How we’re thinking about covering Donald Trump

What’s neglected? Where can you make a difference?

On March 4, 2024, we published “How Slow Boring plans to cover the 2024 election,” and I expressed my view that the central flaw in Trump coverage is treating him as a kind of metaphor rather than an actual politician. Too much of the general campaign coverage, I feared, would emphasize the narrative — the question of what it would mean for Trump to win the election — over the question of what specifically was at stake.

Trump’s win has, I think, only exacerbated that tendency.

There’s been intense attention to the vibe shift associated with Trump, most of which ignores the fact that the central planks of the shift — the collapsing self-confidence of the left, the rightward trajectory of young men, the disalignment of Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists from their former affiliation with progressive politics — would all be true and significant even if Kamala Harris had won narrowly rather than lost narrowly.

Elections are weird tipping point phenomena. All the broad trends in American culture and society would be exactly the same if Harris had gotten 49.7% of the vote and Trump 48.2% rather than the other way around. But the fate of capital regulation for large banks at the Federal Reserve would be completely different. Right now, there is a high chance that we’ll see significant cuts to Medicaid and an even higher chance that we’ll see significant cuts to SNAP. I’ve seen remarkably little coverage of the fact that the odds are overwhelmingly high that the ACA enhanced premium subsidies will be allowed to expire, which almost certainly would not have happened if Harris had won.

Most strikingly, the basic foundations of American democracy are now swaying in the wind.

Washington, DC, where I live, is not a state and doesn’t have normal state criminal courts. We have a local court system and local criminal laws, but constitutionally speaking, these are federal courts. As a result, local felonies are prosecuted by a United States Attorney. I had kind of hoped that Trump would give us a tough-on- crime prosecutor who would help keep illegally carried handguns off the street. Instead, we have Ed Martin, a lifelong conservative activist with no prosecutorial experience, who participated in Stop The Steal rallies and raised funds for the 1/6 rioters and is now abusing his power by threatening to prosecute opposition party members of Congress. This has attracted less attention than the more spectacular abuses of power in the Eric Adams case, but it’s bad. The “vibes” are in favor of free speech, but the actual practice is in the opposite direction.

At the same time, to the frustration of some, the general tenor of Slow Boring coverage is not focused on maximum alarmism about every event.

And today I want to explain why.

Important, tractable, neglected

From the Effective Altruism world, I learned about the Important, Tractable, Neglected (ITN) framework for evaluating potential charitable causes.

The idea is that you want to focus on things that are a big deal. But you also want to focus on causes where your efforts are likely to make a difference. And you want to focus on problems that aren’t getting the attention they deserve, which often means things that lots of people are not already focused on. The important aspect is obvious, but tractable and neglected I think cut against a lot of people’s basic instincts — it’s generally more fun to participate in an ongoing conversation than to try to change the subject.

But beyond that, I think intractable issues are often appealing precisely because they are intractable. If you start thinking a lot about a tractable problem, like kids dying from malaria, you might decide — precisely because it is tractable — that you should do something about it, like give money to highly effective anti-malaria charities. For better or worse, when you start thinking about tractable problems, you’ll almost always find that you’re doing less than you could be doing and you might start to feel guilty.

By contrast, if you focus all your attention on something infamously intractable, like the Israel-Palestine conflict, you never really need to feel guilty about not having contributed to a constructive solution. Nobody is expecting you to solve it! You can just decide who the bad people are and be mad at them.

I was thinking about ITN the other day when Trump tweeted a likely apocryphal quote from Napoleon Bonaparte, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

This is exactly the kind of thing that, when I was at Vox in 2017, I would have dropped everything to write up, just as many people did:

I’m not sure exactly what my take would have been, but it probably would have been some version of this meme. Conservatives have mustered all sorts of criticisms of Joe Biden’s use of executive authority, of Barack Obama’s use of executive authority, of progressive enthusiasm for court-packing, and a dozen other things. But it really is striking that Democratic Party leaders say that they care about democracy and the rule of law, whereas Donald Trump, by his own admission, does not.

One reason for doing these quick write-ups of outrageous Trump statements is simple commerce. If you’re working on the viral/SEO web, the cost-benefit of pointing at something outrageous Trump says and writing, “That’s outrageous! I am outraged and you should also be outraged!” is favorable. The commercial incentives on Substack are somewhat different, but that’s something that I like about Substack. I think you ultimately sell more subscriptions by differentiating yourself, and by giving readers something they couldn’t get from another writer.

That doesn’t mean ignoring important topics, like Trump’s disregard for the rule of law. But it does mean acknowledging that while this is, of course, very important, it’s probably the single least-neglected story in the entire world.

And it’s not not tractable. But understanding the tractable elements requires some thought.

Be the change

I’ve seen lots of people get pulled into debates about whether Trump is an actual fascist and whether Elon Musk is an actual Nazi, and one question I always have is what difference does it make to your conduct?

If, to you, Trump being a “real” fascist means you’re determined to support a big tent movement that maximizes our odds of defeating him, then I am on your side. If it means you think we should stage anti-Trump riots, then I don’t think we’re on the same page. But if it means you think we should encourage people to organize disciplined acts of non-violent, non-destructive civil disobedience, I might agree with you again. Not because ordinary electoral politics and non-violent civil disobedience are the only ways to fight fascism — my grandfather fought fascism by flying ship-based bomber missions in the Mediterranean. It’s just that right now, there are anti-Trump things we can do that will be constructive, and there are anti-Trump things that are likely to backfire and cause harm, and I think discussions about which actions fall into which category are important and worth engaging in.

