What a reporter learned about listening to Trump
Former President Donald Trump often speaks in impassioned tones, using words that can thrill some supporters while angering detractors who see in them the potential for causing harm. Our senior White House correspondent talks about keeping context and fairness at the fore in her coverage.
Donald Trump opened his first presidential campaign with calls for change, laced with searing attacks that have settled into his signature style. Mexicans crossing the U.S. southern border illegally were criminals and rapists, he said.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is going to be the shortest presidential campaign in history,’” says Linda Feldmann, the Monitor’s Washington bureau chief. Instead, the former president is now seeking reelection, with a slight lead in polls and no easing off on controversial remarks.
“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” Mr. Trump said at a recent rally in Ohio. But news accounts often left out the context of that remark, which was tied to the auto industry and the impact of Chinese imports on jobs.
Mr. Trump’s statements are often ambiguous, Linda says on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast. His explicit charge to the crowds who came to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, at his invitation to protest the 2020 vote count did not include invading the Capitol, she points out. But critics say his comments about the vote count, Congress, and his own vice president in the time leading up to and during the attack “led some to blame him for fostering an environment that could lead to violence,” she says.
Trump supporters are themselves divided on the fiery rhetoric. “Some people vote for him because of [it], and some in spite of it,” Linda adds. But “his supporters do fervently believe that he is constantly misinterpreted,” she says. That helps him.
Episode transcript
Gail Chaddock: From the launch of his first presidential campaign at the base of the escalator in Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s searing rhetoric has posed a dilemma for the news media. Do you amplify his claim that Mexicans crossing the southern border are criminals and rapists, or more recently, poisoning the blood of our country? Words matter. They can hurt people. They can make the country harder for anyone to govern. Do you ignore the rhetoric, inviting the charge that the press is normalizing abhorrent language, or attempting to bury the presumptive opponent of a sitting president?
[MUSIC]
Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Linda Feldmann, the Monitor’s Washington bureau chief, about her recent story, “Trump’s dark rhetoric tests a polarized electorate – and media.” Linda, thank you for joining us again. You’ve covered former President Trump for nine years. How do you cover Donald Trump?
Linda Feldmann: I work very hard to be fair. And I know that fairness is subjective, as I pointed out in my article. But I think there’s a way to do it with Donald Trump. It’s to not bring any kind of personal sense to the subject. Any opinions I might have, I put to the side. I see the humanity in Donald Trump. I have flown Air Force One with him and been in very close proximity. He is a human being. He behaves in a certain way, but he deserves fairness as do all politicians.
Chaddock: His rhetoric has always been controversial, often ambiguous, always abundant. Why take up this topic again now?
Feldmann: Well, the latest peg for this is his now infamous “bloodbath” comment, in which he recently said: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” And there was great outrage around this. This was taken to mean that as a threat, that if he loses the election, then it will have been a stolen election as he claimed last time. And, that there could be violence. Now the important thing to know about that is that he was actually talking about the auto industry and his pledge to put a 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports. But the trick in covering that is to include the whole quote and not just the part about bloodbath.
Chaddock: It’s an interesting problem, isn’t it? Because with the bloodbath comment, the press was not inaccurate to say that he said: If I lose the election, there’ll be a “bloodbath.” It was just incomplete. You couldn’t get the meaning without the context.
Feldmann: Yeah, exactly. One particular challenge for the media is that we, by definition, have to condense things. Particularly in a headline. So, I think some of the more liberal media have been unfair to him, but you can’t deny the fact that he made that remark.
Chaddock: It’s also interesting, some of the fact checkers looked up whether bloodbath had ever been used in an economic context, and it turns out it’s kind of a cliché. Isn’t it the heart of what you do as a reporter, to try to put a remark in its proper context?
Feldmann: Yes, absolutely. So it’s true of the bloodbath comment. It’s true in the remarks that he made on January 6th. Some people called Trump guilty of inciting an insurrection. So I went back and watched his speech on January 6th, which was not at the Capitol. It was on the Ellipse, far from the Capitol. And he did not call on his supporters to go to the Capitol and invade the Capitol. What he said was: “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building, to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” So Trump supporters will emphasize the fact that he said “peacefully and patriotically” and people who believe that Trump is guilty of inciting insurrection will say that he spent 70 minutes getting the thousands of people who had come to the Capitol whipped up.
Another important moment in coverage of Donald Trump was the Charlottesville rally in August of 2017, featuring white supremacists marching and shouting terrible racist things. And Donald Trump, in reaction to that, had said something to the effect of many of them are good people. Thus ensued great outrage over his comments. So I went back and listened to the whole speech, and what he was saying is that some of those people were there to protest the taking down of Confederate statues.
Now, do we know that’s who he was referring to when he said some of those are good people? I don’t know. But you can make an argument that even that seemingly reprehensible comment about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was unfairly covered by the media.
Chaddock: Linda, can you talk more about the ambiguity in Trump’s language? Not only is there a lot of it, but often it’s not entirely clear what he means. How do you deal with ambiguity?
Feldmann: First of all, I think you just report what he says and leave the interpretation to others. So for example, during the 2020 campaign, he and Joe Biden were having a debate. Trump was asked about white supremacist groups, and he didn’t condemn them, or the violence that they had already committed. He said that almost all the violence I see is from the left wing and not the right wing. And then he said of far right extremists to “stand back and stand by.” Well, what does that mean? Is that a harbinger of January 6th? I have no idea. Another example directly related to January 6th was the tweet that he put out after the 2020 election in December. He said: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” So he was telling his supporters to come to Washington. Was he telling them to storm the Capitol? No. But that “will be wild” sets a certain tone and has led some to blame him for fostering an environment that could lead to violence.
