There are many reasons why Trump defeated Harris, and I’m not attempting to capture all of them here. I did want to spotlight a few key instances where the news media performance was frustrating. This also isn’t an exhaustive list. It is focused on what polling found were the most important issues to voters — prices, the economy, and border crossings causing crime.

First, let me give credit where credit is due. The news media was at its best over the last four years in consistently pointing out that Trump was lying every time he claimed he won the 2020 election. That was impressive and badly needed. As the old journalism adage goes, “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it is dry, it is NOT your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out of the window and report which is the true.”

I would add that journalists need to consistently report the truth every time the lie is restated. Doing it once or rarely doesn’t serve viewers, listeners, and readers well.

During the 2024 campaign on prices, the economy, and migrant crime, journalists didn’t come close to performing as well as they have with The Big Lie.

TRUMP’S MIGRANT CRIME ALLEGATIONS. One of Trump’s most effective and frequent attacks was on “migrant crime.”

The first problem with that assertion is that undocumented people commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than the rest of the population, not a higher rate. That well-documented fact was reported a little, but not a lot. Therefore, few voters were aware of that important truth.

In addition, after a relatively brief crime spike during the Trump administration, rather than during the Biden Administration, there has been a historic reduction in violent crime during the Biden administration. Again, few voters are aware of that.

Finally, this is the one that bothers me the most. Trump also released many more migrant criminals than Biden, because Trump specifically set a policy to do so. This was documented by the conservative analysts at the CATO Institute. I only saw the CATO findings reported twice, once in a commentary and once by the relatively lightly read Newsweek:

More illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of a crime were released during Donald Trump‘s administration than during President Joe Biden‘s term, according to an analysis published Wednesday by an influential libertarian think tank.

The report from the Cato Institute found over 92,920 noncitizens with criminal records were released from custody between Oct. 2017 and Oct. 2020, including over 8,000 violent criminals and 300 murderers.

While Trump has insisted that the Biden-Harris administration has allowed more violent criminals into the country, a smaller number — 56,280 —were released between 2021 and June 2024, according to the report.

“One of his very first actions in office, the very first week that he was in office, he rescinded requirements for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on convicted criminals,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told Newsweek Wednesday.

“First felons and then other people who committed serious misdemeanors, he revoked those requirements that were put in place by the Obama administration,” Bier said. “So it was no longer a requirement for ICE to detain an arrest criminals over people who are just in the country illegally, who didn’t have any criminal convictions.”

Again, on one of Trump’s most frequent and devastating lines of attack, Trump had it completely backwards. It wasn’t Biden who had increased the number of criminals released; it was Trump. And that happened because Trump made an unforgivable policy blunder, which Biden subsequently fixed and therefore performed better on that measure.

Almost no voter knows this, in large part because the horserace implications of Trump’s allegations were stressed in news media coverage, rather than the accuracy of Trump’s allegations.

TRUMP’S WORST ECONOMY IN HISTORY ALLEGATION. Another of Trump’s most frequent and effective campaign attack lines was that the economy was the worst in history.

Not only was the current economy not the worst in history, it actually is currently the best in the developed world. That’s what the IMF, The Economist and Wall Street Journal are all saying, based on the actual economic data. Axios:

“The U.S. economy has defied predictions of a recession and is on track to continue its world-beating streak of robust growth, according to new forecasts from the International Monetary Fund.

The world faced a slew of shocks in recent years — pandemic, inflation, war and more. But one thing has stayed constant: The U.S. economy has come out in a better position than other large, rich nations.

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook, out Tuesday morning, projects that the United States will grow 2.8% this year… That is set to be the fastest growth among the G7 major economies, as was also the case in 2023.

Gourinchas attributed the U.S. outperformance to two major factors. First, there has been strong productivity growth, which is “somewhat unlike other advanced economies.”

Second is a rise in immigration. There’s been an “increase in foreign-born workers in the U.S. that have been integrated fairly quickly into the labor force,” he said, adding that “the labor market picture remains one that is fairly robust, even though it has cooled off … from very, very tight levels.”

To recap, not only was the U.S. economy the envy of the world, rather than the “worst in history,” that happened largely because of, wait for it, the thing that Trump demonizes the most – a spike in immigration! Isn’t that rich?

This was rarely reported on television news, and when it was, it was usually followed by dedicating the bulk of the story to person-on-the-street or person-in-the-diner interviews making the “but many are still hurting” point.

To be clear, even in an extremely strong economy like this one, there are always going to be people who are still hurting. But the television coverage in particular stressed the “but some are still hurting” point, much more than the “best economy in the developed world” point. The balance was way off.

Oh and by the way, many of the vaunted People-On-The-Street were upset because the rate inflation has only fallen to 2.2 percent, roughly the Federal Reserve Bank Board’s desired level. That wasn’t enough for them. They demanded that prices to return to pre-pandemic levels.

