How the Media Fails With Trump. Over and Over. (And Over.)
Plus: The people of Minneapolis are amazing.
I am doing an AMA right here! In a few minutes! Come and hang out with me at 1:00 p.m. in the East!
Also: The Secret Show will be out soon. So today’s newsletter will be short.
1. Face/Off
I have been driven to distraction by the reporting on Trump’s Davos speech in American media. Did you know that the president of the United States “ruled out” invading Greenland?
Axios: “In Davos speech, Trump rules out using military force to take Greenland”
Politico: “Trump rules out using force to acquire Greenland”
ABC News: “Trump rules out using military force to acquire Greenland in Davos speech”
CBS News: “Trump backs off tariff threats, rules out military force over Greenland”
Fox Business: “Markets rally after Trump rules out military action in Greenland dispute”
CNBC: “Trump calls for ‘immediate negotiations’ on Greenland, but rules out using force”
You get the picture. But did Trump actually rule it out? By which I mean: Trump said a bunch of words. Do those words equal an official binding policy position for the president of the United States?
Well, just a few days before Davos, Trump wrote that America must have “Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” And then, after Davos, he seemed to abandon this position.
Art of the Deal!
But if everything Trump says is just positioning and in an ongoing negotiation then nothing he says can ever be taken at face value. He has not actually “ruled out” the use of force. Those are just some words he said, which can be abandoned, reversed, or ignored at any point.
The media tends to treat Trump’s more insane statements as ephemeral, but then turns around and treats his climb-downs as binding.
For instance: Trump can say a dozen times that he might run for a third term and the media reports it as “Trump said this crazy thing about running again.” But then Trump gives one interview where he says he won’t run again and the coverage is: “Trump rules out third term.”
Why does the media do this?
Every organization has its own reasons.1 But in general, I think it’s a coping mechanism born of the reality that the mainstream media was not built to deal with an aspiring authoritarian force. They cannot believe what is happening around them and so, whenever something that feels normal, safe, or sane comes out of Trump’s mouth, they treat it as if that’s the real policy while everything else was just noise.
This is a mistake, and a dangerous one. Because it misrepresents our fundamental reality. It’s a form of sane-washing. And while it may be comforting to reporters and editors, it contributes to the authoritarian’s progress.2
2. Minneapolis
I first discovered podcaster Margaret Killjoy as a guest on Behind the Bastards and now I follow her pretty religiously. She went to Minneapolis to report what she’s seeing on the ground and I’m going to consolidate her Bluesky thread here because it’s so important:
I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.
I got in late last night. First thing this morning, I saw cars following an ice vehicle down the street, honking at it.
Later, we didn't drive more than three blocks before we found people defending a childcare facility. (The idea that people have to defend a childcare facility... let that sink in)Half the street corners around here have people--from every walk of life, including republicans--standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.
I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.
It's genuinely a leaderless (or leaderful) movement, decentralized in a way that the state is absolutely unequipped to handle. There are a few basic skills involved, and so people teach each other those skills, and people are collectively refining them. . . .
I've been here 24 hours, but already with what I've seen, well, I genuinely believe we're going to win. People here are well aware that what happens here impacts the entire country, that it sets the tone for resistance. ICE is angry, ICE is terrified, of how deeply unpopular it is.
I've never seen a population more united. If people can hold onto that unity, if people can accept that different people will have different ways of confronting fascism, if we can remind NGOs and orgs that they can join but not control the resistance, then, well, people here will write history.
In Chicago and Minneapolis we have seen bravery and initiative from normal people I never would have predicted. Democratic politicians and our business and technocratic elites should be shamed and humiliated by how normal people have met this moment while most Democrats pretended it was business as usual and many elites openly curried favor with the regime instead of resisting.
God bless the people of Minneapolis.
3. Fraud
Kayseh Magan is a Somali-American who used to work as a fraud investigator in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. He’s got an article out explaining that (a) the right-wing obsession with Medicaid fraud in Minnesota is bad faith; but (b) the fraud is real. His piece is worth your time.
During my time working as a fraud investigator at the Attorney General’s Office, my colleagues and I investigated provider, interpreter and transportation fraud in a case known as PIT Stop. Non-emergency medical transportation drivers and interpreters from the Somali community colluded with health providers, who were in need of clients for their struggling businesses. In this scheme, hundreds of Somali Americans recipients from the Faribault area had their identities fraudulently used by drivers, interpreters and health providers.
Granted, the standard of journalistic evidence is different from the standard of legal evidence, but the principle is the same, and if Shirley had an ethical editor they would have told him his work was incomplete, at best.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, however, and Shirley does seem to have stumbled on to something, though only discovered after the fact by local media. Reporters at the Star Tribune and KARE-11 looked for ties between the child care centers featured in Shirley’s video and the Feeding Our Future fraud. That’s how we now know that seven of the child care centers visited by Shirley served as meal sites that received $6.3 million from Feeding Our Future after claiming to have served 2.8 million meals between 2018 and 2021.
The Reformer was the first to report in the summer of 2023 that nearly half of the 60 defendants charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud at the time had billed the state for other services, including child care. Since then, federal prosecutors have charged 18 additional defendants in the federal meals program fraud and more than a dozen for defrauding programs intended to provide autism services to children and housing assistance to the homeless.
This means that once again, the administration of Gov. Tim Walz failed to do the most basic due diligence by continuing to pay providers who had ties to Feeding Our Future.
Which raises the question: Why weren’t they more aggressive about stopping this sooner?
Because of politics and race. In July 2024, I explained how fraudsters leveraged the burgeoning political power of the Somali community by weaponizing race and religion to escape accountability.
Some media orgs are working in bad faith. Some are playing angles. But on the whole I think there’s less of those things than many people outside of the media imagine.
How should the media have covered Trump’s statement about the use of force? Something like, After weeks of hinting that all options were on the table for annexing Greenland, Trump now says he won’t use military force.
See? It’s not hard! You just have to contextualize his words.
Twin Cities resident here. What ICE is doing here is worse than you see on TV/social media. What the people of Minneapolis and the Twin Cities are doing is better than you can see on TV/social media. As an example, after the murder of Renee Good, the Minnesota DFL started to offer training on working as a constitutional observer. Since that day, over 6,500 people have been trained. The murder of Renee Good did not scare people away. It motivated them to get even more engaged.
Lifelong Minnesotan. They came here to try to break us because they fear us. They should.