The Real Story Isn’t Trump’s Lies—It’s That the Media Still Pretends They Don’t Matter
- john raymond
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
There comes a point where failure stops being accidental and becomes structural. We passed that point years ago.
Donald Trump has told over 30,000 lies. He has undermined every democratic norm. He has emboldened fascists, defended autocrats, incited insurrection, and sided repeatedly with a foreign adversary waging war on the West. He has done all of this in the open. He has done it consistently. And yet, to this day, most of the media ecosystem—legacy and independent alike—still doesn’t know how to cover him. Still doesn’t want to cover him for what he is.
Trump is not a puzzle. He is a pattern. And if you don’t see that pattern, then you are part of the problem.
Let’s start with the press. When Trump commits yet another moral obscenity or legal atrocity, corporate media treats it like weather: unpredictable, inevitable, unexplainable. There is a momentary lurch. The headlines twist. Tapper looks grave. The chyron blinks. And then it all resets. No cumulative understanding is permitted to form. No tree of knowledge is allowed to grow. Each new scandal is treated as disconnected, bizarre, and strangely unserious—just “Trump being Trump.”
And in that shrug, in that normalization, lies complicity.
Because this isn’t just a story about scandal. It’s a story about strategy. Trump is not merely chaotic. He is working for another power center—one that operates through disinformation, destabilization, and asymmetric sabotage. He is an actor in a hostile foreign campaign. That campaign is run out of Moscow. And everyone knows it.
Everyone knows it—and yet few say it. Certainly not the legacy journalists. Certainly not Jake Tapper, who would rather maintain a fantasy of objectivity than confront the core truth: that the Republican Party has been compromised by a man who is, functionally and financially, an agent of Russian power.
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s documented history. Trump has been surrounded by Kremlin-linked money and influence for decades. He was financed by oligarchs when no bank in the U.S. would touch him. His 2016 campaign was a parade of Russian contacts. His policies aligned over and over again with Russian interests. And every time he had the chance to support America’s allies or its security services over Putin, he chose Putin. Every. Time.
But Jake Tapper doesn’t report that. Kyle Kulinski dismisses it. Independent journalists wave it away as “old news” or “Russia hysteria.” What’s the harm in that? Everything.
Because when you refuse to connect the dots, you break the public’s ability to understand what’s happening. And when you do that, you’re doing Trump and Putin’s work for them.
The normalization of Trump has created a media ecosystem full of hollow outrage, shallow analysis, and careerism disguised as commentary. Journalists don’t dare say what’s true because saying it means burning bridges, risking access, and losing the illusion of neutrality. So instead they chase the scandal of the week. They say “Trump lies about everything” in one breath and then treat his statements about NATO, Ukraine, or trade policy as sincere in the next. They fall for the trap. They fall for his narrative. And they legitimize it every time they fail to see the pattern beneath the performance.
What’s worse, even those outside the corporate press often parrot the same flattened analysis. “Trump is an idiot.” “Trump is a narcissist.” Sure. But he’s also been astonishingly effective at consolidating power, evading justice, and transforming American conservatism into a vehicle for Russian geopolitical aims. That is not just stupidity. That is operational design. That is asymmetric war.
You can’t understand Trump if you don’t understand Putin. And you can’t understand Putin if you believe he’s a nationalist. He’s not. He’s a predator. Like Trump. They worship power, and they use empire, faith, patriotism, and freedom only as costumes. They believe in nothing but themselves. They weaponize hate. They glorify domination. They were both bullied and now build their identities on bullying the world.
And if you, as a journalist or commentator, have failed to grasp this—if you’ve treated Trump like a conventional politician, or Putin like a conventional adversary—then you have failed your audience. If you cannot say plainly that Trump is working to destroy American democracy on behalf of a hostile authoritarian regime, then you are worse than irrelevant. You are dangerous.
Because this isn’t about opinions. This is about whether truth can still exist in the public square. Trump and Putin’s shared war on truth is asymmetric—it doesn’t need to win arguments. It only needs to confuse. It only needs to exhaust. And if you, the journalist, help spread that confusion, even passively, then you are a combatant in their war.
People say: “Don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”But what if the malice succeeds?What if the incompetence is selective?What if, after all these years, the failure to get it right is no longer excusable?
Trump and Putin are not complicated. They are empty men. They are power-worshipping machines. They do not love their countries. They do not love their people. They love control. They love abuse. They love the pleasure of cruelty.
Until you say that, until you make it clear—loud, repeated, documented—that Trump is a Russian asset cultivated over decades for the purpose of destabilizing the West, you are lying by omission. And your silence helps him.
So if you’re writing about Trump, and you’re not writing that—you’re getting it wrong. And that wrong is costing us our country.
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