Stanford Politics

Donald Trump has a knack for changing headlines. Last year, during a campaign that was unconventional in ways too onerous to count, his ability to overcome unfavorable media narratives with outrageous lies and careless bomb-throwing proved an unexpected strength. He’s continued this anarchic strategy as president — each day’s outrage is replaced by the next, and in the end, no scandal seems to stick.

The clearest illustration of this phenomenon comes from the darkest hour of Trump’s campaign: the day The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape. It was a story that not only dominated the headlines, but one that felt like a genuine breaking point, both for Trump’s longshot presidential bid and for his unrivalled control of the news cycle. With just one month left in the election, Trump was backed into a corner by a story that was both indefensible and unforgettable.

One year later, the Access Hollywood revelation still feels epochal. While it failed to prevent Trump’s victory, it transformed the character of American politics. Which is why it’s hard to believe that the incident faded from mainstream coverage so quickly.

After an initial spike in damning coverage, Trump benefited from the cover provided by two new stories. First, just hours after the tape was released, WikiLeaks began to publish stolen emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s personal account. The disclosures were dragged out over several weeks, effectively directing the negative effects of the media’s attention toward Clinton at a crucial stage of the campaign. Trump also took matters into his own hands by using his platform before the second presidential debate to amplify sexual assault accusations against his opponent’s husband, former president Bill Clinton. Stories mentioning the Podesta emails and Juanita Broaddrick, Bill Clinton’s most prominent accuser, both outpaced coverage of the Access Hollywood tape for the rest of October.

The data paints a troubling picture, and it reflects a need for the media to change the way it covers the president. Since November, Trump’s influence has only grown. Under his administration, ill-crafted tweets have been elevated to government policy by a sycophantic cabinet and communications team; pundits of all stripes have taken to adapting their talking points to fit the president’s terms of debate; and Fox News and Breitbart have broadcast Trump’s incoherent dictates to millions of followers. A year ago, he was capable of changing the conversation. Now he has the power to reshape it.

Trump’s new powers have recently been on full display. After the mayhem in Charlottesville, Trump used his platform to create an equivalency between white nationalists and antifascists, an equivalency that dominated public discourse for weeks. Since he attacked protesters in the NFL as “sons of bitches” from a rally podium in September, he has overwhelmed conversations about racial injustice and police brutality with a nonsensical debate over bumper-sticker patriotism — even going so far as to send his lapdog of a vice president to throw a fit of righteous indignation at a game this past weekend. And after the film executive and prominent Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein was outed as a serial sexual predator last week, Trump’s acolytes immediately set out to reframe Weinstein’s crimes as a moral stain on the Democratic Party, leading CNN and other outlets to openly speculate why Hillary Clinton was taking so long to issue a condemnation.

Trump has mastered the art of exploiting the media, and he has leveraged our nation’s tabloid-like instinct for sensationalism over substance, intent, and credibility to remarkable effect. While at the same time, thanks to the incompetence and cruelty of his administration, there are genuinely more issues that demand our attention than can be collectively processed.

By turning the news into an unnavigable mess of outrage and incredulity, Trump has fragmented public discourse and inspired apathy among his would-be opponents.

In short, Trump has created a media environment in which he alone can thrive. But we — both news consumers and news producers — have allowed it to happen by playing along.

---

Benjamin Sorensen, a senior studying political science, is a weekly columnist for Stanford Politics. The views expressed in ‘Beyond the Beltway’ are his and not those of Stanford Politics, a non-partisan publication.