Brilliant author, writer, and modern historian Masha Gessen has just released a new book, Surviving Autocracy. I laud and have reviewed one of her prior books, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. The following quote is from her new book.

The word “presidential” came to mean moments when Trump acted in a way that a journalist could imagine an American president—a normal American president—acting. In April 2017, after the bombing of Syria, another prominent CNN voice, Fareed Zakaria, lauded Trump for briefly not acting like a deranged clown. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” Zakaria said. “I think this was actually a big moment . . . For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world.” Trump had acted and spoken the way a president might, and this was news. Less than three months into the presidency, his being unhinged and uninformed had become normalized because it was, in fact, now the norm, the everyday reality of American life.

During the presidential campaign, National Public Radio took the position that it would not call Trump a liar or call his statements lies.

After the election, NPR reiterated its position on the word “lie,” though this time the reasoning was different. Reporter Mary Louise Kelly went on the air to explain why she chose not to use the word in her story on Trump’s post-inauguration appearance at the CIA headquarters. She said that she checked the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. “A false statement made with intent to deceive,” she said. “Intent being the key word there. Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares, or doesn’t, with facts.”

NPR and many other media outlets practice the same self-enforced amnesia in a recurrent argument about whether to call Trump a racist—or even whether to call his statements racist. It took NPR until July 2019 to apply the word “racist” to a Trump uttering; the network took the step after Trump tweeted that four Democratic Congress members, all of them women of color, should “go back” to where they came from. NPR’s public editor, Elizabeth Jensen, stressed, “To be clear: NPR used the word ‘racist’ to describe the tweets, not the man who wrote them.” The dichotomy, characteristic of virtually all media discussions of Trump, creates two counterintuitive assumptions: that a person can systematically say racist things but still not be a racist—and that there is a meaningful distinction between making racist statements and being a racist.

This is a dichotomy reserved for behavior that society claims to condemn but in fact tolerates, behavior that may not sully the actor’s reputation. One cannot steal and not be a thief, commit murder but not be a murderer, drive drunk and not be a drunk driver—but one can establish a pattern of racist statements over decades and still not be a racist. Reluctance to label the statements themselves “racist” suggested that the judgment of whether a statement was racist or not was far more complicated than most people experienced it as being. This, in turn, reinforced the Trumpian sense of mushy reality, the growing feeling that nothing was knowable. The shared reality of many Americans is that they are hearing the president engage in racist speech; when journalists refuse to affirm this shared reality, it thins even more.