Donald Trump is an aging fascist and a demented and unhinged convicted felon, sexual predator, and con artist. Yet, the mainstream media continues to apply traditional neutral reporting standards when covering his untraditional and frankly weird actions. If he were a normal candidate for President, he ought to be treated normally. But Trump isn’t normal, and there are many moments when he doesn’t deserve to be treated normally. He isn’t some quirky, outlier longshot presidential candidate, like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. This deranged wannabe autocrat is a guy who stands a good chance of once again becoming the leader of the free world, the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, and the person responsible for seeing that the laws of the land are faithfully executed. His track record of lies, threats, fearmongering and xenophobic scapegoating all suggest that he wants power only to benefit himself, not his country. Consequently, he needs to be outed and the danger he poses must become the responsible media’s lead stories, and not just editorial material.

If media outlets do not toe his line, Trump has repeatedly promised to illegally control them or shut them down, even though the media is protected by the First Amendment. Query: if his Supreme Court tells him he can’t do it, will he act illegally and simply replace the justices with his loyalists or perhaps even ignore them altogether? So, why then, isn’t the media opposing him to the fullest extent allowable by law? His assaults on them should place them at Defcon 1. Despite their claim that the media itself is never the news, the media is now part of the story itself because undermining the media is part of his announced platform.

Media outlets subject to his threats should do what patriotic, anti-monarchical newspapers did back in pre-Revolutionary War times: stir up patriots to fight back …

Media outlets subject to his threats should do what patriotic, anti-monarchical newspapers did back in pre-Revolutionary War times: stir up patriots to fight back against an identifiable enemy of the state.

Editorials are fine. In fact, The New York Times – one of the normalizers – published an honest, beautiful editorial on September 30, and I highly recommend it. However, the editorial belongs on page one above the fold because too many undecided voters do not read the op-ed page. The real, bare-knuckled truth about this dangerous politician and horrible human being ought to lead as headline news stories, not just as editorials. Whether in print form, or a television broadcast, or in online steaming, there is a very narrow window for getting the truth through to undecided voters. If they are forced to dive deeper, or search, or wait, they will likely move on to something else.

Mainstream media outlets who view Trump as an existential threat to democracy and free press journalism should be doing the following:

1. Print and broadcast as lead stories the truth about who Donald Trump really is, what he stands for, and how grave a threat he is to Madisonian democracy.
2. Call him out as a liar and a sociopath. For a long time, the mainstream media, while keeping score on his firehose torrent of lies, wouldn’t call him a liar. If King George III were a pathological liar, would Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine have sanitized their nouns and adjectives?
3. Challenge his consequential lies (there isn’t enough newsprint or air time to expose all of them). And don’t just fact check lies and say they aren’t true. Publish or broadcast the information that proves Trump is lying. It’s important to plainly publicize the truth because millions of undecided voters and soft supporters are not well-informed and have short attention spans. It’s a challenge, to be sure, but it just might pay dividends on Election Day.
4. End the double standard. Because Kamala Harris is a typical presidential candidate, talking about issues, stating policy positions with clarity, criticizing Trump with truth and endeavoring to answer questions using correct grammar, the media holds her to the traditional high standard befitting persons seeking the highest office. Trump, on the other hand, haughtily spews out word salads in the most fractured syntax imaginable, and the media gives him a pass. The only time he speaks with any clarity is when he’s lying about someone or something. If Harris acted that way, the media wouldn’t stop talking about it.
5. Stop “sane washing,” the practice of taking Trump’s rambling, nonsensical, and yes, insane speeches and translating them into what editors believe he was trying to say and make them sound somewhat sensible. The media, instead, should be “insanity exposing.” Why aren’t mental health professionals getting press attention when he behaves bizarrely and irrationally? When Biden faltered, the media wrote and spoke incessantly about his age and infirmities, and made no attempt to sane wash his words. With Trump they speculate on what he was trying to say when in fact his mind may not have even formed a thought at all.

Some will raise questions of journalistic ethics and fairness. The media must abide by the law, to be sure, but how does one effectively expose the most unethical, immoral, multi-indicted, multi-impeached, falsifying felon to ever get so close to the Oval Office without going on offense once in a while? When Trump crosses the line by a mile, the media must fight back, even if it means going against traditional notions of journalistic neutrality in order to call out Trump’s dangers.

Too many popular media outlets have been too deferential to the Bully Trump. Do they fear loss of circulation or TV ratings? Do they fear being sued (truth is a defense to libel)? Are they worried about losing revenue? What they should fear are Trump’s thugs barging into their newsrooms, expelling the real journalists and putting Steve Bannon in charge.