It’s not as though he has ever tried to disguise his strategy. It was almost 40 years ago that Donald Trump said: “If you are a little different, or a little outrageous… the press is going to write about you.” He has been consistently outrageous ever since – and the press has consistently covered him.
But this election has been slightly different. Cowed by criticism of their role in the 2016 campaign, many US news outfits have reduced the wall-to-wall coverage they afforded Trump previously and tempered their reporting – only to stand accused of a whole new set of failings. Chief among them is “sanewashing”, the idea that Trump’s rhetoric and behaviour is being toned down or neutralised. The political scientist Brian Klaas calls it “the banality of crazy”, as journalists, numbed by the awfulness of Trump’s words, fail to represent them to the public. Then there’s “bothsiderism”, the curse where reporters attempting to be objective fall into a mire of false equivalences. The truth, amid an ocean of fake news, is that a decade on from Trump’s first hint he might stand to be president, the media is still no closer to knowing how best to deal with him.
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