The trouble with writing about Donald Trump

This weekend, the mainstream media was all in a tizzy because of Nick Kristof's column arguing "that we in the media screwed up" on Donald Trump.

As someone who has #headdesked himself repeatedly over Trump's myriad failings as a possible president, I confess that I'm not terribly interested in Kristof telling me to eviscerate Trump's idiotic foreign policy viewsyet again. Rather, I'd suggest a few things in reaction to Kristof's column:

• Kristof is really writing about television rather than all news media;

• Kristof's complaint about reporters not taking Trump seriously seems about six months out of date;

• It's not that the media hasn't fact-checked Trump to death, it's that his supporters remain convinced that Trump is right;

• Trump hasn't really expanded his electoral support all that much, so maybe the media might be doing something right?

• For opinion writers, there's another problem with criticizing Trump: He's too basic.

Let me elaborate on that last point.

It might shock you, my dear readers of Spoiler Alerts, but opinion writing is not rocket science. Events happen. Opinion writers react and interpret them using our own prisms of experience, education and analytic training. Or, sometimes, we wait, and react and explain why the first round of punditry is wrong. When we do this, the goal is to be right, of course, but also to be read. The latter can involve adopting a counterintuitive position, or linking a story to a larger, ongoing theme, or pointing out the ways in which this news shatters some stale conventional wisdom (or reaffirms said wisdom, take your pick).

The more singular one's punditry, the better -- provided that the writer can draw upon facts in evidence to support that view. The great thing about the world is that most events or people or trends are complicated enough to inspire a welter of different viewpoints.

The trouble with writing about Trump is that he has no complexity. There is no subtext to what Trump says or does -- it's all on the surface. He's so basic that it's impossible to find any deeper meaning or counterintuitive take.

This is true regardless of one's ideological starting point. For months, Jonathan Chait and Matthew Yglesias kept trying to find ways to argue that Trump was a better choice for president than the other GOP candidates. A few violent rallies later, however, even they had to admit that they were wrong. At the same time, Mollie Hemingway and Mary Katherine Ham are conservatives who like to take issue with modern feminism in interesting and thoughtful ways. When it comes to Trump, however, they both wind up sounding like someone who works for the Center for American Progress. That's because neither of them is stupid and it's blindingly obvious that Trump really is that much of a misogynist.

Some realists and paleoconservatives have desperately tried to excuse Trump's transgressions to focus on his foreign policy musings. This might be because they think Trump vexes neoconservatives, and neoconservatives are awful. Or it could be because they yearn for a Trojan horse to smack down conventional wisdom about American foreign policy. The problem is that the more Trump opens his mouth on foreign policy, the stupider and shallower he sounds. Unsurprisingly, realists don't want to be associated with yet another objectionable politician.

Others have tried to use Trump's surge to argue that he's exposing economic anxieties or fury about political correctness or whatnot. Trump's voters certainly merit analysis, but claiming that his support is really about trade or immigration misses the bigracistelephant in the room. The public opinion data suggests that the appeal of Trump's economic musings is pretty limited. And the meager efforts to defend Trump's rudeness as "politically incorrect" are so laughable that they undercut those trying to defend free speech. Trump is simply too toxic a brand even for those who might want to champion some of his populist worldview.

Trump reduces all punditry to the obvious take.

No matter how much one tries to develop an alternative perspective, the inescapable conclusion is that Trump is a narcissistic, ignorant, misogynistic gasbag. Which means that, at this point, the entire commentariat winds up sounding pretty much the same when it comes to him.

I suspect that this near-uniform chattering class repugnance with Trump, his ugly campaign and his retrograde policies absolutely delights his supporters. There is so little trust in authority that for those voters, the bipartisan calumny that will rain down upon The Donald is seen as proof that he must be right.

Fortunately, those supporters represent a decided minority of voters. Which means he probably won't win the general election. Unfortunately, it means we're going to have seven more months of Very Boring Punditry about how the likely GOP nominee is an arrogant know-nothing. I'll probably contribute my fair share of analysis to this pile. But at this point in the 2016 election cycle, no opinion writer wants to write about Trump even though we have to write about Trump.

He's basic and bad. There's really nothing else of substance to say.

Previously:
• 02/29/16: Nobody will admit to the real reason Donald Trump is winning