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?
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.
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