The '3 Stooges' problem of covering Donald Trump

The media *still* isn't getting it right.

Do you remember when Donald Trump, as president of the United States, tried to force Denmark to sell him Greenland?

“It's just something we've talked about,” Trump told reporters back in 2019. “Denmark essentially owns it. We're very good allies with Denmark. We've protected Denmark like we protect large portions of the world, so the concept came up.”

Larry Kudlow, at the time an economic adviser to Trump, predicted success in the purchase. “I don't want to predict an outcome, I'm just saying the president — who knows a thing or two about buying real estate — wants to take a look at a Greenland purchase,” he said.

Denmark somehow resisted Donald Trump’s real-estate prowess — and did not sell us Denmark.

I will be honest: Until literally the middle of a speech last week in Dallas, I had totally forgotten about the Greenland gambit.

Which made me think — again — about the incredible difficulty in covering Trump as a member of the media and why I still think the mainstream organizations aren’t getting it right.

Let’s start with why it’s so incredibly hard. I call it the “Three Stooges” problem.

My dad was a big Stooges fan. What can I say — he liked physical comedy. And, as a result, I grew up watching the Three Stooges every Saturday morning with him.

One of the Stooges most famous bits was when all three of them tried to walk through a door at the same time. Inevitably, they would get stuck. Hilarity would ensue.

What does this, you might legitimately wonder, have to do with covering Trump? This: Donald Trump says and does SO many things on a daily, weekly and monthly basis that are outside the norm that, well, they all just sort of get stuck in the door together.

Because there are so many of them, they block each other off. No one stands out or takes precedence — and, as a result, there is a tendency to forget or ignore them.

Let me give you one example: In July 2015 — less than a month after Trump became a candidate — he was an event in Iowa and was asked about John McCain. Trump said that the Arizona Senator was a “war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

I remember thinking — and writing — at the time that Trump’s campaign was over Insulting the military service (and 6 years of captivity in a North Vietnamese prison camp!) of a Republican elected official in a GOP presidential primary? Unimaginable!

For any other politician, that would have been either the end of his or her campaign or a massive unforced error that they would spend months recovering from. Can you imagine if Jeb Bush(!) said that McCain was a “war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured”????

The calls for him to drop out of the race would be immediate. He would have to say he had taken some cold medicine the night before and it had interacted badly with his body chemistry. He would have had to do a sitdown with veterans groups. And an interview with a major media outlet explaining he never really meant what he said.

And even ALL of that might not have saved his candidacy. But for Trump, the story just came and went — one of hundreds (literally) of things he said on the campaign trail in 2016 that would have destroyed the career of any other politician.

If the Three Stooges is too old a reference for you, maybe this one will work better. On “The Simpsons,” Mr. Burns is an old, rich and (mostly) evil guy who lives in Springfield. One day, he goes to the Mayo Clinic for a physical.

The doctor comes back after conducting a series of tests. He pronounces Burns “the sickest man in the United States.” He has every disease known to man — and a few new ones that have been discovered in him.

And yet, he isn’t sick. At all. Why? Because all of these illnesses are blocking each other from developing in Burns’ body!

That’s Trump. It’s virtually impossible to cover or remember ALL of the things he has said and done over the last decade.

The New York Times editorial board — on Sunday — did an absolutely amazing piece cataloguing what Trump has done or has said he will do. It’s mind-boggling. Truly.

All of this gets me to the broader issue: How the media is *still* — broadly — not figured out the right way to cover Trump?

If you remember back to 2016, the criticism of the mainstream media was that they ran TOO MANY of Trump’s speeches without fact-checking or proper context. And that they did so because Trump rated — and, in TV, ratings mean money.

Which, I think was fair and largely accurate.

Now the criticism is that the media isn’t covering Trump ENOUGH — that we are “sane-washing” him and giving people a less-than-complete version of who Trump is and what he wants to do.

So, two approaches — both of which people say are wrong.

I will admit that if someone made me the publisher of CNN or the Washington Post, I would not have an easy solution on how to handle this conundrum. Trump represents an asymmetric threat to the norms of journalism and, trust me, if there was any easy answer on how to cover him, smart media types would have already come up with it.

Here’s how I have chosen to handle it: I try — wherever and whenever I can — to make sure that my readers see the actual words Trump is saying. I provide context, fact-checking and, yes, some humor when I go through transcripts of his interviews, speeches and the like.

But I always keep as my North Star that this is someone who could be the president for the next four years. And someone who has never, really, hid the ball on what he wants to do. His words matter because they are the best way to grasp what he might actually do in office as well as how he sees our American democracy.

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