In an interview with Substacker Aaron Rupar released on Wednesday, political scientist Brian Klaas pulled back the curtain on how former President Donald Trump's latest rhetoric is poisoning American politics — and how the press is barely even paying attention to it anymore.
"In 2017, whenever Trump tweeted anything I got media requests from CNN, MSNBC, the BBC," said Klaas. "I was going on TV all of the time to talk about every single tweet. Some of them were pretty banal and genuinely not that big of a deal. They were just unusual, because he wasn’t the standard politician. Now he’s saying, 'We’re going to purge the vermin,' and he’s talking about going after his political opponents, and the phone doesn’t ring."
This is ultimately the true "canary in the coal mine," Klaas added — the fact that "Trump doesn’t even generate news these days when he says literally the craziest stuff in the last 30 years of American politics. It isn’t even covered."
Notably, Trump still manages to get headlines when he goes far above and beyond — in particular in his recent town hall with Fox News' Sean Hannity, when he said he would be a dictator, but only on "day one" so he could fix the border and drill for more oil.
But Trump still manages to escape an astonishing amount of scrutiny, Klaas added — in particular, citing a report from The Guardian that found that Trump's "vermin" comments received 18 times less coverage than when Hillary Clinton said half of Trump's supporters could be put in a "basket of deplorables."
Ultimately, Klaas said, "The press has failed in covering Trump in two different phases. The first phase was Trump’s rise. In 2015, Trump was a fringe candidate, and at that point it made a lot of sense to not amplify him" — and yet they kept doing this even as Trump commanded larger and larger polling leads. "Now I think we have the exact opposite problem. Trump is so ubiquitous, in terms of how much influence he has on American politics, that the real problem has become that the routine nature of his incendiary and authoritarian rhetoric has meant the press has tuned him out. That has, I think, created the very wrong impression that Trump is becoming more normal when the opposite is happening."
