Why Are Trump and Vance Able to Skate Away from Their Dangerous and Destructive Statements?

How is it not an ongoing story that the Republicans' vice presidential candidate (a Yale Law graduate) stated in all seriousness last week that he will continue to call immigrants who arrive in the US legally "illegal immigrants"?  No, that was not a typo or an unfair characterization.  Here is what J.D. Vance said in response to a reporter who had pointed out to Vance that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio -- who are now living in fear (along with their US-born neighbors) because of the lies that Vance and Donald Trump have continued to spew -- are in fact legally residing in the country:

Now the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … they are here legally. And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs: mass parole and temporary protective status. She used two programs to wave a wand and to say, “We’re not going to deport those people here.”

Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.

My most recent two-part Verdict column, published yesterday and today, ends with a discussion of that example of Vance's insanity and shamelessness.  His illogic is so glaring that I wrote this as I tried to analyze Vance's incomprehensible statement: "It seems almost insulting to Verdict’s readers even to go down this blind alley, because Vance’s mistake is patently obvious."  I will try to minimize that possible insult here on Dorf on Law by saying only that what makes something legal or illegal is the law, not what J.D. Vance wants the law to be.

Honestly, however, what is going on?  Vance is, at least in this instance, even more brazen and unhinged than Trump, who usually contents himself with repeating blatant lies rather than inventing self-negating attempts at arguments.  As I wrote on Verdict: "This is ... one of the all-time lowest points that we have seen in American political discourse. ... That he is not being laughed off the political stage is a scandal."

The title of this column asks the same question that I was trying to address on Verdict, which is how it is even possible that Trump and now Vance are not being hounded by skeptical reporters and commentators for the cynical lies and deceptions that are the Republican ticket's stock in trade.  Last week, I wrote (here, here, and here) about how the press follows Republicans' lead by dumbing down the concept of "policy discussion" to mean something like this: "saying words about a social issue that some people are angry about, even though those words offer no policies or even hints at solutions to the things that are making people angry."  Put differently, the now-accepted definition of "talking policy" -- but only when it comes from Trump and other Republicans -- is "yelling about things that we in the press think are worthy issues to discuss."

If the theme last week was to take Republicans and media figures to task for distorting what it means to discuss policy, then the theme for this week is to broaden the perspective beyond policy issues to point out that those same people cannot even understand what an argument is, much less what a good one looks like.  "He argued ..." is now treated as equivalent to "He asserted ..." or even simply "He said ..."  Trump says, for example, that he will make some problem magically disappear, without offering logic or an explanation, and the press says that Trump "argued" that he could solve a problem.  He says that Kamala Harris is a communist but offers no indication that he even knows what a communist is, and news articles have him "arguing" that Harris is a communist.

This differs from the "sanewashing" that I discussed earlier this month in a Dorf on Law column, which is an attempt to create something coherent out of utter incoherence.  Accepting non-arguments and bad arguments as if they are good (or at least plausibly defensible) arguments does not even bother to add content.  Trump and Vance say things, but reporting that they have offered either no logic or terrible logic is apparently not a journalist's job.

Is that because the press is in the tank for Trump?  Unlikely.  Is it because they are overcompensating for their supposed "liberal media bias"?  I continue to think that is part of it.  But it might in fact be that these people are in fact incapable of understanding what a good argument looks like.

What do I mean by that?  Consider John Dickerson, a CBS News reporter who is taking over the Evening News anchor job.  That is Walter Cronkite's old gig, and one might expect that the person who has risen to the top of a major news organization to take on such a storied role would be razor sharp.  As it turns out, however, not so much.

Dickerson is a genial guy, and when he interviews people or is being interviewed himself, he comes across as reasonably smart.  Even so, shortly after the Harris-Trump non-debate, Dickerson appeared on Stephen Colbert's show and, after agreeing that Trump had performed miserably, said that "[i]t would’ve been in his advantage” to say earlier in the non-debate "what he said … in his closing statement, where he said, 'You know, you’ve got all these plans. Why didn’t you do it while you were in office?' He waited all the way until the end of the debate to say that."

But why would Dickerson think that Trump should not have waited, or that Trump should have said that at all?  Here, Trump did seem to be trying to make the beginning of an argument: You've been in office but haven't solved problems.  But what is the actual argument?  Therefore, you'll never solve any problems?  Even if Dickerson took that to be Trump's point, there is a very good reason for Trump not to have offered it earlier in the non-debate: It is stupid, and Harris could have knocked it out of the park, both substantively and rhetorically.

