Donald Trump wins presidency thanks to lack of media scrutiny

The failure of the media to hold Donald Trump to account for his actions and words helped convince the voting public to re-elect him as President, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

THE RE-ELECTION of Donald Trump – an abomination of a human being – has sent shockwaves around the world. It seems difficult to accept how this could happen. But it’s worth taking stock of exactly how this outcome came about because it was not an aberration. It is a symptom of a broken political and media system, a situation Australia is not immune to.

The U.S. political and media system is broken because the old political rules are not being played by Trump’s Republicans and the media does not care. The Democrats, however, are still playing by the old rules and are being held to account for how well they follow these rules. They are scrutinised by the media for the quality of their policy-making, the performance of their candidates, the truthfulness of their statements, how they criticise their opponents and how they respond to criticism.

Since Trump and his Republican colleagues are not expected by journalists to play by the rules, they are not scrutinised when they break them. This is why Vice President Kamala Harris had to be flawless and Trump got away with being lawless. They are held to entirely different standards.

Trump can be lawless — Kamala must be flawless

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not taking the same exam.

So, what are these rules? The first is truthfulness. Trump is a perpetual liar, manipulator, conman, fraud and mainstream news media do not care. Lying used to be a political problem. It still is for Democrats. For Republicans, it is a winning political strategy.

Related to this, the approximately third of Americans who voted for Donald Trump – let’s call them MAGAs – also do not care about the old rules of truthfulness, credibility, accountability and honesty. They do not care about facts, truth, science, evidence, empiricism or reality. Trump showed that he can lie as much as he likes, can manipulate voters as much as he likes and they will eat it up.

To say this situation is dangerous and scary for civilisation is an understatement. Just to show how extreme this Trump-led mass delusion has become, some Republican voters believe the unhinged conspiracy theory that Democrats can control the weather. Despite the lunacy of such beliefs, this was never covered by mainstream media as a major news story during the Election. As above, the news media does not care how much Trump lies, or how deranged from the truth his cultist followers have become.

The second rule that Trump breaks, but the Democrats do not and can not, is the seemingly now quaint concept that a political leader should be of good character. The media didn’t care that Trump was a liar – see above – and that he was an insurrectionist, a felon, a rapist, best friends with a paedophile, a racist, misogynist, that he allegedly praised Hitler, and that a huge number of his former staff and even military leaders warned the public how dangerously unfit he is. They did not care. Neither did his voters.

News media apparently no longer considers it a requirement of political candidates that you are of good character — as long as you are a Republican and not a Democrat. If you are a Democrat, every minutia of your past will be dug up, from Harris’ husband’s divorce from his former wife to vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s 30-year-old drunk-driving conviction.

Every now and then, a story might break about a huge scandal in Trump’s past, such as the Washington Post asking questions about a suspected $10 million payment from groups linked to Egyptian intelligence services. But these stories die in the 24-hour news cycle when Trump makes a simple denial. Case closed, nothing to see here. Over and over again, Trump showed when it comes to media accountability for his bad character, he is Teflon — nothing sticks.

Trump won … but wait, Albo just got another flight upgrade!

In Australia, where media disinformation rules, crazed despot Trump is equal to Harris and Dutton's hateful record is eclipsed by inane trivia to propel him as a real contender for PM.

The third rule that Trump breaks is that he is allowed to abuse whoever he likes, without any ramifications. He can say whatever he wants about immigrants (his claim of eating cats and dogs), about his political opposition (“they’re the enemy within”), about Kamala Harris (he called her “retarded”, amongst other insults). Even when these comments are reported by news media, they never join the dots and ask the simple question — what does it say about American society if a person who behaves in this way becomes President?

Presumably, American society still believes children should be brought up to behave well – to be good people – and yet Trump can be as offensive, demeaning and racist as he likes, with no serious ramifications. There seems to be no moral standard left for Trump to ignore and abuse, and yet this situation is apparently entirely unproblematic according to mainstream journalists.

On the other hand, when President Joe Biden criticised a racist comedian who appeared at Trump’s rally and said Puerto Rico is an “island of garbage”, mainstream media leapt on the comments like they were scandalous, misrepresenting them as having referred to Trump’s MAGA supporters, even after Biden clarified this is not what he said.

News media then gleefully played along with Trump’s garbage truck stunt, allowing Trump to weaponise the misrepresentation of what Biden said for political gain. This was a great example of how Trump plays the media like a violin. It’s also evidence, like we saw during the Australian Voice Referendum, that the media thinks it’s more controversial to criticise racism than to be racist — a sign of the racism inherent in political media.

The final rule Trump is allowed to break, which goes completely unremarked by the media, is that he does not need to have any policies or solid plans for what he wants to do as President and is not required to justify any of the slogans he uses in the place of policies. Any economist will tell you that tariffs increase the price of goods. Trump has been allowed to lie by claiming China would pay tariffs, not U.S. consumers.

Trump Mark II: Chaos personified

The post mortem of this disaster will be long, bloody and it will stink like the rotting corpse of American democracy.

Trump has promised to deport American immigrants – as per his racism – and is never called on to justify how he would do this, why he would do this and the influence this would have on the people impacted, the communities they live in, and the economy they contribute to.

It is not as if news media has to look far to see how incompetent Trump is and to predict the chaos of his second term. As part of his first racist pitch to voters, he promised to build a wall with Mexico and have Mexico pay for it. That, of course, never happened. He has shown his incompetency to govern repeatedly, with just one example being his mismanagement of COVID-19 which cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

There was once a rule that not only would a political candidate be expected to have policy plans, ideally costed for the public to scrutinise, but that these plans would benefit the public. Trump is under no such obligation with news media never calling on him to explain his plan to tackle inflation, economic inequality, climate change, housing affordability, the cost of education or any of the systemic problems plaguing the U.S.

At the same time, the Biden Administration, and, in turn, Harris’ candidacy, was plagued with accusations that voters suffering from the cost-of-living crisis would punish them at the polls. Despite Democrats successfully steering the economy through an economic downturn, returning the economy to pre-COVID growth, growing jobs and the fall of interest rates showing the inflation crisis is passing, they received no credit for this in the media.

At the same time, Trump was never under any sustained pressure to explain how he would manage the economy any differently than Democrats, nor was he asked about the la-la land idea of canceling federal income tax and the inflationary effect of his tariff proposal.

There is, of course, a clear link between the media’s lack of scrutiny of Trump breaking all the old political campaign rules and the outcome of the Election. When the media doesn’t think it’s controversial for Trump to be an abomination – a hateful, incompetent, nasty person who clearly doesn’t have the public’s interest at heart – it’s hardly surprising that his supporters do not care either.