between how Biden’s syntax is measured versus Trump’s. Biden often confuses dates and names and he has never been articulate. Yet the point he is trying to make is usually plain. His mix-ups merit front-page treatment.
Trump issues regular flights of gibberish that might trigger a primary challenge if they came from Biden. This was Trump’s reasoning about real inflation earlier this week. “And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market . . . we’re going through hell,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box. “People are going through hell. They have — I believe the number is 50 per cent. They say 32 and 33 per cent. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50 per cent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 per cent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up . . . And they have been treated very very badly with policy.” Good luck trying to figure out Trump’s inflation policy.
After Trump was elected in 2016, the Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness”. But that was incomplete. No matter what approach America’s media takes to Trump, controversy is assured. Ignoring what he says is negligence. Running his speeches live is an in-kind subsidy. The same applies to he-said-she-said traditional reporting. Fact-checking is for losers. The beauty of the media’s quandary from Trump’s vantage point is that whatever it does will trigger in-house controversy. Bannon described the mainstream media as the “opposition party”. The ideal opponent is one that is always at war with itself. In gratitude, Trump routinely calls journalists “criminals”.
The 2024 election’s odd blend is to be equal parts dull and frightening. If Trump is true to his word, 10 months from now he will be rounding up millions of illegal immigrants for deportation. Ukraine’s war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia will be over. The same fate would befall Trump’s federal criminal trials. His Department of Justice would be investigating his opponents. And he will have invoked the Insurrection Act to shut down civilian protests with US troops. Bannon’s zone would have long since overflowed. America would have arrived there in broad daylight.
edward.luce@ft.com
