In my year-plus working for Village Voice, the New York-based alternative weekly, there were painfully slow news days, or days when the news cycle wasn’t directly tied to the city. And on those quietest and most desperate of days, when blog posts still needed to get written, I did what I had to do. I visited Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.
Trump, as the nation has quickly learned in these past months, is always good to say something outrageous. In more innocent times, that trait was great for a quick-hit post. When Nelson Mandela died, a deeply important world event that was not New York-centric, we could write about Trump’s dubious claim they were best buds. When Trump hinted in a tweet that he was going to run for president in 2013, or all those times he said he would run for mayor: hahaha, ridiculous, what a fucking orange clown, publish.
These days, though, we in the media find ourselves in a disquieting position. We have to write about Donald Trump, who is a deeply stupid person: a crude, nasty, bloviating man always willing to shout himself hoarse about terrorist Muslims, rapist Mexicans, probably-menstruating Fox hosts—anything for five seconds more of attention. It’s obvious that he hasn’t given a single thing he says more than five seconds of thought, that his brain is an arid wasteland punctuated by moats of nacho cheese.
And yet: he’s still a frontrunner in the GOP race, long after he shouldn’t be, and he continues, insistently, to make news. (“‘This Will Be the End of Trump’s Campaign,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Man for the Seventh Time this Year,” as the painfully apt Onion headline goes.) Being obligated to write about him—once a fun diversion from actual news—is like being force-fed a metric ton of candy until our teeth liquify and run out of our heads in a rotten stream.
The news-making pattern has become clear: Trump says something awful, the media questions it, and he doubles down, turning whatever he pulled out of his ass into an actual plank in his campaign platform. We saw this cycle with his idea to create a registry of Muslim Americans, which was first posed as a question by a reporter; a mere day later, it was “absolutely” something he was planning on doing. That’s how fast it happens. And because Trump’s greatest fear appears to be that of looking “weak,” he’ll never change his mind.
What’s worse: his idiotic knee-jerk rhetoric is still, more or less, working. In some Iowa polls he’s dipping below equally dangerous bigot Ted Cruz, while in others the two are neck-and-neck. No matter how much hand-wringing the media does, no matter how many times we point out what a dick he is, what a liar, it does no good. Like a trash monster that feeds on sewage, it only makes him stronger. In one recent poll, 68 percent of likely Trump voters said they would vote for him if he ran as an independent.
And that, roughly, is where the “Ignore Donald Trump” brigade comes in. Those are the people insisting that the only way to cover Trump is to not do so at all, to ignore him until he goes away.
“Stop paying attention to this buffoon,” a friend of a friend wrote recently on Facebook. And from a reporter of my acquaintance: “Can we just ignore him or something? Give him the silent treatment?” Other people are loudly declaring they won’t click on any more stories about Trump, that it’s time to focus on the “real issues.” In other words: All it’ll take for Trump to lose is for us to all shut our eyes and pretend he’s not there.
But we don’t get to ignore Trump. We can’t, for the same reasons, on a sliding scale of severity, that we can’t ignore the Westboro Baptist Church or ISIS or other threats to the common good that nonetheless benefit from media attention. The “just ignore him” tactic is short-sighted, it doesn’t work, and it presumes that if Americans simply pretend not to notice something, it goes away.
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