Harris could have started with a dig: "Well, there are only 24 hours in a day, and you left such a huge mess that we haven't had time to fix everything that you broke."  More to the point, she could have used that opening as another reason to run down the list of all the things that the Biden/Harris Administration has done, contrast that with Trump's lone piece of major legislation -- the reactionary and unpopular 2017 tax cut for businesses and the wealthy-- and then point out that for almost two years now Trump's cult in the House of Representatives has (when it has functioned at all) been deliberately blocking everything that the White House has tried to do.

Notably, this is a good example of when the adage that "if you're explaining, you're losing" simply does not apply.  Trump would have handed Harris an opportunity to make an affirmative case drawing on Democrats' successes, pointing out Trump's failures, and mocking Trump's fanboys and fangirls in Congress.  She surely would have been happy to explain all of that for the entire non-debate.

Honestly, if I were on a non-debate stage in Harris's position, I would not have dared dream that Trump would launch that flailing attempt at an argument early in the evening.  If he was going to take his shot, the only time that it could work was in his closing statement, when the coin toss had determined that Trump would be the last to speak.  Even then, it should have been laughed off.  Dickerson, however, thought it was a real argument.

Indeed, Dickerson did not merely say that Trump should have come out with that nonsense sooner on September 10.  He contrasted it with a Clinton-Trump non-debate:  "When he debated Hillary Clinton, he said that in his first answer; and he was relentless in making that case. …. Which is great, because it gets to phoniness, it deflates whatever plans the opponent [has offered]."

That was "great"?  I wrote a Dorf on Law column about that non-debate in 2016, and I pointed out that Trump's attack was even more ridiculous in at least one sense, which is that he kept saying that Clinton had been "in public life" for many years.  That is, she had been in politics for decades, yet somehow there were still problems.  I summarized his campaign strategy in six words: "Everything sucks.  Blame Hillary.  Trust Trump."  So because Clinton had been a US Senator during George W. Bush's presidency, she was to blame that problems were not being solved?  Powerful stuff.

Moreover, even if one credits Trump with having scored some brilliant point on Clinton, the idea that "it deflates whatever plans the opponent [has offered]" is simply weird.  Opponent: I have the following plans to deal with the issues that continue to confront this nation.  Trump: Oh, yeah, well you haven't done it so far.  Seriously, an eighth-grader could answer that.

And even if Dickerson thinks that Trump's non- or bad argument "gets to phoniness," that dig was unique to Clinton, who had been accused of lacking authenticity.  Whatever lies Trump and the Republicans have been trying to tell about Harris -- she "became black," she was the "border czar," she waved a wand and made immigrants legal -- "phoniness" is not getting any traction.

Was this an example of a journalist trying to cover his behind by saying something positive about Trump after saying many negative things about him?  Again, I suppose that is one possible explanation.  Whatever the malady, however, Dickerson is not the only journalist afflicted with it.

In a recent "Meet the Press" interview of Pete Buttigieg, for example, the moderator interrupted herself at one point and simply repeated Trump's comment from the non-debate about how Biden has not repealed Trump's tariffs.  That topic had not come up in the interview, and she did not ask Buttigieg to respond, instead moving quickly to an entirely different subject.  Yet somehow she thought it necessary to repeat Trump's claim.

Professor Dorf recently explained that Trump fundamentally does not understand how tariffs work.  Here, however, the response is even more straightforward.  Again, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt as to whether he even had an argument, he might have been saying that Biden would never allow a tariff to stand if he is against tariffs.  That, however, is not only another "we haven't gotten to everything that needs to be done" opportunity, but it is nonsensical to compare across-the-board tariffs to individual tariffs.  "She thinks that we shouldn't throw small children in the deep end of the pool, but she hasn't stopped that one kid from splashing water in other kids' faces.  She's obviously lying."

There are several other problems with Trump's argument-adjacent claim about tariffs as well, but the point is that there is no reason for a journalist to carry Trump's water, especially days after the non-debate ended.  Like Dickerson, the interviewer might have been thinking that she needed to "sound balanced," but that cannot explain why she decided to repeat that particularly weak claim.

This is why I am willing to say that the people whose job it is to cover policy arguments do not know what the words "policy" or "argument" mean.  They fill in gaps for Trump and Republicans to make their assertions sound like more than they are, but at most that has resulted in attributing easily beatable arguments to Trump.  That might be better than having no argument at all, but probably not.  And it certainly does not explain why Vance has gotten a complete pass on "legal still means illegal, because magic wand."

In any event, it is more difficult than ever to take any of these people seriously at this point.