2016 All Over Again

Morning Dispatch

On last night’s episode of The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell opened his white-hot monologue with these words:

[A]ll of the cable news networks, including this one, carried it live just like they all did repeatedly in 2016. It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie. Some of the networks tried to play catch up with fact checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that of course is way too late and utterly useless. No network even attempted to fact check every lie Donald Trump told Every network has the capacity.

We livestreamed Donald’s press conference on Mary Trump Media yesterday because I thought it was important to see what Donald had to say and, perhaps more importantly, how he was going to say it after five days of being out of the public eye. In that short amount of time, the entire presidential race had been turned on its head.

How would he respond to having the spotlight taken away, being bested by a Black woman in poll after poll, being relegated to a distant second when it came to rally attendance? I knew he was going to lie, but would there be new signs of his cognitive decline, a deterioration in impulse control? Would there be evidence that the strain was chipping away at his already tenuous grasp on reality?

During the 2016 campaign, I was quite frankly horrified by the billions of dollars in free coverage the media gave Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton was giving important and substantive policy speeches, network cameras were trained on empty podiums and planes idling on the tarmac waiting for Donald to show up.

I was relieved when they stopped covering his rallies in 2020 and the years following. Why give him any more attention? He’s going to tell the same lies, spread the same misinformation. But that didn’t’ work either, because it allowed Donald’s lies to enter the public consciousness unchallenged. It is not an accident that over 70% of Republicans now believe that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.

We tried to fact-check Donald in real time yesterday, but it’s impossible to do that verbally because, given the volume and velocity of his lies it would mean talking over him the whole time, which would make the livestream an incomprehensible mess. We tried, and, of course, provided analysis afterwards, but we need to get better at it.

What I’m more concerned about is that we did not cover the appearance of Vice President Harris and Governor Tim Walz at the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan. And we didn’t cover it because we didn’t know it was happening. I pay fairly close attention to the news, as do many of my friends and colleagues, so this is yet another media fail. Why was this not reported? From now on, I’ll check the Harris/Walz campaign every day to get my information.

Lawrence tried to rectify this omission by playing Vice President Harris’ remarks in their entirety. I’d like to follow his lead and do the same here:

But Lawrence O’Donnell is right—yesterday felt like 2016 all over again. And that is not a good thing.