There are people who looked up whether Joe Biden was still running for the presidency on November 4. Others are surprised and horrified to find out that the Affordable Care Act that they love and the Obamacare they hate are, in fact, the same thing. And as Trump proposes tariffs in line with exactly what he promised during the campaign, economic experts and news panels breathlessly discuss the terrible implications for supply chains, grocery prices, and basic economic needs as if they hadn’t been listening to what Trump said on the campaign trail the last year plus. It seems that our media apparatus can only speak frankly about consequences once it is too late to do anything about them.
The tendency to treat details as immaterial has been a pattern throughout the campaign — with the plans to weaponize every police department in the country to demand paperwork from every person as they please, to do away with birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, to dismantle the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and oppose mandatory vaccinations that have saved millions of lives. Instead of treating these proposals with seriousness and mapping out the implications of the policies, our mainstream news apparatus glossed over the true importance of a presidential campaign to chase empty soundbites and focus on absurdities like whether Tim Walz was in China in June or August of 1989. The effect was to turn who would wield power in Washington into a simple popularity contest, leaving voters with only cursory knowledge of how this leadership would shape our lives and a deepening sense of buyer’s remorse as the transition gets underway.
Now that political headlines have moved on from wondering whether candidates can sell their policies, we are getting the too little, too late coverage of the incoming Trump Administration, and every new story makes the potential damage terrifyingly clear. Most prospective appointees are either shameless sycophants and bootlickers, sex pests and conspiracy theorists, blatantly and openly corrupt, or some horrifying combination of the above. Economic policies are sparking off likely trade wars and possibly escalations into real wars. And there’s already a posture towards the rest of the world that sees countries fall into two categories: either a subordinate to extort or an enemy to destroy.
All of this should have been available for us to understand before we cast our ballots, and the growing alarm at the devastating implications this has for the country going into the next four years reveals how unprepared many voters were to accept the consequences of the election. Media treated the campaign like a game, but voters are the ones who really lost. We were fed a constant diet of consumer-based politics — whether campaigns were selling their messages successfully, who sounded the best, who held the most appeal — instead of breaking down the powers of the presidency and Congress, and what the real impact would be on our lives.
It will be on the best informed of us to focus on impact-first discussions of policy and politics, without getting swept up into the optics and narrative. While the press were enamored with the storylines of the campaign, they’ve left us with the undeniable reality of tariffs versus tax credits, a crank-led health system compared to a science-first approach, and a dictatorial disregard for laws contrasted with a sworn oath to uphold it. And while I have little sympathy for the people who gleefully threw their vote behind Trump only to learn that he meant everything he said about the worst of his policies, it’s true that they were misinformed every day whether they were deep in right wing propaganda or just caught up with the evening news. No one in our mainstream media did viewers right by putting our lives at the center of the conversation, and so we voted without understanding the impact we wanted to have.
So as we try to endure over the next two years between us and midterms, we will have to ask for more from our media sources and ourselves. If elections are about choices, then choices are about context. We can’t let ourselves get distracted by the superfluous and irrelevant, and find out too late that the substance is so different from the style.
