He's disliked in the business, especially by conservatives. Everyone's doing the best they can, working to well-established norms and against growing headwinds. We stage our minds, our means and the medium itself to adapt to the pressures. Sadly, with apologies, it remains ovewhelmingly in the media's interest that Trump wins.
We might fight this fact. We might fool ourselves into thinking we can justify or moderate the outcomes that we all know result from it. And we can reassure ourselves that only the most cynical and disgusting personae online (easily seen and often exposed) are consciously inviting the opportunities it creates. But the sheer weight of his presence makes a symbiotic organism of our business and he is the host.
It shows in what is covered and the things not covered enough, the reluctance and measure around reporting the awful things about him. It shows in the magnanimous editing of his statements to say what he surely Meant rather than what he Said. And be under no illusions, it's hard work: NBC News will show five seconds of him talking at a rally and there'll be two cuts in the clip. It shows in our eager narration of his vulgarities and in our anxious interfacing with the right-wingers who police it. It shows in the high standards applied to his opponents. It shows in how we try to leash them, politically: Trump with a bungee cord, Kamala Harris with a choker.
It's made worse (and was precipitated) by long-term problems that have nothing particular to do with Trump or politics. Most pressing is the scale and speed with which everyone must now post and syndicate content to compete, which has a corrosive effect on quality, accuracy and any genuine consideration as to what's relevant. Second, the culture of journalism is a floating world as insular and aloof as any you ever saw drifting overhead. In the mists of it are things you don't see, like the tier of institutionalized editors (hi!) who thread all this psychotic normality into the reportage we assign and are sent. Wherever he is, there we are, equidistant between reality and wherever he's going.
More than anything, though, what he gets us is traffic. Jesus Christ it's a lot of traffic.
Outlets that cover politics are running on the fumes. MAGA is to news as top lists of affiliate-linked gadgets are to consumer-enthusiast sites. You can't avoid the Best Air Purifiers for Episcopalians because search engines favor it and Trump can't be left unwritten about because to unwrite about him is to unattach that audience. However much that might be—a quarter of the readership at many news venues, maybe more—the loss of it would be fatal. It might even threaten the fraud that ad tech's been running on advertisers for the last decade, sending everyone scrambling for subscribers and friendly billionaires. Imagine that!
You see, then, why despite all those things that should matter (he's a criminal, he's an incoherent wreck, he's widely disliked, bias toward him is rarely covert, most everyone is doing the best they can) it all orbits around the Orange Hole, slowly spaghettifying as it's drawn in. That he will lie to the moon and back is already in the script, but if a critic slips up in even the slightest way (say, calling him "guilty of" rather than "liable for" sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll) the rubber roomers we assign to unbylined factchecking will excitedly light up their icons.
So, if you watch the debate tonight and get a general sense that nothing much matters (don't miss the solemn "did she do enough?" talk afterwards) remember that they're both walking in the garden of two unforking paths.
All he has to do to "win" is not melt down completely and to remain generally consistent with the character that we've all been selling you for years.
Conversely, there are two things that would count as a win for Harris—a real win, not the "our panel thought she won with her Sensible Policy Elaborations" win that's already in everyone's WordPress Drafts. Either by default, because Trump's performance is so unintelligible or obscene that it mirrors Biden's disaster two months ago, or because Harris burns him with rhetorical savagery such that literally beating him to death with a golf club would only register as a 9.5 to its 9.3. But she won't do that1, because it risks everything. And he won't fail that badly, because he'll be on something. In both cases, the point is that they can only escape by achieving escape velocity, up or down. Anything else is just another hoofbeat; hope you like horses.
Here's something to do about it: stop reading about his daily escapades, stop reading stories about polls, stop tickling your neurotransmitters with tweets, stop short before anything else that looks, feels, tastes or smells like this blog post. Politics happens in other places.
1. Update: she did do that.
