On Being Wrong About Trump
Congratulations to Hillary Clinton! And to Ted Cruz on his Texas and Oklahoma wins. And to Bernie Sanders for his successes. And to Donald Trump for everything else.
When Trump announced last summer, in his famous “they’re sending rapists” presentation, I made the wrongest call I’ve made in many decades in journalism: that Trump would be this cycle’s version of Herman Cain. You can read all about it here.
Obviously it wasn’t just me who got him wrong. Almost anyone who extrapolated from modern U.S. political history had been expecting Trump either to hit a ceiling of demographic or regional support, or to hit a wall as he crossed line after line that for previous candidates had meant going too far:
Insulting John McCain’s war record? Imagining a military record for himself, because he had gone to military school? Revealing first-principles ignorance of the mechanics of national security (the “nuclear triad” flap)? Saying that the previous Republican president lied the country into war? Or that he’d opposed the war beforehand, when he hadn’t? The Klan? For previous candidates, even one or two gaffes like these had been too much. Think of poor Rick Perry with his comparatively harmless brain-freeze over “oops!”
Recommended: Trump Gives His Supporters What They Want
I still think Donald Trump is extremely unlikely to win the presidency. But his chance of being the 45th president is no longer “exactly zero,” as I said last summer — and his chance of being the nominee is obviously very good.
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So, Trump is something new. By last December, Trump’s improbable progress was so evident that I contributed to a Newsweek feature on “The Worst Thing I Wrote This Year.” You can read my confession here.
Yesterday a Politico reporter, Hadas Gold, asked me whether wrong calls about Trump meant that we had to change all the rules of political reportage. I sent her my earlier Newsweek item and an update. Today she ran this item, quoting part of what I said in email. She was aware (because I told her), but did not mention in her article, that I’d written about this in Newsweek two and a half months ago. Instead her article implied that I was only now being caught out. (“Now, months later, Fallows acknowledges...”) [Update She has now added a Newsweek link to her item, without the usual step of noting that this is an update.]
Just for the record, here’s the full version of what I sent to Hadas Gold last night when she asked whether in the wake of Trump’s rise the rules of political coverage need to be changed:
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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
