Somewhere around the third or fourth time I watched a Nobel Prize-winning economist appear on CNN to explain—in tortured academic prose—why Donald Trump's tariff scheme was economically illiterate, I realized we were all living in a Monty Python reality where punch lines have metastasized into policy.
Two words would have sufficed: He's wrong.
Two more for good measure: That's crazy.
But no. Instead, we got fifteen minutes of someone with a Zoom background that looks like the Alexandria Library, surrounded by spines bearing names like Keynes and Hayek, launching into a dissertation about "comparative advantage theory" and "supply chain elasticity" and "the historical precedent of Smoot-Hawley protectionism" that would put a graduate seminar to sleep.
And somewhere in Middle America, some guy in a MAGA hat saw this and thought: Look at that smug bastard with his fancy words and his book collection, telling me I'm stupid. Trump speaks plain. Trump makes sense. These elites are the problem.
The media—in their desperate, hand-wringing need to maintain the fiction that we're still engaged in some kind of rational discourse—has spent eight years treating a food fight like it's a nutrition seminar. They've dignified the undignifiable. They've taken a man who suggested injecting bleach and shining light inside the body to cure COVID and said, "Let's have a panel discussion about the President's unorthodox and radical medical theories."
Case in point: Springfield, Ohio. Remember that beautiful moment in American political discourse when the former and future President of the United States stood on a debate stage and claimed—with the kind of straight-faced conviction usually reserved for Flat Earth conferences—that Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets?
They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats.
This wasn't a policy proposal. It wasn't even a coherent thought. More of a brain spasm. The correct media response would have been laughter. Sustained, withering, nation-wide laughter. The kind of mockery that ends careers and sends people slinking back to whatever cable news green room spawned them.
Instead—and I swear this happened—CNN dispatched actual reporters to Springfield. They sent journalists with notepads and cameras and satellite trucks to a sleepy Ohio town to investigate whether Haitians were, in fact, conducting a large-scale operation to harvest and consume the local domestic pet population.
They found—unbelievably—that this was not happening. That it had never happened. That it was, from its conception to utterance, industrial-grade horseshit.
But here's the kicker: Nobody cared.
Not one single MAGA hat-wearing, Newsmax-watching, Truth Social-scrolling believer looked at CNN's exhaustive investigative reporting and thought, "Hm, perhaps he was mistaken." The fact-check landed with all the force of a Tic Tac splashing into the ocean. The narrative had already embedded itself in the ecosystem, another data point in the grand conspiracy where the mainstream media covers up immigrant crime.
By treating the claim seriously enough to debunk it, the media had already lost. As they did throughout Trump's entire reign as public servant, they'd dignified the absurdity. They'd suggested that this was something that required investigation, that it existed on a plane of reality where evidence mattered.
The tariff thing is even more insidious because it comes wrapped in the flag and tied with a bow labeled "bringing jobs back to America." Never mind that every economist who isn't on the payroll of a think tank funded by Peter Thiel will tell you the same thing: tariffs are a consumer tax. They make everything more expensive. They don't bring manufacturing back—they just make your iPhone cost more.
But Trump says it with confidence. He says it simply. "We're going to put tariffs on China and they're going to pay for it and we're going to build factories here again."
It's demonstrably false. It's economically illiterate. It's the kind of thing that would get you laughed out of a freshman economics course.
But instead of saying "That's flat-earth-level crazy," we get Professor McBrainy explaining the intricacies of international trade theory to an audience that checked out after the word "elasticity." We get charts and graphs. And the MAGA crowd sees this and thinks: There they go again. The elites. The intellectuals. The people who think they're better than us because they read books.
Anti-intellectualism has become the battle cry, and the media keeps handing them ammunition by deploying intellectuals to combat idiocy.
Seth Meyers nailed it back in 2015 when he said Trump was "running as a joke." That's exactly what it was. A publicity stunt. A brand-extension exercise. The same way Kanye West "ran for president" or when Roseanne Barr did it, or when that guy from Diff'rent Strokes threw his hat in the ring.
