Trump stands with his eyes closed in a suit with a red tie, before a banner that reads "CNN."
Former U.S. President Donald Trump participates in the first
presidential debate of the 2024 election campaign at CNN Studios in
Atlanta on June 27. Christian Monterrosa/AFP via Getty Images
Since U.S. President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance
against former President Donald Trump two weeks ago, mainstream U.S.
media has been consumed by an unprecedented wave of coverage centered on
whether Biden can sustain his candidacy. Increasingly, much of the
commentary is overtly pushing for Biden to withdraw. In its most recent
phase, some of the frenzy has been distilled to a single question that
is pregnant with doubt: Can Biden, the oldest man ever to occupy the
U.S. presidency, even survive another four years in office?
As someone who has spent a career covering the world outside
the United States—and who has always regarded the political journalism
emanating from Washington as unique for its clannish reflexes and crowd
mentality—I have been puzzled by the dearth of vigor shown in
post-debate coverage toward a question of far greater import: Can
America survive another Trump presidency? In other words, if Trump is
reelected, what will remain of U.S. democracy, of civil and human rights
in the country, of its economic health and its alliances, and of
Washington’s prestige and influence around the world?
In a departure from much of its recent election journalism, the New York Times published
an editorial this week calling Trump unfit for the presidency. This
alone, however, does little to balance its news coverage and commentary.
As many have noted on social media, political content in the Times and
other U.S. newspapers has overwhelmingly prioritized Biden’s perceived
weaknesses and liabilities over the past several weeks.
Yet given Trump’s record in office, his rhetoric, and the nature of
his platform, as best as it can be known, a free press should consider
it a task—or better, an obligation—to refocus with energy and
persistence on existential questions regarding Trump’s reelection.
One of the most underrated dangers about the prospect of another
Trump presidency is the very deliberate way in which the former
president seems to avoid being pinned down on important questions. Take
abortion, for example. Trump has both bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who finally tipped the balance against Roe v. Wade, thus ending federal abortion rights, and suggested that he holds more moderate views that would leave it to the individual states to determine reproductive rights.
One
can see this indeterminacy throughout Trump’s politics. What this
suggests is not just cynicism or wanting to have controversial issues
both ways. Instead, it appears to point to a brand of radical populism
rooted in highly personalized power. “Don’t ask me, just trust me,”
Trump routinely seems to say to the U.S. electorate. This was already
evident in 2020, when the Trump-led Republican Party unconventionally
sought his reelection without adopting an updated platform.
This time around, the party has issued
an official platform but one that is unusually vague and full of
Trump-style platitudes. Much more relevant is that the conservative
political apparatus took the pains to publish a doorstop of a policy
book, “Project 2025.” Trump has made a sport of denying
having anything to do with the Heritage Foundation-generated book
because, one surmises, he does not want to be bound to clear positions
and a degree of deniability might help him woo a fraction of more
liberal voters. But as NBC News reported—and
the Biden campaign has since tweeted out—Trump publicly praised the
plan when the think tank started working on it in 2022, calling its
prescriptions “exactly what our movement will do.”
As historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out,
Project 2025, despite its plethora of policy positions, also reflects
an aversion to being pinned down. On the U.S. Federal Reserve, for
example, Perlstein writes that the plan “summarizes every theory
on monetary policy, from the status quo ante, to Milton Friedman’s
monetarism, to ‘commodity-backed money’ (the gold standard), all the way
to outright Fed abolition.”
Still, some policy proposals are so alarming that they should be the
focus of vastly more attention at this stage of the election season.
Project 2025 is full of intimations of purging the civil service of
bureaucrats who are perceived as politically unreliable or hostile and
restocking it on the basis of loyalty to the president.
Trump has famously boasted that he would be a dictator for one day at the outset of a renewed mandate and has hinted
that he would seek to serve more than another single term as president.
But that is not all. Both Trump and the Republican Party have floated
radical changes that would fundamentally change the nature of U.S.
society.
Trump has called for the “termination” of the Constitution—news that the Times covered
on Page 13 in December 2022, when this was proposed. Trump has said his
administration would deport millions of undocumented immigrants and
suggested that this might involve the U.S. military in a domestic
operation. Moreover, he has vowed
to use the Justice Department to investigate perceived enemies and
antagonists; these could include everyone from Biden to people who have
worked for Trump, such as Bill Barr, his own former attorney general.
Republican lawmakers—like Trump in his previous term—have sought to gut the IRS, reducing its ability to collect taxes, especially among the wealthy.
Combine this with frequent vows to extend the large tax cuts that Trump
previously engineered, and one can easily imagine a major expansion of
the U.S. deficit.
During a recent event, House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke of
the need to “significantly reduce our overall spending” as a means of
funding the military. This would not involve “easy conversations,” he
said. The biggest items in the national budget, outside of debt
servicing and defense, are Social Security, Medicare, and national
health insurance. To follow Johnson’s logic, if not his words, the
country should be braced for big cuts of social programs under a Trump
administration.
Of late, prominent members of the Republican Party and vocal Trump supporters have also spoken of
the United States as an explicitly Christian nation and vowed to
promote their vision. When one considers this alongside statements in
Project 2025, the Republican platform,
and elsewhere about promoting traditional gender conformity, it is not
hard to imagine a regime of intolerance toward LGBTQ people and a
stripping back of their rights.
Finally, amid mounting evidence of the accelerating threat of climate change, Trump repeatedly shouts
“drill, baby, drill” at his rallies as he denounces policies aimed at
promoting green energy and electric vehicles. This is a two-pronged
threat. By promoting or even merely extending its dependence on oil,
gas, and coal, the United States would inflict incalculable damage on
the planet. It would also fall further behind other advanced economies,
led by China, that are developing and profiting from the cleaner
technologies of the future.
The media has a vital role to play in holding Biden—and his age and
vigor—up to scrutiny as he seeks reelection. But in light of Trump’s
policies, to do so largely at the expense of holding the Trump agenda up
to equally deep and persistent scrutiny represents a grave abdication
of the press’s democratic duty. Given its rich traditions, enormous
resources, and diversity, the U.S. press should easily have the
bandwidth to do both. A failure to do this constitutes an injury to
itself and to American democracy, one that historians looking back at an
election this critical will not fail to notice.
Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. Twitter: @hofrench