That kind of disinflation almost never happens. If it did happen, it would cause a recession that would put millions of Americans out of jobs. I also never saw that important context provided in news coverage.

TRUMP’S “ONLY TRUMP CAN FIX IT” CLAIM. Then there was the “only Trump can fix it” claim about the economy. The problem with that assertion is that the nation’s top Nobel prize-winning economists and Goldman Sachs market analysts looked at the Trump’s policies and say that Trump’s policies – mass deportations during a severe labor shortage and across-the-board tariffs — would make inflation and economic growth much worse than Harris’s policies, not better. Yahoo News:

“More than half of the living U.S. recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics signed a letter stating that a Harris agenda would be “vastly better for the U.S. economy” — here’s why.

The group of 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists outlined a number of reasons why they felt Harris would be better for the U.S. economy than Trump.

“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’ economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities and fairness, and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump,” the letter stated.

The economists who signed the letter expressed concerns about the effects of Trump’s proposed tariffs and tax cuts.

Finally, Trump’s alma matter, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business found that Trump’s policies would increase the deficit five times more than Harris’s proposals. So much for Republicans’ “America can’t afford Kamala” mantras.

These third-party expert rebuttals to Trump’s “only he can fix it” claims were almost never included in coverage of Trump’s claims. “Only Trump can fix it” claims got repeated endlessly in the mainstream news, while journalists almost always failed to report the truth that the nation’s leading experts actually say Trump will make the economy much worse.

Once again, the horserace implications of Trump’s claims were the focus of most of the reporting, not the accuracy of Trump’s central campaign claims.

The Harris campaign couldn’t have done a better job of making these three points. In their defense, they probably didn’t largely because they preferred to try to change the topic to one that was more advantageous, such as their own economic agenda, abortion bans, health care policy, and Trump’s unfitness for office. That’s what candidates have to do. If they spend the whole campaign “on defense” fact-checking their opponent, because journalists won’t do their job, voters will never hear their affirmative case.

Regardless of what you think about Harris’s decision to forgo the constant fact-checking role, the fact remains this should be the role of national news outlets. Journalists with time and space constraints obviously can’t call out all of Trump’s constant stream of lies. But when it comes to what surveys consistently said were the top issues in the campaign, they could have and should have done much more to help voters understand the Trump lies that, according to surveys, voters were believing.

By Guest Columnist Noel Holston

A long-ago college classmate of mine guy posted the illustration above on Facebook to express his elation in having helped reelect former President Donald J. Trump who, in case anybody’s forgotten, is a convicted criminal, a self-described sex offender, and the proud ringmaster of a horrendous 2021 riot in Washington, D.C., that was a violation of his Constitutional oath and an act of treason.

And his acolytes insist they’re not a cult. Perish the thought.

The nicest thing I can say about this image is that it’s not as offensive as memes I’ve seen that compare Trump of Mar-a-Lago to Jesus of Nazareth.

For non-MAGAts like me, the image suggests not a new day or another “Morning in America” but a sci-fi/horror movie like Godzilla in which an ugly, angry monster slowly rises from beneath the sea and prepares to wreak havoc and destruction across the land.

And then there’s the irony of the image: the second coming (lower case intended) of a demagogue who insists human-induced climate change is a “hoax” and has sworn he’ll use his power to kill regulations and programs that would mitigate its destructive effects, Florida be damned.

Maybe he’ll propose building a seawall.

All snark aside, the coming Administration’s rejection of science, especially when it comes to climate change, is the greatest threat it poses. We have plenty of other contentious issues – guns, gangs, reproductive freedom, illegal immigration, drugs – but none of them is as urgent as addressing the pollution that’s accelerating climate shifts and catastrophic weather it engenders.

To everyone who got bent out of shape about the price of bread after the pandemic, I say, “Wait’ll the floods, wildfires and tornados start wiping out whole crops.”

Trump and billionaire pals like Elon Musk are more interested in exploring the profit-potential of outer space than in restoring and preserving the planet that we actually live on.

 I hate to break it to them, geniuses that they consider themselves, but by the time we get even two or three “pioneers” settled in on our moon or Mars, Earth will be a world of hurt. That just how the two timelines match up.

I don’t know what exactly we can do about this existential threat – and when I say existential, I mean our existence, not Earth’s. Earth will go on with or without us.

Maybe if the next monster hurricane wiped Mara-a-Lago off the map.

Maybe.

—

About the author: Guest columnist Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He serves as Georgia Correspondent for Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (2000-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

In these days of high anxiety I get a lot people asking, “So who do you think will win?” To which I first say, “I don’t know. No one does.” But then, if they’re truly interested, I add, “Given a straight popular vote, Harris should win by at least four million. But with the Electoral College, where the choices of 150 million people are left in the hands of 70,000 – 80,000 oddballs who don’t ever pay much attention to this stuff, this could go either way.”

