Donald Trump is a great gift to the media he hates
Donald Trump is a great gift to the media he hates
Late on Tuesday night, as the vote counts rolled in across the United States and it became clear Donald Trump was headed for the White House, the Huffington Post issued a strange memo to its staff.
The editors believed Mr. Trump to be a uniquely toxic candidate. So, since the summer of 2015, every news story the outlet published about him had included an addendum noting he “regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims – 1.6-billion members of an entire religion – from entering the U.S.”
But with Mr. Trump transitioning from candidate to president-elect, a HuffPost editor explained that “we’re going to start with a clean slate,” according to Politico, which obtained a copy of the memo. “If he governs in a racist, misogynistic way, we reserve the right to add [the tag] back on. This would be giving respect to the office of the presidency which Trump and his backers never did.”
But it is also true that, while Mr. Trump says he hates the media, he may have just given them the greatest gift in a generation, and a thrilling way out of their existential doom.
That is because the public’s appetite for stories about Mr. Trump is unlikely to evaporate any time soon. On Tuesday, more voters pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton than for Mr. Trump. With all three legislative branches of the federal government controlled by Republicans for at least the next two years, many Americans will want the media to rediscover their sense of purpose as the unofficial opposition.
Donald Trump is a great gift to the media he hates - The Globe and Mail
