The former president pleaded not guilty to federal charges in Florida. It’s the latest episode of a half-century of legal trouble and journalistic malfeasance.
Donald Trump is in legal trouble again. But then, he has been in legal trouble my entire life.
Starting with the Nixon Justice Department’s housing discrimination lawsuit against his company back in 1973, Trump had been involved in more than 3,500 legal disputes before he even moved into the White House. Yes, some — such as the complaint against a tenant for not paying rent even though he had — were frivolous, but many, like the one brought by the Justice Department, weren’t.
All of which should have been a red flag for the media. But it wasn’t.
Instead, media executives put Trump on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”; they gave him his own reality TV show; and they allowed him to spew lies about President Obama’s origins without producing a shred of evidence.
The debate over CNN’s infamous recent Trump town hall made it seem as if “How do we cover Trump?” was a novel question. But New York newspapers ran his full-page ads effectively calling for the death penalty for the now-exonerated “Central Park Five” in 1989 even though their executives knew Trump could not be trusted. And they knew this because their newspapers had already been covering Trump for years.
