Let's Compare the Coverage of Biden's Putin Gaffe and Trump's Plea for Putin's Help

Donald Trump gets special treatment from the press, and it's to his benefit. This is hard for many to process because of how obvious it is that most members of the mainstream media hate Trump and find his behavior disgraceful. But that's not the dynamic in play here. The fact is that Trump's exploits are so far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior for human adults, much less people vying to be President of the United States, that the press doesn't know what to do with him. He short-circuits people's brains.

The whole universe of covering politics pre-2016—with its gaffes and scandals and all the rest—was turned upside down by his approach of never admitting error on anything ever. The one time he kind of apologized was when he was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. The rest of the time, he said all 20-plus women who accused him of sexual misconduct had made it up. Liars. He said we should ban all believers of one religion from entering the United States. He called John Lewis, who was nearly beaten to death marching for the liberation of his people at Selma, "all talk," "no action." Buttressed by the closed media ecosystem in which his fans live, and where none of his misdeeds exist for more than a nanosecond, he was impervious to the press, which couldn't really come to grips with him in the first place. Armed with the conventional weapons of political war—in which it has always been a player—the mainstream press was faced with a series of nuclear scandals that scorched the political landscape and left it disoriented, particularly when he'd change the subject to another scandal by the next day.

This would be one thing, and almost understandable, if the mainstreamers did not simultaneously hold other politicians, particularly milquetoast Democrats, to the old standards of gaffe. In fact, the conventional-weapons gaffes—The Emails, The Deplorables—are beaten to a pulp, maybe because the press still knows how to respond to them and the miscreants involved still harbor some capacity for shame. And that is how we get to a place where Joe Biden faced day after day of incessant coverage, a sustained barrage of negative questions and headlines, for his statement that Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power" as he continues to commit atrocities in Ukraine. This was a diplomatic mistake, even if Biden has stood by the comment as an expression of his personal outrage at Putin's conduct. It was worthy of the press's attention. But how much, and for how long? Particularly when the leader of the opposition party, Biden's 2020 opponent and most probable opponent in 2024, is saying this shit?

OK, first of all, can we all admit now that it was bad that Putin actively backed this guy in 2016? Somehow this was in doubt over the last five years. Now that people's memories have been refreshed with regard to Putin's resumé as a mass-murdering war-crimes aficionado, can we come to the consensus that it is a negative attribute for any American presidential candidate to have his support? How about the fact that Trump has never had a bad word to say about the guy? Is that bad? That the most recent former American president and the guy currently bombing maternity hospitals and theaters full of kids seem to share a similar view of how things ought to work? In the run-up to the invasion, all Trump thought of Putin's moves with respect to Ukraine was that he was using his power in a "smart" way. The idea it was morally wrong did not occur to him, because it never does. When he now describes the invasion as a "mistake," it's in a tactical sense, not any moral one.

Second of all, how many minutes of coverage will this get, and how will it compare to coverage of Biden's "I don't think the murderous dictator should remain in power" gaffe? Because while Biden did commit a diplo-faux pas, Donald Trump is literally saying that Putin hates America and he wants his help. That's the thing: he's not just asking for dirt he can use in the next election. He is spelling out, for all to see, that when his personal interests do not align with those of the American national interest, he chooses his own every time. Which we knew from his treatment of the now-widely beloved Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of his first impeachment, or his attempt to overturn an election to stay in power leading up to his second. But now he's just out and saying that, while the United States leads a coalition of the free world to counter Putin's world-historical barbarism, he's looking for Putin's political help. This is the guy who not only welcomed that help in 2016, but then stood next to Putin in Helsinki two years later and said he believed his good friend Vlad when he said he'd done nothing wrong.

It's unlikely this will get the full treatment, precisely because it is so intergalactically scandalous—so disqualifying for public office—that nobody knows what to do with it. This is gaffe shock-and-awe, scandal blitzkrieg, and we've been seeing it for half a decade now. The most likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024 is, in every way that matters, siding with Vladimir Putin. You would think this would be disqualifying, considering the images coming out of Ukraine, ahead of his inevitable presidential run. It won't be a blip on the radar by then.

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