Don't Normalize Donald Trump; 'Abnormalize' Him

Much has been said about how we Americans, particularly we Americans in the mainstream media, should not "normalize" Donald Trump. I think it's way too late for that.

Look around. Most Republicans already have normalized Trump. So have the independent swing voters and even disgruntled Democrats who helped to get him elected. Either he was normal enough for those voters or those voters didn't want "normal." They wanted change. They wanted what President Barack Obama offered as a candidate in 2008: hope and change.

It's hard to change people's minds about someone they have normalized. Yet some things need to be abnormalized.

For some of us, Trump's attempts to win votes by any means necessary are jeopardizing our ability to get along across racial and ethnic lines. We must not normalize his racial dog-whistle rhetoric that appears to have fed a spike of more than 700 incidents of hateful harassment and attacks since Election Day, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Those included anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-LGBT, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-woman incidents. A church near my neighborhood was spray-painted with anti-Hispanic immigrant graffiti. An Asian-American friend was out playing with her son when an elderly white man told her to "go back" where "she came from." By the way, she's American.

Coincidence? I think not. Trump has been reluctant to denounce such violence except for one brief "Stop it" in answer to a direct request on "60 Minutes." That's the sort of passive attitude that needs to be abnormalized, perhaps beginning with how news media cover it.

But that's hard for news reporters, who, unlike us opinion writers, are expected to be balanced and objective. That shouldn't mean false equivalencies should be drawn in a way that normalize speech and behavior that should be abnormal -- and unacceptable.

Yet sometimes even straight news reporters have to draw the line. Back in September, for example, TV reporters balked at Trump's refusal to let reporters or producers tour his new Washington, D.C., hotel. He only wanted to allow photographers. That was a no-no to the news crews, which erased their video in protest.

Usually, his media manipulations and liberties with the truth are more subtle -- until they aren't. Promises that repeatedly brought cheers from campaign crowds have been casually rolled back by the new president-elect. In a live-tweeted meeting with The New York Times' editors Tuesday, he said prosecuting Hillary Clinton is "just not something that I feel very strongly about." Climate change? Previously he called it a hoax. Now? He's keeping "an open mind."

Maybe he'll keep the most popular parts of Obamacare, he said after meeting with President Obama. Maybe he won't try to round up and deport all of the undocumented immigrants in the country. Maybe just the violent criminals. Maybe the wall he wants to build along the Mexican border with be part wall, "part fence."

Yet his casual rollbacks on his biggest problems bring remarkably little backlash from his supporters. As The Atlantic's Salena Zito memorably wrote while covering Trump's campaign, "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; "his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

But so what if he casually rolls back on his promises as if he never made them? When he makes such claims, "the press takes him literally, but not seriously," wrote The Atlantic's Salena Zito while covering Trump; "his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

Trump's media games took on a new significance after he resumed his pre-election habit of waging useless Twitter wars, this time with the New York cast of the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton."

Trump was steamed that Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by the crowd and (politely) called out from the stage at the Friday night show.

"The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated," Trump tweeted, "should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior."

Never mind that Pence later said that he wasn't offended at all. (And never mind that "Hamilton" is in no way overrated.) But Trump's little Twitter feud was perfectly timed to distract the world from his $25 million settlement of three class-action civil lawsuits brought against Trump and his "university," the controversial learning annex which was not really a university, the New York attorney general, said.

Was Trump's anti-"Hamilton" Twitter tirade, then, a deliberate diversion from a far more damaging news story? If anything pokes holes in Trump's new-found image as a champion of ordinary folks, the Trump University scam does it. That's an important story but, alas, less tantalizing to home audiences than Trump's Twitter jab at those supposedly snooty liberal actors on Broadway.

That's normal behavior for Trump. That's why he needs to be "abnormalized," in my view. His success at hiding scandals behind gossipy controversies needs to be the exception, not the rule.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)