The media doesn't remember this, but they used to know how to ignore celebrity vanity campaigns. When Roseanne Barr ran for president in 2012 on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, CNN didn't host town halls with her. MSNBC didn't breathlessly cover her campaign rallies. She got maybe a chuckle and everyone moved on.
Same with Gary Coleman in 2003 during the California recall election. Even when Stephen Colbert did his satirical campaign in 2008, the joke was clear: this was performance art pointing out the absurdity of American political theater.
But Trump? Trump got wall-to-wall coverage. Trump got treated like a serious candidate from day one. Not because journalists thought he'd win—they didn't. But because he generated ratings. Because he said outrageous things that made good television. Because in a media landscape where clicks and views are currency, Trump was pure gold.
The networks couldn't help themselves. They gave him billions in free media. They covered empty podiums waiting for him to speak. They aired his rallies in full while giving actual policy speeches from other candidates, a forced thirty-second recap.
And then—shocked Pikachu face—he won.
Somewhere along the line, the running joke with the splashing headlines got taken seriously. Like a plane that's lost its second engine and is headed straight into the hillside, Trump's momentum couldn't be stopped—and the media never once blinked or reflected on their role in creating the monster.
Not once did they back off when the crowd sizes swelled and think, "Holy shit, did we turn this joke into a legitimate presidential candidate?" There was no editorial meeting where someone said, "Maybe we should stop giving him two hours of free airtime." No moment of reckoning when CNN realized they'd aired thirty-four Trump rallies in full.
And here's the thing: they're still following the same formula. Crazy statement, cover it straight, disprove it, nobody cares. Rinse, repeat, sell ads. The business model hasn't changed because the business model works—for them. Not for democracy, not for truth, not for the future of the republic, but for quarterly earnings and cable news ratings.
Look, Trump rose to power for a million reasons. The economy was leaving people behind. White angst found a convenient scapegoat in immigrants and globalization. His opponents were comically terrible—Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of everything Middle America distrusts about coastal elites; Joe Biden, barely conscious on a good day; excuse-me-I'm-talking Kamala Harris, unable to articulate why anyone should vote for her beyond "I'm not him."
But Trump, Trump had no credentials. None. He was a failed businessman who'd driven casinos—casinos, which are designed to print money—into bankruptcy. He was a reality TV star whose greatest accomplishment was firing people on camera. His business empire was built on inherited wealth, licensing deals, and the kind of financial shenanigans that made his tax returns a classified document.
All of that is true. But make no mistake, the media has blood on their hands. They injected his joke of a candidacy with legitimacy. They made him inevitable by making him inescapable. They turned a clown into a contender by refusing to call the circus what it was. They awarded him long monologues instead of laughing him off the stage. They treated insanity as a legitimate governing philosophy. They fact-checked lies as if fact-checking mattered to people who'd already abandoned the concept of objective truth.
By refusing to call a joke a joke—by insisting on false equivalency in the name of "balance"—the media normalized the abnormal.
I'd love to end this with some kind of roadmap for how the media can fix this. Some three-point plan for restoring sanity to political coverage. But I've got nothing. We're in too deep. The damage is done. Half the country thinks expertise is elitism, education is indoctrination, and facts are just opinions you disagree with.
The media could start by remembering that some things don't deserve dignified responses. When someone says immigrants are eating pets, the correct response isn't an investigation—it's ridicule. When someone proposes economic policy that would have been debunked in 1930, you don't need a Nobel laureate to explain why—you just need two words: That's crazy.
But they won't do it. They can't do it. Because the incentive structures are all wrong, the business model is broken, and somewhere, an empty podium is waiting for Trump to arrive, and you just know every network is going to cut to it live.
We've dignified the absurd for so long that the absurd has become normal.
Welcome to the Meat Hook Realities. Uncomfortable truths, unapologetically told.