[…]rather than studying the world as it is in an empirical sense, identifying problems, and proposing solutions, Trumpism starts with “solutions” consistent with its racist and xenophobic worldview—extrapolated from slogans like “Make America Great Again,” “Build the Wall,” “Drain the Swamp”—and then goes in search of “real” problems to justify their implementation.

The press and Democratic Party have, unfortunately, gamely played along—denouncing Trumpism’s false statements of fact but largely conceding the underlying “problems” as worthy policy debates. For example, outlets like the Atlantic and New York Times insist on pretending that gender nonconformity among children is a serious “problem” worthy of national political debate when less than 0.1 percent of U.S. minors take gender-affirming medication.

The same goes for immigration. Mainstream newspapers and cable outlets have largely narrated as a “crisis” the Biden administration’s mismanagement of a dysfunctional asylum process—dysfunction, worth noting, that was deliberately sown by Republican governors to justify their racist anti-migrant policies. This crisis framing has been readily adopted by “Blue State” Democrats like New York City mayor Eric Adams and New York governor Kathy Hochul to obfuscate their own mismanagement of the issue.

Journalists, as Stuart Hall and his collaborators once argued, are “secondary definers.” Their commitment to “objectivity” means that they can’t weigh in on matters of public policy directly. Instead, they rely upon experts and public officials as “primary definers.” “Effectively, the primary definition sets the limit for all subsequent discussions by framing the what the problem is,” Hall and colleagues wrote.