Consider Trump’s refusal at last week’s debate to say that he would respect the results of the election, a violation of the indispensable notion of the peaceful transfer of power.
But on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the next morning, the process journalists had a different view. “It’s the revenge of the elites,” Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics said. “Elites do not accept that that was an appropriate answer.”
Host Joe Scarborough agreed that the issue was only of concern to “people in newsrooms . . . with their soy lattes.”
Halperin (Harvard ’87) went on to say that “normal people won’t care about that answer.”
Halperin and Scarborough were wrong; a Post-ABC News poll found that 65 percent disapproved of Trump’s refusal. But that’s beside the point: What Trump said was reckless and dangerous — and saying so has nothing to do with soy lattes.
“Morning Joe” has come in for a large share of criticism for cheering on the rise of Trump. And contributor Halperin’s praise for Trump’s tactical genius has been particularly soulless.
In March, Halperin declared on “Morning Joe” that Trump is “one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us have covered.” In January, also on “Morning Joe,” he said Trump’s attacks on the Clintons were “politically brilliant.”
In June on his Bloomberg TV show, “With All Due Respect,” Halperin asserted that “it’s not racial” for Trump to attempt to disqualify an Indiana-born federal judge as a “Mexican” because of his ancestry. His reason: “Mexico isn’t a race.”
When Trump named Stephen Bannon to head his campaign, coverage noted the publisher’s strong ties to the racist alt-right. Halperin argued that Bannon “should not have let himself be so defined by others. The guy’s got an impressive résumé.”
Earlier this month, when a New York Times lawyer responded to Trump’s threat to sue the newspaper, Halperin said the lawyer’s letter was a “big mistake” because “we have to be fair and even in this campaign and not basically take sides.”
And when Trump was widely panned for calling on Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, Halperin said, “There is a lot of fault on both sides.”
This is not to pick solely on Halperin, with whom I have clashed over the years. Trump exploited a profession dominated by process journalism, and the entire cable news industry irresponsibly gave Trump unfiltered and uncritical coverage as he mounted his assaults on democracy and civility — the equivalent of millions of dollars of free ads that propelled him to the nomination.
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Were more committed than ever
