Nine Lessons I Learned About Political Reporting While Covering Trump

"Journalism would be severely constrained without the First Amendment being protected by the government, so American journalists inevitably will be pro-democracy and wary of people who exhibit antidemocratic tendencies like Trump."

"-- so of course a person like Trump, who lies constantly, will be covered more negatively than Obama or Biden, who don't lie as often."

"Coverage of Trump became very negative."

"As Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told the German news outlet Der Spiegel in an interview this month, "We had to be much more forthright about Trump's mendacity, his lies over the course of the administration."

"Regularly suggesting that Trump was saying racist things might have reduced those publications' abilities to get access to GOP sources and thereby tell those insider accounts.nn"

"Some of the worst coverage from political journalists in the Trump era, in my view, stemmed from worries about being perceived as not neutral and objective and therefore biased against Republicans."

"The wrongheaded reliance on GOP insiders culminated in what in hindsight was a huge media mistake: initially downplaying Trump's efforts to overturn the election results. .nn"

"all these forms were spectacularly ill-matched to Donald Trump when he emerged as a threat to American democracy," Rosen wrote on his personal blog in mid-November.nn"

"This insider, access-based coverage was a hallmark of the Trump era."

"Black voters were also prescient about Trump."

"She had covered Rubio closely and was extremely confident that he did not have the skills to defeat Trump, particularly if Trump made race a central issue in the campaign.nn"

"The Atlantic's Adam Serwer argued that many of Trump's supporters backed him because of his harshness toward conservatives' perceived enemies ("The Cruelty Is the Point," a Serwer piece was headlined.)."

"Trump aides, advisers and allies said there is no grand strategy to reverse the election results," the Washington Post wrote in a Nov. 11 story.nn"

"And Ta-Nehisi Coates, then at The Atlantic, dubbed Trump "The First White President," arguing that his rise was best understood as a backlash to Obama."

"So in the Trump era, journalists were often faced with a choice: straightforwardly describe Trump's behavior, which would sound negative and lead to more criticism from conservatives of liberal bias; or soft-pedal Trump's behavior and make strained analogies to Democratic politicians to reduce accusations they were being partisan.nn"

"Those consumers might flee if they view coverage of Trump and the Republican Party from these outlets as being too negative.nn"

"The headline of the Post piece was, "Trump insists he'll win, but aides say he has no real plan to overturn results and talks of 2024 run.""

"You probably know who Kellyanne Conway is and don't know who Russell Vought is, but as far as I can tell, Vought had far more influence on the actual policies of the Trump administration."

"But Joe Biden is president now."

"I moved in this general direction myself -- from a wariness about covering Trump bluntly and being cast as partisan to covering Trump directly and without hesitation.nn"

"Looking back, there was likely some amount of motivated reasoning at play there -- many of these Republicans didn't personally like Trump and were surely hoping he would lose.nn"

"And Black experts were often those who most forcefully rejected the argument that Trump's appeal to voters was primarily based on feelings of "economic anxiety" or that Trump's ideas should be taken "seriously but not literally."nn"

"And it wasn't just high-level Republicans and the media downplaying Trump's actions."

"(Harris is Vice President Kamala Harris's niece, and is very active on social media.)"

"And Trump's administration was quite fractious."

"Journalism would be severely constrained without the First Amendment being protected by the government, so American journalists inevitably will be pro-democracy and wary of people who exhibit antidemocratic tendencies like Trump."

"Not a single Trump aide was quoted by name saying Trump would not contest the results.nn"

"The same day, Politico downplayed Trump's attempts to contest the election, in a story with the headline, ""

"They rarely captured the identity politics of Trump, in part because it was unlikely reporters who described Trump's words as racist would get access to insiders in his administration.nn"

"Perhaps Trump never had a "clear endgame" or "ultimate plan."

"The effort to contest the election was "mostly performance art," Politico said, again not quoting a single Trump aide by name making this point.nn"

"There is no need to project how Trump-like the 2024 Republican presidential nominee will be."

"My thinking about Trump sharpened after I started reading a broader range of work."

"Another line in the article was this: "Asked about Trump's ultimate plan, one senior administration official chuckled and said, 'You're giving everybody way too much credit right now.'"

"But Black political observers were often the ones most bullish about Trump's chances from the start and the most willing during his campaign and presidency to speak bluntly about his racial and at times racist language"

"But no matter what, you heard it here first, in 2024, Biden will ..."

"Those pieces were written early in Trump's presidency but are still memorable because they ended up accurately capturing some of the main themes of his tenure in office.nn"

"I'm not singling them out -- at the time, I was mocking the idea of Trump winning the nomination myself, after all.nn"

"It wasn't only Black political observers who proved prescient about Trump."

"Trump was speaking about racial issues in a way that would resonate with the GOP base, she said."

""After the Trump presidency, it should be crystal clear that newsroom diversity is essential to tell the stories defining our generations accurately," CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is Black, wrote in a recent essay published in Politico. ""

"" I try not to write off candidates like I did with Trump."