If I think they’re really interested I throw in the conventional wisdom that Democrats always need something like 2.1% more popular vote than Republicans just to make up for the built-in disadvantages the Electoral College. And then, if their eyes haven’t completely glazed over and they’ve wandered back to check on some not-too vital football game, I offer the fairly scientific opinion that this election is a matter of “Boys v Girls”.

Poll after poll shows a startling gap in enthusiasm, with men preferring Trump by 20% or more over Harris and women in some cases supporting Harris by closer to 30% over Trump. Some of this can be attributed to nothing more complicated than standard-issue gender identification, with the added understanding that many men, no matter who the candidates, will never vote for a woman. “Too emotional”, y’know.

But in 2024, studies continue to show that men, particularly younger, so-called “blue collar” men are steadily falling behind their female counterparts in terms of education and earning levels. Currently, over 60% of college degrees are being earned by women, a dramatic shift from even 20 years ago. The explanations for this are murkier. But one worth considering is that more men than women failed to react effectively to the great shift from a physical labor-to-information econmy. Put another way, men have held to the view that they were entitled to good-paying, low-education jobs. Work that required nothing more of them than muscle and the willingness to put in eight hours a day.

In my mind I add a couple other dimensions to this very real trend. One, an anecodote admittedly, is a line from a book by retired CIA director Michael Hayden. In his view, after analyzing data from post-election surveys in 2016 he concluded that the most reliable indicator of a Trump voter was someone still living within 25 miles of where they grew up. Whether far rural Kansas or Staten Island, New York.

A more recent data point shows the wide-and-getting-wider gulf between more and less-educated voters, with the former migrating towards Democrats and the latter toward (Trump-era) Republicans.

And to this you say, “This is supposed to surprise me?”

And I get that. But the “within 25 miles” business is interesting, especially when you see these Trump rallies so ften set in rural-to-far-exurban areas. No doubt there are a few hedge fund/private equity bros in those MAGA crowds, cheering on a looming era of carnivorous deregulation. But the — fair — guess is that the seething, beating heart of these gatherings are men, mainly, who have never ventured far from where they grew up.

And why? Because they liked small town, rural life and fresh air too much to think of leaving in pursuit of a higher (economic) standard of living? Or because life in or closer to a large city was simply too scary and intimidating a prospect to them? Being as places like big “liberal” cities are full of people and cultures too alien and uncomfortable for them to understand … or so they’re told by the perpetually reaffirming sources they trust most?

Now obviously there are a significant number of women at MAGA rallies. No group of any kind is monolithic. But as an old movie critic, I can tell you plenty of women tag along with their boyfriends/husbands to see lunk-head, ultra-macho “action” films like “Rambo” and “Death Wish” back in the day or disposable junk like “Hard Kill” today. Those gals, loyal by tradition, “support” their men, come what may whatever they think.

The point here is that where a profound shift has taken firm hold among women in terms of making an an effort to gain more education, adapt to the modern world and achieve professional-level standards of living, men are backsliding. Instead of getting more training after the factory or mine closes and maybe moving to where work pays more, they remain in place, close to what is familiar, working minimum-wage jobs … and growing ever more bitter toward “the elites” and/or “government” for failing them, as though they were entitled by race and gender to the same comfortable life the recall their fathers having.

So ,,, in my mind this election will come down to which of these groups, angry, self-pitying men or ambitious, self-motivated women gets up off their butts and votes.

.

I strongly suspect that 20, 30, 50 years from now last night’s debate will be remembered best for … cats. For a 79 year-old American presidential candidate angrily asserting that he saw something “on TV” … about something on Facebook ... where someone was talking about something someone’s daughter somewhere heard … from a friend … that might have happened; namely that “migrant” darkies in Ohio are eating other people’s dogs and cats.

Jeeezus … .

Whatever else can be said conclusively about the face-off between Trump and Kamala Harris, including the indisputable facts that she was prepared, poised and looked presidential while he was, as usual, glum, angry and frequently incoherent, its that Trump’s act never plays well outside the thick MAGA bubble. By the time the 90 minutes were up and Trump had done his usual dystopian riffing, a lot of people other than just smug elitists like me, feet up on the ottoman, sipping a beverage, had to look around and ask, “What the hell country is he talking about?”. The United States? Today? A country in “tremendous decline”, in an absolutely miserable condition, “Venezuela on steroids”, overrun by “millions of hardened criminals”, with prices up “70-80-90-%” and “nuclear war” being the next sound we hear?

Good god, man. Seek help. Take the meds Melania is pushing on you. (Ok Donny, be careful with that. Have someone else test them first, maybe Eric, because with you and that pre-nup you gotta be careful.) But good lord, talk about hysterical. Just what everyone wants in a commander-in-chief.

