Fallout from Trump town hall
By this point, you've heard about Donald Trump's town hall in front of a very friendly audience where he repeated a whole lot of lies we've heard before. But as our colleague and friend John Allen points out, for better or worse, this is the addition of Trump that has taken a dominant lead in the GOP presidential primary campaign, all while being indicted over hush money payments to a porn star, found liable for sexual abuse and investigated for January 6th and taken classified documents from the White House. All this, of course, raises the important question of how news organizations should cover the former president. Jay Rosen joins us to help break down that very problem. He's an associate professor of journalism at NYU. I want to get your initial reaction to the first time we have seen Donald Trump in an open interview setting that wasn't in the cocoon of conservative media. Well, what happened was easily predicted and thousands of people did predict it.
He has no restraints. He doesn't care what he's saying is true. He attacks people. He causes confusion. He insults. And all of this was very well known before him. It's interesting, Stephanie.
The day of the event, CNN.com, ran an article saying that Trump was going to launch a more conventional, traditional campaign, and he was going to reach out to other parts of the electorate that he had not reached before. And he was going to hire people who can sort of give him a normal looking campaign. And all of this turned out to be completely false. And you think that was the baloney his team told them in order for CNN to potentially agree to have not just a straight interview, but to interview him with a Trump cheering squad really around him. Yeah, I think I got snowed by the aides. And I think it was prelude to what ended up being a disaster or an event.
Okay, but that's history. Yeah. Looking at that, and now looking forward, he could be the Republican nominee, which you cannot ignore him. So how should the media cover him? In graduate school, I had a professor who said, when in doubt, draw a distinction. So I'd like to draw a distinction that can answer your question. Please. Not the odds, but the stakes.
Not the odds, but the stakes. And by the odds, I mean, of course, the whole horse race apparatus that organizes itself around the question, who's going to win? How are they proposing to win? What is their strategy for winning? What are the chances that they'll win? And instead, I think campaign coverage should focus on the stakes, meaning the consequences for the country if, in this case, Donald Trump wins again. What kinds of changes are likely to come? Who will suffer the most? Exactly how will American life change? That's a huge story. It's an important story. And the answer is not just sitting on the surface. You have to dig for it. You have to do journalism.
Not just who's winning, who's losing, because the argument we've heard on the other side today is get over it, America. You can't just be in an echo chamber. You need to hear the other side. And in theory, I can understand that. But my issue is none of this is about the other side or about policy. If you and I disagreed on policy, it would be great to have that debate and for the American people to understand the consequences of your policies versus the consequences of mine. But to me, the issue that we saw last night is a former president of the United States looking into a camera and millions of people watching and hearing him say, bald face lies and a news organization broadcasting it lies like we've run out of ammunition.
What do we do with that? Well, the political director of CNN before the event said something really struck me. He said, he's not like any other candidate. And he said, we're going to treat him like any other candidate, which said to me, they haven't thought this through at all. What I mean by not the odds, but the stakes is to shift the focus of campaign coverage, not to what Trump is saying and what his supporters are screaming about, but to the concrete changes in American life that would occur if he wins reelection to the presidency. And for that matter, what America will look like if in this changing country, Biden wins. And digging into that, every time you go out on assignment, not the odds, but the stakes, keeping that in mind, can I believe lift the press into the kind of position where it can kind of put to the side a known quantity, Trump's awfulness when it gets a hold of the microphone and start to focus on things that really matter to Americans. Okay, but that's under the assumption that you think Donald Trump is awful.
What if you are a Republican who supports Republican principles? How does Donald Trump pushing lies on television help you? It doesn't necessarily. It doesn't, but it's important for supporters of Trump to know how America is going to be different and to know what's going to happen in their communities and to know what kind of change he plans to bring and to get an introduction to authoritarianism because that is the most likely outcome if Trump regains power. It was no surprise President Biden responded. I want to play some side by side that Biden tweeted of the town hall. Watch this. We've created a record 12.7 million new jobs.
January 6th, it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken to. They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable and it was a beautiful day. The price of insulin went from four, five, six hundred bucks a month down to thirty five dollars a month. It saved the government a hundred and sixty billion dollars. It was a rigged election. We had a rigged election.
I thought it was a rigged election. The election was rigged. Do you think that's effective? No, but it is expected and it's just who he is. No, I mean what President Biden put forward. The side by side you saw right there is what President Biden put out today of here's what I've offered. Here's what he's offered. Do you think that's effective on the part of President Biden? I don't know.
I think that's kind of a horse-racey question. It's not my area of expertise. Is it effective? Is it not? That's what I mean by the odds. Like that's the whole game of the odds. What's working? What's not working? I think that's a mistaken direction for campaign coverage to go in and it's not like the horse race is evil and we have to get rid of it because it's like a virus. It has its place, but that place is not to provide the organizing principle of campaign coverage. There's a couple of other things that journalists need to do too to recover their sense of mission here.
They have to decide to be explicitly pro-truths, pro-facts. So when he starts an interview with the election was rigged, should the interview say this is over? Well, there has to be a limit. I don't know if it's within the first minute, but there has to be a limit to that. And I think journalists have to become more openly provoting, pro-participation, pro-democracy. They have to boldly come out and say these are the things that we plan to fight for in this election and then figure out what the implications for their campaign coverage is from those declarations.
Stephanie Ruhle