"One of the reasons that I was so confident back in 2015 that Trump would not win the nomination was that the high-level Republican contacts I had accumulated from more than a decade in D.C. journalism kept telling me he would not win."

"At times, in the Trump era, White House coverage read like gossip news and Conway was a featured character.nn"

"And Black voters have been more unified in opposing Trump than Asian or Hispanic Americans."

"I was so certain Trump would not win the GOP nomination in 2015 in part because I had become taken with a political science book called "The Party Decides."

"Or, to go back to the example of how media outlets covered Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: There was a lot of focus on whether Trump would eventually accept the results and that coverage inevitably led to predictions and speculation."

"Covering government means we should be scrutinizing and evaluating, for example, how Biden's immigration policies work.nn"

"It's likely that this kind of coverage -- insiders quoted in major news outlets downplaying the seriousness of what Trump was doing -- contributed to an environment in which the news media was slow to capture the gravity of what was happening: The president of the United States making a sustained effort to stay in office after he lost an election.. .nn"

"When I was on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, Black voters, most of whom strongly disliked Trump, were generally the most confident outside of Trump's base that he could win the GOP nomination and presidency."

"And I think that surprise was in part due to my media diet being dominated by establishment-oriented media outlets in which the ideological views expressed generally ranged from Hillary Clinton on the left to Jeb Bush on the right."

"Secondly, most of the prominent Black political observers who were suggesting that Trump could be formidable, like Ellison and Joy, were openly left-leaning in their professional roles."

"In 2019 and 2020, Black voters I spoke to were often the most confident that Trump could win a second term and therefore felt Democrats should nominate the candidate who would be least offensive to white people (Joe Biden)."

"Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.nn"

"Even outlets that aren't as focused on insider reporting, like ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, have rank-and-file conservatives and Trump supporters among their consumers and want to keep them."

"Then-President Obama seemed surprised by Trump's ascent and victory."

"What I learned and will carry forward is that journalism can't really come from "the view from nowhere," a term New York University professor Jay Rosen uses for the posture of neutrality that had become a norm in political journalism."

"If nothing else, I am hoping this article itself is an illustration of the ninth, meta-lesson that I learned in covering Trump: Journalists covering elections and governments should be humble."

"In June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, I had been covering national politics for 13 years, including three presidential campaigns."

"(Trump was often mean to Black female reporters in particular, so assessing their job performance based on their ability to get inside information from Trump and"

"By the end of Trump's presidency, covering Trump this way was mainstream, but Black journalists were often the ones taking this first approach while white colleagues often cast Trump's actions in racial terms only when it was no longer controversial to do so."

"GOP party leaders were almost universally opposed to Trump's candidacy at first, and I kept assuming this lack of elite support would keep him from winning.nn"

"I had been savvy at times -- describing Obama as the likely winner of the 2008 Democratic nomination in January 2007, before he even formally announced his candidacy."

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent much of the first half of 2019 predicting Democrats would not move to impeach Trump and implying Trump would not do anything that forced their hands."

"Donald Trump was leading in the polls of the 2016 Republican presidential primary."

"I just wrote a long essay about the lessons I learned covering Trump."

"I remember this conversation from more than five years ago so clearly because it encapsulates much of my experience as a political journalist in the Trump era."

"Then Trump came along.nn"

"But Trump himself and how he reshaped American politics often befuddled traditional experts on American politics, who were looking to compare and contrast things that he did with Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and other more establishment politicians.nn"

"For example, from the start of Trump's campaign in 2015, Univision's Jorge Ramos centered his coverage around how Trump spoke about immigrants."

"But the rise of not only Trump but also Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2015 caught me by surprise."

"I told Joy, who is a friend, that Trump was experiencing a sugar high in the polls, not unlike Herman Cain did four years earlier."

""You use your access in order to move your story forward and that means certain things you're going to give a pass," journalist Soledad O'Brien said on the podcast "Hear To Slay" hosted by author Roxane Gay and Cottom, in describing the weaknesses of journalism in the Trump era.nn"

"Similarly, before the Trump era, I mostly relied on outlets like The Times, the Washington Post, Politico and CNN to get a sense of political news and a read on what people across the ideological spectrum were thinking."

"I predicted the Republican establishment would organize against Trump and embrace the obvious candidate for the party's future, a kind of a Barack Obama for the right:"

"After all, "The Party Decides" theory was basically right in 2020 -- Democratic elites embraced Biden over Sanders and the party's voters followed.nn"

"I was pretty conscious of issues around race and identity before the rise of Trump"

"Senior Republican officials told me and other reporters the GOP might take the nomination from Trump at the 2016 convention; Trump had almost no chance of winning the general election; his top aides would push him toward governing like a traditional president, and some Republicans would back impeachment over Trump's effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into his political rival Biden.nn"

"Appearing on ABC News's "This Week" in July 2015, then-Rep. Keith Ellison (a Democrat who is now Minnesota's attorney general), said he thought Trump had a decent chance of winning the GOP nomination."