The Coming Trump-Harris Double Standard

If past is prologue, journalists will try to prove their toughness by normalizing Trump and abnormalizing Harris.

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(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

As happily as it ended for liberals, the early weeks of July were their darkest since November 2016, illuminating only how various elites will respond if Donald Trump wins the election. 

What we saw was disturbing: When it appeared that Trump would win the election all but unopposed, we did not see officeholders take steps to batten down the hatches of the political system, or media figures apply extra scrutiny to the presumptive president. (In 2016, media elites explained away their insipid obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails by citing her poll numbers—she would likely be president, after all, and thus merited a thorough scrubbing.)

Instead, we witnessed what the scholar Timothy Snyder has famously described as “obeying in advance.”

Some of these gestures were truly ominous. Trump threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg if elected, and the Facebook founder responded by lifting post-January 6 restrictions on his accounts. When Trump was injured in an assassination attempt, he refused to allow the medical professionals who treated him to brief the media or release his physician notes, but reporters and law enforcement officials didn’t respond by applying their usual rigorous standards, and instead, fearful of antagonizing him, just swallowed his self-serving version of events whole. 

But a lot of it looked more like fawning than cowering. Reporters swooned over pictures of Trump bleeding from the ear. For the umpteenth time, they fell like a ward of amnesiacs for his team’s deceptive insistence that Trump would “set a new tone” with his convention speech. Large newspapers went to press celebrating the supposedly chastened Trump before he’d finished delivering his angry, meandering remarks. 

Media figures more recently raced to offer a generous interpretation of his pledge to Christian conservatives that they will no longer have to vote after this election. And through it all, they’ve shrugged at the games Trump has played with his campaign promises: selling policy to billionaires, even if it entails reversing his own positions, and lying about the Republican agenda.

Now they tell us, in so many words, that they’re sick and tired of the good Kamala Harris vibes, announcing implicitly that they intend to cover her more adversarially in the near future. 

I’m of course all for a press corps that treats politicians skeptically. But the public can’t be well informed if journalists apply different standards to different politicians arbitrarily—or, worse, out of fear that certain politicians will seek retribution for adversarial coverage. What would that look like in this race? It’s hard to know until we see it, but one approach would be for reporters to over-police Harris for policy consistency across a span of many years, while continuing to yawn at the thorough corruption of the Trump agenda. 

BRIBE, SHIFT

Donald Trump supported banning TikTok, until a right-wing billionaire told him to reverse himself in exchange for money, at which point he became a huge TikTok booster. 

Trump had a similar change of heart over BitCoin after meeting with crypto lobbyists. He seems to be having another one over electric cars, as he chases Elon Musk’s money. He asked for a billion dollars from oil executives in exchange for letting them write environmental rules. 

Donald Trump supported an anti-trans boycott of Bud Light until an Anheuser Bush lobbyist scheduled a fundraiser for him and he called for an end to the boycott. 

Now Trump says he won’t defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion unless they pay up. Or pay him?

I can’t say with total certainty that Trump what these new, bought-and-paid-for views mean in practice. Will he deem it worth his time and effort to overturn the TikTok ban if he wins? Will he really try to ply a bunch of government money into crypto? Trump doesn’t drink alcohol, and if he did, would it really be Bud Light?

But we can be confident these aren’t passing reversals because they were bought and paid for. He placed himself in hock to powerful people.

Now ask yourself: Which right-wing billionaires paid Donald Trump to disavow Project 2025? The answer is: none of them. Trump didn’t start falsely disclaiming Project 2025 as quid to some billionaire’s quo, and his campaign hasn’t engaged in kabuki attacks on the Project 2025 authors because the agenda conflicts with the public-policy interests of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Jeff Yass. They love Project 2025!

They’re scrambling because voters have gotten wind of Project 2025, and find it deeply off putting. You won’t hear Thiel or Musk or Yass bash Trump for throwing Project 2025 under the bus, because they want him to win the election—but they also suspect, quite rightly, that Trump’s supposed flip on Project 2025 is meaningless. Feigned. If he wins, they understand that he’ll just flop right back. 

In fact, Trump couldn’t truly abandon Project 2025 if he wanted to, because, as Jonathan Swan notes, the project “owns the central personnel database in the conservative movement.” As in 2016, Trump is raw-dogging his run for office without a transition team, this time because he doesn’t need one. Project 2025 is the transition team, and its marching orders. 

If you’re being intellectually honest about Trump, covering him in light of everything we’ve learned about him over eight years, you can’t credit him for having “evolved” on Project 2025 or ding him for “flip flopping” on it, because he didn’t really do either of those things—he’s just lying. 

ETCH-A-SKETCH KVETCH

Consider the contrast with Kamala Harris.

The Harris campaign is still very young. Reporters call this a “honeymoon phase,” but if she’s benefitting from any leniency at the moment, it’s mostly because the rollout has been well choreographed and 10 days isn’t enough time to assemble a meaningfully detailed policy agenda. But soon enough it’ll be reasonable to expect her to articulate her plans for the presidency. And when she does, some of her positions will differ from those she took when she ran for the Democratic nomination unsuccessfully five years ago.

For instance, I suspect Harris will not run on Medicare for all or a fracking ban this time around. And I thus suspect she’ll eventually have to explain her change of heart.

There’s a lot she could say about that. If she wants to root her new, more incremental policy ideas in material reality, she could note that things have changed since Trump left office: many fewer people are uninsured, Democrats enacted hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy spending. Because Harris is a decent communicator, I imagine she’ll be able to explain her updated views in ways that set her enduring values against the GOP threat to progressive goals: The sustained Republican attacks on the ACA underscore the importance of protecting hard won gains and improving the system we have. 

But in part because she isn’t a dishonest sociopath, reporters will expect more candor from her. They’ll want her to admit that the main difference between then and now is the zeitgeist. 2019 was a disorienting time. The pandemic hadn’t yet arrived, and Trump was chipping away at the ACA. He was also historically unpopular and on track to lose, which made Democrats believe they had leeway to campaign aspirationally. At the same time, his slash and burn campaigning and governing style also convinced many Democrats that the outer bounds of the possible were much more distant than they’d realized. If Trump ran on calumny and lies and won, surely Democrats could get away with embracing progressive issue positions.

They no longer believe this. The most moderate Democrat won the primary and then only won the election narrowly. Democrats have thus trimmed their sails dramatically.

Harris naturally won’t want to cop to any of that history, and that’ll only make reporters want to hound her more.

But here’s the critical difference between Harris and Trump: However Harris defines her issue positions in the year 2024, you can take them to the bank. Obviously circumstances can change in ways that require rethinking policy. But if she says no Medicare for all, she’s not going to win the election and spring a single-payer health-insurance plan on Congress when she takes office. However she evolved, the claim that she evolved will be credible. 

In Trump’s case, the same claim is not credible. His well-established record of dishonesty is central to the true story of his agenda. If anything, the press owes Harris a greater spirit of generosity: She’s not only more honest than Trump, she’s also taking up the baton unexpectedly from the administration she served for four years—why wouldn’t her new agenda reflect a commitment to finishing what she and Joe Biden started together? 

But experience should prepare us for the opposite. If campaign journalists have taught us anything it’s they’re perfectly capable of turning reality on its head and making Trump’s opponents suffer for his sins. They can make Hillary Clinton an avatar of corruption in a race against a court-sanctioned fraudster; they can make Harris an avatar of inconsistency against a guy who trades policy for cash.

Again, I can’t say for certain that they’re about to hit Harris with this specific double standard. But if they do, Democrats shouldn’t take it lying down this time around.