We all know that his fear and horror shtick plays with the sad, low information goobers and goob-ettes following his rallies around the country. But out in public? in the real world? In front of millions of people who, correctly, think a guy ranting about “migrants” eating your cat is probably having a stroke? It just sounds … you know … weird.

By the time ABC cut to a commercial at the one hour mark, the vote was in. Harris cleaned Trump’s clock. With remarkable ease. Another example of what being a good student, preparing for the job at hand and having a full understanding of who exactly your opponent is can do for you.

I have no idea what this smackdown will do for “undecided” voters. But Democratic strategists have to have revitalized confidence that Trump has no other act to work with. He’s got nothing but same very old, very tired, very weird shtick. Period. There is no policy to jab back with. Asked about the nine years he’s been promising an alternative to Obamacare, “in the coming weeks” he said what? That he has, “a concept of a plan”? What in god’s name does that even mean?

It’s no wonder Harris challenged him to another debate before last night’s match. The man remains the preposterous, incompetent fool he’s always been. Out in a farm field with flags a-flyin’ and red hats a-bobbin’ the crowd is thrilled to believe Democrats are killing babies after birth. But in front of cameras beaming him back to people who can read and know the world isn’t flat, that Ted Nugent isn’t the greatest patriot and musical act of our era and that they aren’t barricading their front doors against a zombie horde of Haitian cat eaters … he sounds 101% batshit.

I plead with some Nobel-winning behavioral scientist/social psychologist to explain to me how 70 million people living in the United States in the 21st century can believe anything he says, including the part about eating cats.

As we all knock back our meds in preparation this week’s debate we’re well aware that “we” in general agree on next to nothing. But maybe … maybe … we can all accept that asking the two candidates, both incumbents in a way, to clarify/explain things they’ve said and done in and out of The White House is fair play.

I’ve seen several lists of possible questions CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash could ask. Allow me to add a few more.

For Trump:

“In recent campaign appearances you have talked at great length about the life and death choice of either being electrocuted by a sinking electric boat or eaten by a shark. Millions of Americans share this same concern. What is your final decision on this matter and what then is your advice, as Commander in Chief, to concerned residents of Hays, Kansas?”

“During your presidency you promised legislation jump-starting ‘Infrastructure Week’ with a laser-like focus on your part to improve America’s roads, bridges, ports and such while also creating millions of high-paying blue collar jobs. By one count you promised ‘Infrastructure Week’ no less than 41 times. Unfortunately we can’t find a date when any such legislation was ever introduced or when you signed it in to law. Please provide our audience with those dates.”

“In February of 2020, a month before COVID hit with full impact in the United States you told reporter Bob Woodward that the virus was “really deadly stuff” while at the same time telling the public there was nothing to worry about You said that it was just “a couple people coming in from China” and that it would disappear by Easter. After that a million Americans died. Do you understand what “deadly” means? Can you define it for us? And as a bonus question, did you ever have ultra violet light and/or bleach inserted up your rectum?”

“In addition to being convicted of 34 felonies for election and business fraud you have also been judged a ‘rapist’ for assaulting E. Jean Carroll. You have lost two defamation cases related to this matter and are on the hook for over $83 million in damages. Yet you still insist you never met Carroll and that she is making this all up. Please tell us here and now sir, whether you still think Ms. Carroll is a liar?”

“Do you still routinely cheat at golf?”

“You recently proposed eliminating the federal income tax and replacing it with a 10% tariff on everything imported into America. This would mean, for example, at everything at WalMart would cost 10% more. Who, in your mind, bears the cost of tariffs? Mexico? Woke blue cities? Sneering liberal elites? E. Jean Carroll? Also, would this tariff apply to the Trump ties, gold sneakers and other items you are currently selling?”

“You have had at least five in person conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but have refused to release any information much less recordings or transcripts of those meetings. You did hough once say that, “I could care less”, if such transcripts were released. Nevertheless, House Republicans quashed a subpoena to force the American translator for your private two-hour Helsinki meeting to disclose what was discussed. Can you promise us that that translator/note taker is now free to reveal what you and Mr. Putin discussed? Okay, why not?”

“According to an analysis of your own tax records no one person in the United States lost more money from 1985 to 1994 than you. Over $1 billion. Casinos under your guidance went bankrupt. Casinos, sir. Then, during your presidency the federal deficit ballooned more than under all but two presidents, George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom were forced to finance wars. Considering this and the fact that no New York City banker has been willing to give you a loan for over 25 years can you point to anyone other than yourself or say, Stephen Miller, who thinks you know two shits about how to run a lemonade stand much less the American economy?”

Finally, for President Biden:

“Why are you so old?”