Interrupting Trump’s strut is only a start: Journalists shouldn’t normalize the GOP candidate
"Political journalists have yet to face their complicity in normalizing much of the garbage that Trump has packaged into pellets in this campaign. The normalization of which I speak is not new. For years, respectable media treated climate-change-deniers as legitimate dissenters, with lazy point-counterpoint coverage that gave the voices of a few flat-earthers equal weight with a vast scientific consensus. For years, they have left unquestioned a conservative (now metamorphosed by media groupthink into “centrist”) uproar about the magnitude of American taxes. But for now, let me emphasize only one component of conventional wisdom: hysteria about budget deficits, a conservative bugaboo since Ronald Reagan (in fact, since the days of Herbert Hoover, as demonstrated by the historian Kim Phillips-Fein, but that’s a subject for another time). In recent years, the poster boy for “responsible” budgeteering has been the choirboyish Paul Ryan, feebly carrying the flag for true conservatism even as he dare not detach himself from the loathsome Trump. Ryan & Co. only seem respectable because their false premises go unexamined, starting with the crackpot, easily falsifiable claim that the United States is crushed by a tax burden second to none in the wealthy world, and supplemented by the corollaries that trickle-down economics works, that there is something non-idiotic about the existence of a “Laffer curve,” that American business suffers from excessive regulation, and that raising wages would impede growth."
