Journalists Call Out Trump/Vance Lies; But They Don't Call Trump and Vance Liars

They are liars

Donald Trump decided to run for president when Barak Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents dinner in 2011.

You can see it in Trump’s face. He is not amused, despite the evil twist of his lips. From the vantage point of today, we can see the revenge he is plotting.

This is why he spent his entire term as president focusing only on undoing what Obama had achieved.

To be fair, there were people in New York who knew Trump’s scorchingly vengeful nature. But to most of us, he was a buffoon. Someone to be made fun of.

Germans thought the same of Hitler in the 1920s.

It’s been 13 years since Obama mocked Trump and we have forgotten how the latter responded. So when Kamala Harris roasted Trump during their debate on September 10… when David Muir fact-checked Trump about his erroneous claims that people were eating pets, and Trump responded with the incredibly pathetic, “I saw it on TV!” we should have been bracing ourselves for the backlash.

It’s not that I was surprised when Springfield, Ohio had to shut down its schools and city buildings because of bomb threats. But I was still shocked at the vehemence of the reaction to Trump being humiliated.

Joshua P. Hill wrote today that “we are on the edge of a pogrom.” That made me wake up from my groggy morning routine.

Pogroms, of course, were raids made by the acolytes of the Tzar on Jewish villages. “Raids” is a whitewashed word. Recently the world has been appalled at the Hamas militants brutally raping young women at the Israeli music festival on October 7 of last year. We have read with horror the systemic sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinian prisoners and the video of a Palestinian prisoner being gang raped by Israeli troops. Add to that the regular stories about police brutality toward Black Americans.

The pogroms were all of this rolled into one. Horrifying incursions that destroyed lives and villages.

Raping and pillaging in the truest sense of the words.

For those of you who are musical theatre inclined, this is why the families in Fiddler on the Roof had to leave. And it is why Tevya and Goldie had to mourn their daughter as if she was dead when she married one of the Tzar’s soldiers.

Jewish people in Tzarist Russia didn’t “bitty bitty boo.” They prayed. Mostly that their families would survive another day.

Which is what I imagine Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio are doing. Hiding in housing that may be overcrowded, but is better built than those of Russian villages in the 1800s.

I fear for them.

The Anatomy of a Call to Violence

The woman who started the rumor feels bad. She posted something a neighbor told her about a friend of a friend’s cat gone missing. She blamed the population of Haitian refugees who settled in Springfield when the city invited them in after it found itself in need of workers post-pandemic.

According to Reuters, the gambit to fill jobs worked, as around 15,000 people who had been escaping the uncontrolled state violence in Haiti streamed to southwestern Ohio.

That’s 15,000 people on top of the 59,000 people who already lived there in 2020. Of the 59,000, 40,000 are white, non-Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census. With the influx of the Black Haitian refugees - who helped the local economy grow by 6 percent - the demographics of the town turned from 68 percent white to 54 percent white.

Like every economically advanced country in the world, the U.S. is racist at its core. We don’t respond well to rapid population shifts. Especially when the people coming in are from different countries or have Black or Brown skin.

This is an old story. And the woman who shared the first “eating cats” meme likely was responding to her own resentment and racism. She may be among the 60 percent of Springfield residents who voted for Trump in 2020.

This is how personal prejudice becomes national bias. Systemic bias. This is how old stories become violent flash points as they are launched by social media.

This is what happens when people say things out of hate and anger and resentment. This is what happens when facts no longer matter.

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Legacy Media is Doing… Better

This week, The New York Times has done a yoeman’s job of calling out the “eating cats” lie as a lie. They’ve even used the word “lie” in a headline.

That is more than can be said about NPR, which famously told its reporters in 2016 that they can’t call Trump’s lies lies.

Clearly they are still abiding by that rule.

But let’s look at this Times piece that used that heretofore verboten word.

Times reporter Charles Homans counters the lies spread by Trump and JD Vance thusly:

The previous week, claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, had begun circulating on social media. None of the reports had been substantiated, and local officials in Springfield — a small city where, in recent years, public services have been strained by a large influx of Haitian migrants — said they had seen no evidence that any of them were true. Major conservative media outlets had given them only fleeting attention.

But while the story has so far not proved credible, it has proved meme-able — and that has given it a life far beyond the right-wing internet.

Almost every sentence in these key paragraphs that set up the story is passive. The vile, racist claims “had begun to circulate.” All by themselves. Not one person posted them or spoke about them in a speech or debate. The claims just proliferated. Like magic.

“None of the reports had been substantiated” leaves open the possibility that, perhaps, some of the reports could have been substantiated.

It certainly does not say, “The refugees have been slandered with lies that are designed to dehumanize them.”

Or, if you want to make it active, “Donald Trump is giving speeches around the country dehumanizing Haitian refugees in Ohio. By doing that, he is stirring his base to action, what experts in state violence call ‘stochastic terrorism.’”

As Jamison Foser notes in this week’s “Finding Gravity” Substack, the framing of these stories “privileges the lie.” That is, they talk about the lie, and not the lying liars who are spreading the lies.

So, while many mainstream outlets have called out Trump’s lie about Haitian refugees this week, they have also kept in the news the one policy that consistently stokes Trump’s base - immigration.

Foser writes that the legacy media (and the rest of us) should “make the character and actions of the people telling the lie the story, rather than making the topic of the lie the story.”

After all, the Times had no compunction running headlines like this back in 2016:

Or this piece in the Atlantic in 2016 that starts with, “Hillary Clinton can’t be trusted because she’ll do anything to win.”

But… this doesn’t describe… Trump?

Foser (who I also quoted last week) uses a really good metaphor for how the press treats Trump differently from other people it may cover:

Imagine a man, let’s call him Bob, is standing at a bus stop, waiting for the 5:10. He’s wearing a Dave Matthews Band hat and doing a crossword puzzle on his phone. Now imagine another man, let’s call him Bill, who has twice been convicted of random assaults and just got out of prison, walks up to him and punches him in the face and says “I hate the Dave Matthews Band.”

Would you expect a news report about this assault to focus on Bill’s history of violence, his previous convictions for assaulting people, and his time in prison? Or would you want news reports to focus on the Dave Matthews Band and the polarized reaction to their music? 

We hear it on the news all the time, the history of the perpetrator, the liar. But not when they’re reporting on Trump. Even when they’ve all been watching him do it for the last nine years.

So, while I see the legacy media inching towards doing better at covering Trump, we need to see them cover TRUMP, and not what he says. He doesn’t care if he tells the truth. That is what we need to be reporting.

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