The Emperor's New Annexations: Journalism and the Normalization of Nonsense

The fact that serious journalists are even entertaining the possibility of Trump’s threats to annex other countries highlights a fundamental flaw in how we approach political discourse.

Donald Trump is confident he wants to buy or invade Canada, Greenland, and Panama, and very serious people in journalism and the media are taking him seriously. Not just “seriously” in the sense that he might actually be crazy enough to try these things once he’s in office and once again commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on the planet, but also “seriously” in the sense that, while there are reasons we might object to territorial conquest, his proposals are at least worth considering, talking through the legalities of, and considering if maybe it would be good for Canada, Greenland, and Panama to be compelled into an American empire.

Talking heads on the news networks and writers at political outlets are parsing the threats as serious policy, publishing articles about their merits, and generally treating them as perhaps a bit unwise and unrealistic but, to steal a line from P. J. O’Rourke, “wrong within normal parameters.” 

Which is absurd. There’s nothing serious, in the latter sense, about Trump’s imperialist fantasies. And it’s wrong to sanewash them by pretending otherwise. But there are reasons journalists hesitate to point out that Trump is dangerously irrational, and they’re deeply embedded in the norms of the profession and the way journalists think about bias and how to avoid it.

Our media and journalism culture wants to appear fair and balanced. We imagine a sharp line between “news” and “opinion,” and the people on the news side go out of their way to assure their audience they’re avoiding opinion in favor of facts. That’s laudable. There’s value in getting it right and presenting it like it is, and good journalism depends on caring about both.

But the cultural norm for achieving that lack of bias is built on the epistemically shaky idea that the opposite of a biased perspective is one that presents “both sides” on any policy question. Further, it’s one that not only presents both sides but presents both of them as equals. Trump’s wished-for territorial expansion exposes the flaws in that thinking—and entirely breaks the mirage that a coequal “both sides” approach avoids bias.

First, there’s no reason to believe that the relevant sides to a political issue reduce to what each of the two major parties, or representatives of those parties, think about the matter. The parties often converge on the wrong answer, and better answers get excluded from the Washington consensus. Radicals are frequently correct, and the status quo frequently needs challenging. Of course, not all radical ideas (e.g., invading Canada) are good ones, and sometimes the status quo (e.g., the continued existence of Canada as an independent country) is worth preserving. But the ideas taken seriously by Democrats or Republicans do not represent the entirety of ideas worth taking seriously. If the “both sides” you present are only those two sides, you’re misleading your audience about the state of the debate and the directions in which good policy can be found.

Second, each of the two parties is largely an incoherent and conflicting grab bag of coalitions and views. The Democrats and Republicans do not derive their policy views from considered first principles and careful analysis of the best data, theories, and scholarship. Rather, they assemble coalitions intended to appeal to their base and the marginal voter and choose policies most likely to appeal to, or at least not drive out, those diverse groups. This makes sense from a political standpoint—they need to win elections—but to think the most informative debate about good policy is between what the current Democrats want and what the current Republicans want is fundamentally confused. “Republicans” don’t want one thing. Rather, Trump wants something, other Republicans want something else, still others want a third thing entirely, and yet others want one thing while saying, publicly and for political reasons, that they want its opposite. So presenting “both” sides not only misses out on the ideas beyond the borders of those sides but also masks policy diversity within each of the sides.

Third, and here we get to how Trump breaks things, the “sides” in this paradigm are rarely coequal. Yes, there are times when each of the “sides” has a serious position, each of roughly equal merit, and it’s worthwhile to present them as such and let them each speak, unobstructed and unjudged, to those merits. But all too often, one side is serious, and the other is talking basically nonsense, out of ignorance or because they are obfuscating the actual interests at play.

There’s no intellectual grounding to many of Trump’s pronouncements. This isn’t like a disagreement about financial regulations between serious scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and serious scholars at the Brookings Institution. Trump is unreasonable, uninformed, and quite stupid. You don’t have to—and, in fact, shouldn’t—treat his random urges as considered policy proposals, because he’s never given them consideration. They’re just violent fantasies of dominance. He wants people to look up to him and respect him, and the more land he controls, the more they’ll do both.

The correct way for journalists to discuss Canada, Greenland, and Panama, then, isn’t to bring in experts to talk about legal pathways to his goals or to weigh the benefits of annexation. It’s to point out that Trump is a madman with fascistic urges of empire and that we should in no way entertain his base desires.

Still, to acknowledge that is to no longer treat matters as if there are two equal sides. In our media culture, that is to be “biased.” So, to avoid bias, we have to instead pretend that invading Canada or Greenland, while maybe not advisable, is at least reasonable, and we have to talk about those Republican positions as if they are legitimate. Hence the weird and humiliating performative seriousness.

But overcoming bias isn’t about ham-handedly reducing complex issues to two arbitrary “sides,” and it isn’t about sanewashing what is very much not sane. It’s about doing your damndest to get at the truth and not letting your own tastes interfere in that quest. What we’re seeing now is the opposite of unbiased: it’s putting a clumsy thumb on the scale for ideas that, ideally, wouldn’t even have a place in serious conversation.