An Open Letter to the Media: You Have Enabled Fascism in America

The media has enabled Donald Trump, and they should be ashamed.

John Kelly, left, has called Trump a “fascist”. Image via CNN.

To the media,

By now you will have read the John Kelly story in the New York Times. Kelly was the longest-serving chief of staff in the Trump administration, and in his interview he stated that Trump was “certainly an authoritarian,” and “admires people who are dictators”. More specifically, Kelly told the Time that Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Helpfully, Kelly also spelled out the definition of fascism, saying “it’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.”

In other words, John Kelly, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general, is calling one of the two candidates for president this November a fascist.

We’ve know this for years

According to the mainstream press, this is big news. One of Trump’s own people calling him the F-word is a huge deal, and a sign that it might now be ok to debate whether Trump really is a fascist:

Screen shot of The New York Times

I hate to break it to the press, but many of us have been begging you to do this since the day Trump began his racist birther campaign all the way back in 2015. It was quite obvious almost a decade ago that Trump fit the definition of a fascist, and that was before he came to power and committed more crimes in office than every other president combined.

Unfortunately you did not appear to realize that a man who launched his political career on a racist meme, threatened to jail his political opponent, and had been recorded bragging about sexually assaulting women might actually be a monster. Instead we were subjected to thousands of poll analyses, fed stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server, and made to watch fancy graphics of Electoral College projections. Trump was given thousands of hours of uncritical media coverage, and almost never held to account for his pathological lying.

This was, I believe, a subconscious effort to normalize Trump’s candidacy so that the election could be portrayed as a horse race. Because if it was a close contest where the red guy was battling the blue girl for the White House, you could use all your fancy charts and polling experts to saturate the airwaves for beaucoup dollars.

The horse race narrative

Study after study showed you botched the 2016 election by giving Trump far more airtime than he deserved and treating the contest like a football game. It helped swing the election in Trump’s favor and handed the keys to the White House to a deranged sociopath.

Did you learn your lesson in time for 2020? It was marginally better after the horrors of his administration, but not by a lot. We still had the fancy graphics, the poll soothsayers, and the constant red team vs blue team narrative, but you fact- checked Trump more than before and made up a little for the horrific failure four years earlier.

Unfortunately, you seem to have forgotten everything you learned just in time for the 2024.

Miraculously, Donald Trump is the candidate for president again, despite having tried to overthrow the 2020 election and lead a violent insurrection on the Capitol. This did not happen by accident. Yes, the GOP is to blame for a lot of this — his image was rehabilitated in a matter of months and he quickly took control of the party in time for the midterms in 2022. But the media played their part too. How? By focusing yet again on the horse race.

The stakes, not the odds

In November of 2023, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen urged the media to cover “not the odds, but the stakes,” of this election.

“The stakes, of course, mean the stakes for American democracy,” Rosen told CNN. “The stakes are what might happen as a result of the election.”

Rosen was careful to clarify that it didn’t mean the horse race “is some sort of sin or poison that has dot be driven from the news,” but rather, “that the horse race should not be the model for how you design your coverage. It should not be the organizing principle of your campaign coverage.”

And here we are, two weeks away from the most important election of our lifetime, and Donald Trump is running even with Kamala Harris in the polls. This did not happen because Donald Trump is an exceptional candidate running an exceptional campaign.

Trump is a 78 year-old man incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together, and he running a terrible campaign that outsources his ground game to a mentally disturbed tech billionaire. Trump is running on an overtly fascist agenda and telling the media exactly what he is going to do when he gets into office. The Democrats on the other hand, do have a very good candidate who is running on a very sane, center left platform that many traditional conservatives have no problem getting behind. And yet Trump is still considered by many polling experts to be the favorite.

This is not an accident. It is in fact entirely deliberate, and you have your hands all over it because you have failed yet again to explain the stakes of this election. It really wasn’t hard to do, but for the sole reason that it was more profitable to dress Donald Trump up as a run-of-the-mill Republican, you portrayed the election as another horse race between the red team and the blue team.

This is why John Kelly’s revelation that he thinks his former boss is a bonafide fascist is being portrayed as an “October Surprise”, or just another story that could shift the polls in the swing states one way or the other.

Fascism is the real story

In a functioning media system, Trump fascism would be the only story worth reporting on, and the public would know that they were voting for democracy or dictatorship in November. But they don’t. They think it is a choice between woke liberalism or tax cuts. I know highly intelligent people who genuinely think both sides are “just as bad” and that Democrats and the “Deep State” present a more significant threat to democracy than a man labeled by his own chief of staff as a fascist. They believe Trump isn’t great, but that he can be controlled by his party and contained by America’s checks and balances. But he can’t, and you know this more than anyone.

I believe that Kamala Harris will win in November because enough Americans see through this facade. They understand how dangerous Donald Trump is and the kind of threat he poses to American democracy and the world at large. They have had enough of Trump and his exhausting assault on civil society, and will vote him out resoundingly. But it won’t be because you did your jobs.

The media system in America is broken, and we need urgent action to reform it. So if you believe deep down that you are part of the problem, now is the time to take action. Take your talents to media outlets that do real work, or go out and start your own thing. Anything but this. It will be hard, and you might not get rich, but you will help destroy an industry that has enabled a fascist to run for the highest office in the land.

Sincerely,

Ben

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