'Eternally sorry': Journalist confesses his biggest error in covering 'buffoon' Trump

Former President Donald Trump's behavior has been enabled by a mainstream press that "never took him seriously," Lucian Truscott wrote for Salon on Tuesday in a damning indictment of the media's enabling of the former president's attacks on democracy.

This problem has existed long before the Trump era, wrote Truscott — going all the way back to the 1970s.

"You didn’t have to cover American politics very long to realize that politicians lied, prevaricated and said things that were demonstrably untrue all the time," he argued. "It didn’t take much longer to learn that you weren’t there to report their lies. You were there to report what politicians said. You were, in effect, a stenographer. Lies, if they were remarked upon at all, were the domain of pundits."

But this setup was wholly unequipped to deal with the way Trump operates, he wrote.

"The national media certainly didn’t know what to make of Trump, and neither did I, because at the same time, I saw him as a buffoon, the rest of the press saw him, and treated him like a uniquely 'American' figure in politics, with his fake hair and his fake tan and his supermodel wife and his exaggerations and outrageous statements nobody in American politics had ever made before," he wrote.

The real problem, he continued, is that Trump's clear lack of qualification to serve in high office was so poorly covered in the national media for years, that they don't know how to handle it now.

"Nine long years" after Trump first stepped down that escalator, Truscott wrote, Trump "has become a caricature of a buffoon, but we, including the political press, are all so used to it by now that the New York Times calling attention to Trump’s obvious unfitness for office became a story covered by the rest of the political press." The reason for this, said Truscott, is that "the Times and much of the rest of the national media played such a large role in normalizing behavior that once would have been disqualifying on the day it occurred" — particularly his comments disparaging members of the military while he ran to be commander in chief.

Truscott himself, who covered Trump during the early years of his first campaign, feels responsible for falling into the same trap — and concluded by apologizing for this.

"The orange-haired buffoon who first ran for president in 2015 showed us over the years who he was, and still much of the press let him slide, perhaps because his entire political party not only let these outrages slide, they celebrated him for them," he wrote. "In 2016, I called him a 'toy fascist.' He was the real thing, not a toy. I mistook a buffoon for a monster, and I will be eternally sorry for that."