“This isn't normal”: On MSNBC's The Sunday Show, Angelo Carusone, Jonathan Capehart, and Ankush Khardori discuss the media's sanewashing of Donald Trump
Carusone: Media needs to do a better job of contextualizing Trump's “dangerous” rhetoric
Published
Citation From the October 20, 2024, edition of The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart
JONATHAN CAPEHART (HOST): We've been so inundated by Trump's water canon of crazy that some of us don't take what he says seriously. He's considered more of a stand up comedian riffing his greatest hateful hits than a barely veiled tyrant bent on retribution. And what makes this especially troubling is that almost half the country supports him in spite of it, or maybe because of it. As Michael Sokolove of The New York Times soberingly writes about the Trump supporters he talked to in Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, a town that Trump won by just two votes in 2020, "what if what his supporters really want and do not express is the Trump vibe? All the name calling, coarseness, and bullying, the hyper masculine authoritarian rhetoric. Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works, and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare."
Folks, this isn't normal. It's dangerous. And I pray that a majority of the American people agree with me.
Joining me now, Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters, and Ankush Khardori, former federal prosecutor and senior writer for Politico Magazine. Thank you both very much for coming back to the Sunday Show. I mean, I repeated over and over again, this isn't normal to try, to break through to folks that all those things in isolation that would have us go oh, or make us laugh like the Arnold Palmer thing and have us scratching our heads, but it's not normal. And it seems to me, particularly in our in our profession, but, Angelo, I'm gonna come to you first on this, it seems to me that our colleagues in the press are not five alarm firing on all of these things for whatever reason.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT & CEO, MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, I do think that and there's a few layers here. One is that they haven't looked at it from a 30,000 foot view, the long arc. I mean, I've watched 640 Trump rallies, a little more actually now, from 2016 to now.
And if you are part -- if you're really covering this, just forget the substance, there is actually a decline in his capability of being able to even weave together coherent thoughts. It's gotten so bad that he himself has owned that by saying, well, it's actually part of a rhetorical tactic called the weave. Right? So he sort of inoculated himself even against the potential of that criticism, and the media has largely missed that. And I think the best evidence of that is if you go back to February and look at the top five papers and news coverage about Joe Biden's acuity and age, and you compare that to the last 30 day period about Donald Trump, there was 5 times more coverage and discussion of Joe Biden's age and lack of mental acuity and decline than there is right now about Donald Trump's.
So that alone is the clearest measurement there, and I think you sort of said it in your in your intro, which is that that there's this water cannon that is inundating people, and they just, it's just another part of this string, and they're not able to tie that together. And that to me is the biggest threat, is that it's not these one offs that alone should be significant. It's that when you add them up, and that's what the media is supposed to do is contextualize it and explain why it matters. It matters because as you know, it is dangerous. There's a foundation, Project 2025 and a very authoritarian bent here, that is ready to operationalize what is ostensibly crazy and a lack of control.