Worrying about exactly how bad Trump is doesn’t really accomplish anything, while worrying about what kinds of opposition activity are likely to be useful is important.

One thing that we are committed to on this Substack, and something that cuts against the grain of normal political column writing, is that we try to give advice about actions that you can take in the world. Elon Musk is putting a million bucks into a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. The candidate on the other side is Susan Crawford, and if you’re angry about Trump and Musk and worried about the future and feel that people aren’t doing enough to stop him, you can give her money here. It’s generally considered journalistically inappropriate to make that kind of fundraising appeal. I understand where that tradition comes from, but I also think it’s kind of silly. Lots of people are clearly anxious about Trump and wondering what can be done. The subtext of a large share of recent columns has been an attempt to address those anxieties. And you see tons of pieces that are like “Democrats should do X” and “Democrats should do Y,” and for some X and some Y, I agree with those pieces of advice.

But also, the boring reality of congressional leadership is that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are stuck herding cats and are going to end up adopting least-common-denominator consensus strategies.

This is annoying. I am, to an extent, already annoyed by it, and I’m sure I will express annoyance about it on future occasions. But in general, I think I read too much content dedicated to expressing annoyance about a kind of banal structural situation. But the audience for political columns — American citizens who care more about politics than the average person — is a group of people with agency and power. What you (we) do is important, and it’s worth thinking about. And I think that we should give money to Crawford (we’ll have more donation recommendations in the future).

If you are represented by GOP members of Congress, it would be constructive and useful to show up at town hall meetings and give them a piece of your mind. It is always constructive to write or call your member of Congress, regardless of party.

I think that on the margin, telling back-bench Democratic members you’re annoyed that they aren’t doing more to defeat Trump probably doesn’t accomplish that much. But telling back-bench Democratic members, “Hey, I know a lot of people who have serious doubts about Trump but also think the Democrats got too left-wing, so I want to see you guys recruit big tent candidates and write up a moderate platform for 2026” might move the needle, just because it’s a more specific and unusual thing to hear.

The stories people don’t know

I did a tweet last Thursday where I said that “Elon Musk is asking us to trust him to wield enormous power on our behalf. He is undoubtedly brilliant and accomplished, but every day he fails to display the normal human virtues — honesty, loyalty, humility, concern for the welfare of others — that would earn that trust.”

The tweet included screen shots of him getting fact checked for some false claims about the International Space Station and of Grimes pleading with him to get in touch with her about a medical crisis impacting one of their kids. For my trouble, I got dunked on by various left-wing people challenging the claim that Musk is brilliant and accomplished. I really do think the evidence suggests that Musk is quite brilliant — and also dishonest and evil.

But beyond that, I would hope that more people might recognize efforts to actually be persuasive.

At this point in time, if you’re putting out ideas like “Trump is a fascist” or “Trump is a white supremacist” or “Elon Musk is only rich because of his father’s mining business,” then the people backing Trump are just going to tune you out. The point that I am trying to put out there is that all the good things that Musk fans say about Musk are perfectly consistent with other ideas like, “Trump’s budget is going to be bad for the poor, the elderly, and the disabled who depend on Medicaid” or “DOGE is going to make the national parks worse.”

These are also stories that are more at risk of getting buried, ignored, or miswritten.

A smart 22 year-old fresh out of college with decent writing chops but no real experience or information can easily write a good article about why Trump tweeting that he is above the law is dangerous. That article won’t persuade anyone. But people will read it. And while it won’t equip the people who read it with any information that is useful to them in any way, it’s easy to produce and good for business. Writing informative articles about health policy is harder. The health care system is complicated. Health care finance is complicated. There genuinely is spending in the system that is wasteful. There is also room for plausible disagreement about what exactly “waste” means in a health context.

On the surface, the goal of cutting hundreds of billions, if not trillions, in wasteful health care spending is not totally insane. But it’s also something you could be saying because you’re a liar who is callously indifferent to the well-being of low-income people. Obviously, on one level, “Trump has some bad ideas about Medicaid” and “Trump’s fuzzy budget math is going to lead to higher interest rates” are not as bad as “Trump has a terrifying disregard for the basic norms of liberal democracy.” But on another level, precisely because these are sort of boring technical issues, it’s more likely that a good article about them could change a person’s mind, or provide a reader with information she can use to change a person’s mind.

I’m not a fan of the view that this or that Trump stunt is a distraction from the other Trump stunts.

Degrading the quality of the US-Canada relationship and sending the vice president on a failed mission to gin up support for the German far-right are genuinely bad decisions that deserve criticism on their own merits. But I do think it’s true that, objectively, there are certain kinds of controversies that Trump welcomes and certain kinds of controversies that he tries to duck. He is most uncomfortable when the attention is on mainstream policy issues and at his happiest when the media is debating Trump as a kind of cultural abstraction. I would like to keep my attention mainly on the former, where I think new information actually alters people’s thinking, rather than endlessly revisiting the same themes we’ve been talking about since MAGA Zoomers were in middle school.

Whether this or anything else will be adequate to save us, I can’t really say. The main thing is that all of us, whatever our jobs or roles in society, need to try to think about whether our actions are more or less likely to make a difference. Just expressing alarm about alarming developments to an audience of people who are already alarmed isn’t likely to accomplish anything. Which is not to say that I’m not alarmed or that you shouldn’t be. It’s just that alarm only means anything insofar as we are channeling it into something useful.