What's the Lede?
How the media missed the boat on today's Trump outrage.
HERE’S HOW I would have filed the story:
WASHINGTON — In a post that may live in infamy, President Donald Trump threatened Sunday to lay waste to Iran’s civilian infrastructure unless Tehran stops blocking the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday. “Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards,” he said on Truth Social, “or you’ll be living in Hell.”
A month after declaring the U.S.-Israeli alliance would easily triumph without a threat to the vital oil channel, Trump’s bellicosity bordered on threatening war crimes. “Praise be the Allah,” said the president, a favorite of evangelical Christian voters.
Had an editor pushed back on the opening clause, I would have relented; it may be too cute by half. But I would have fought for the rest.
A president’s words matter. A key to White House coverage is to craft ledes that make room for presidential quotes. Elevate his words, don’t soften them. Spotlight them, don’t scrub them.
Trump made it easy on editors Sunday, launching a verbal warhead that spoke for itself. But too many news organizations tried to speak for him. They used cliches like “expletive-laden” to wash his language and asterisks to disguise it, burying the full crazy of his quotation deep in their stories.
That’s not how White House journalism should work.
The news in his post — the outrage of his post — is not just the ladened expletives. It’s the intemperance shown by a man with access to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It’s the threat to destroy bridges and power plants, potential war crimes. It’s calling the enemy “crazy bastards” in the language of a crazy bastard. It’s a political leader who would not be president without the support of evangelical Christians praising Allah.
But his supports say: He was just mocking Muslims! That’s deplorable. That’s news.
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I am a former White House correspondent for The Associated Press, AP bureau chief, National Journal editor-in-chief, and Atlantic columnist with 30 years in journalism before leaving the trade in 2018.
Thank you! Americans NEED to see exactly what their president posts on Easter morning, in all its obscenity.
Presidents are the top of our hired help to run our country. Have to ask ourselves: do we want to keep someone on the job who threatens war crimes against 93 million people on Easter morning?
There isn't a mainstream journalist in America who could write that story and get it filed and they all know it. By my informal, back of the envelope calculation, this type of reporting died out sometime in the early 2010s. That's roughly when I stopped reading the Washington Post regularly because it no longer had hard hitting stories that were brave.