Chaddock: Linda, did you find that the Trump voters you meet support his rhetoric?
Feldmann: Many of them do, and they don’t take literally everything they’re saying. I mean, they just like his energy. They like his willingness to bust norms and to be aggressive. And they think it’s a show of strength. And that he’s going to push back against the establishment. But a significant number of his supporters don’t really like the way he talks. They say, yes, I love his policies and I’m going to vote for him again, but they say they wish he would tone it down. This was true after he lost in 2020. People would say: “I want him to run again in 2024, but I want him to get off social media, and stop distracting from his important messages with all this inflammatory rhetoric.” Some people vote for him because of the rhetoric and some in spite of.
Chaddock: How do you find the people you’re talking about? The people who actually like his policies, don’t like how he talks about women, Hispanics, immigrants.
Feldmann: So a lot of Trump supporters don’t want to talk to the media, because they think reporters are unfair and that we’re a wholly owned wing of the Democratic Party. So I go to Trump rallies and talk to the people in red hats, but I also go to local Republican Party meetings. I’m completely upfront about who I am: reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. And I’m just here to listen and maybe ask a few questions, if people are willing, and I’m clear if I’m talking on the record or off the record, and just ask them where they’re coming from.
So these are not necessarily people who go to the rallies, but they’re people who care and are interested. Another way of getting to Trump supporters who don’t go to rallies is through personal contacts. I can reach Trump supporters who frankly won’t talk to anybody else. They say: “Oh, well if if so and so sent you, then I will talk to you.” And have had some wonderful frank conversations about why they’re willing to vote for him either because of or in spite of some of his habits.
Chaddock: Let’s take a look at a provocative statement on the other side of the aisle. In March of 2020, then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was talking before a pro abortion rights rally on the steps of the Supreme Court. And he warned conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.” After rebukes on all sides, he denied that he ever meant a personal threat. “ I should not have used the words I used,” he said. “I’m from Brooklyn. We speak in strong language.” And he added that the Republicans had “manufactured outrage” by suggesting that he meant personal violence against the justices. Does Donald Trump ever apologize or revise controversial statements?
Feldmann: I have never heard Donald Trump apologize for anything he has said. It’s just not in his nature. He’s not introspective. He’s always moving forward, looking ahead, behaving tactically, in the moment. He also has the instincts, I think, of a performer, even at times a stand up comedian.
It’s interesting also to note that Chuck Schumer also didn’t apologize for his comment. He says I should have said that differently, but he didn’t apologize to the justices. And it’s worth noting that a year or two later, someone with a gun showed up at Justice Kavanaugh’s house. We’re living in a very violent time and I think a politician who wants to mind his rhetoric is going to be mindful of that.
I will say that I think Trump is unique in his ability to be constantly making controversial statements and get away with it, frankly.
Chaddock: Is it possible that what Schumer termed “manufactured outrage,” that is, taking a comment and misconstruing it, is it possible that these misrepresentations of what Trump actually said may even help him in the 2024 presidential race?
Feldmann: The ability to claim that he’s been misrepresented in the media does help him because his supporters do fervently believe that. That he is constantly misinterpreted, and that the worst possible interpretation is put forth by the media. Just as all the legal cases against him are, I think, helping him. Things that would be bad for anybody else are helpful to Trump. The very, very beginning of his first presidential campaign, the moment he descended the escalator and started talking about Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers, I remember thinking: “Wow, this is going to be the shortest presidential campaign in history.” But he was actually tapping into something. And as we now know, he was elected and now he’s trying again, and is even slightly ahead in the polls.
Chaddock: You know, early on, he also said to his supporters: They’re not really coming after me when I’m criticized. They’re coming after you. I’m just “standing in the way.”
Feldmann: Yeah, exactly. He’s really embracing his followers as a movement and trying to make it personal for voters. And we know that how people vote is a very personal matter. And Trump gets that, and therefore makes those comments, basically: I am you and you are me, we are one.
Chaddock: Linda, as you know, the last quotation in a story is an important one. Why did you choose the ending to this story that you did?
Feldmann: So this was a comment from Dan Schnur, who teaches at University of Southern California, but he used to be a very prominent Republican strategist. He was the communications director for Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. On this subject of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, he tried to put it in the biggest context possible. He talked about how, you know, “People have been using war analogies or military analogies in politics ever since Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.” So he’s telling us that this is nothing new here. And he said: “The question is whether we should take his remarks literally or not. And if we do, he can argue he’s being held to a different standard, but if we don’t, we’re ignoring his political history.” So he’s saying that in some ways Trump can’t win. If we take him literally, then it looks like he’s promising mayhem and bedlam. But if Donald Trump is telling us that he’s, for example, going to be a dictator for just one day, you know, maybe we have to believe him.
Chaddock: At least take it seriously to readers to give thought to, not ignore it.
Feldmann: Exactly.
Chaddock: Linda, thank you very much for joining us for this podcast and for your almost 30 years of watching politics in Washington for the Monitor and its readers.
Feldmann: Thank you very much, Gail. I appreciate it.
[MUSIC]
Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock. Edited and produced by Clay Collins and Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus, sound engineer Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.
