There has been ample coverage of Trump’s outrageous statements and lies for well over a year. Hours upon hours of airtime and thousands of articles have been devoted to declaring him a danger to the republic. Several prominent newspapers abandoned their long-held impartiality to declare him unfit for office. It didn’t work. The people who supported Trump knew the things he had said and done and were aware of his temperament—and still chose him to be leader of the free world.
It is painfully clear that all our outrage didn’t work. And now there’s a danger of getting sucked into a vortex of what I’d like to refer to as “outrage porn.” Trump’s horrific statements aren’t going to stop. He’s going to keep tweeting about every sleight and alleged offense, from Hamilton controversies to unflattering Saturday Night Live sketches to the untold thousands of protests and articles and taunts forthcoming. And he will use these incidents to cement his reputation as a political outsider with his voters. He will weaponize these reactions, holding them up as proof of just how much know-it-all elites loathe his “deplorable” white base.
Far worse, he will use our indignation over cultural kerfuffles to distract from far bigger stories—like his settling of the Trump University fraud suit for $25 million or the sprawling ethical conflicts that have emerged from running the presidency and a business empire at the same time.
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