Trump could be our next president. That's not the media's fault.

Maybe if we scream a little louder?

We’re a year out from the 2024 presidential election, but there’s bad news: Donald Trump is winning.

President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.

Well, shit.

Margaret Sullivan, a longtime media critic and Guardian columnist, blames the media:

It’s now clearer than ever that Trump, if elected, will use the federal government to go after his political rivals and critics, even deploying the military toward that end. His allies are hatching plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one.

The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities.

Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization”, as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race – rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.

Here’s what must be hammered home: Trump cannot be re-elected if you want the United States to be a place where elections decide outcomes, where voting rights matter, and where politicians don’t baselessly prosecute their adversaries.

While admitting that folks in my industry can get distracted by shiny, shiny things — and Trump is adept at giving it to them — I still think Sullivan is wrong, for three reasons.

“The media” isn’t that monolithic. There are tens of millions of Americans who don’t want to hear what the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN have to say about Donald Trump. They’d rather hear nice things, so they go to “news sources” — Fox, NewsMax, the Daily Wire, and on and on — that tells them what they want to hear. If they don’t (as we found during Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox) that audience will simply turn to the next “news” sources that does.

So part of the problem here is that we have an audience problem, not a media problem. Which leads to…

A lot of folks like what Donald Trump is selling. It’s aggravating! It makes you doubt the wisdom and goodness of your fellow citizens! Nonetheless: Some folks are anti-abortion or anti-immigrant or simply think they do better economically under the former president and have decided he’s all right with them. Some folks are doing it because the people around them are doing it, and they’re not bad folks, right? Those people voting for Biden, on the other hand…

And listen: It’s not that they don’t understand he’s an authoritarian monster. They’ve seen the rallies where he promises he’ll be their retribution. Every person who will vote in 2024 was alive and sentient on Jan. 6. And during the pandemic. They’ve seen the forces Donald Trump will unleash. For far too many of our fellow citizens, that’s simply not disqualifying.

But there’s a nearly opposite reason that also comes into play here:

A lot of folks probably don’t believe Trump will do what he says’ll do. This is a fairly common phenomenon. I give you Steve Benen:

As regular readers might recall, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Congress eyed measures intended to give the economy a boost, and House Republicans were only too pleased to pitch their ideas. By any fair measure, the GOP bill included little more than tax cuts for corporations that the party wanted anyway. Even the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal conceded the plan “mainly padded corporate bottom lines.”

Democrats, eager to go on the offensive, convened focus groups to help sharpen their message. The party, however, quickly discovered a problem: Voters literally couldn’t believe that Republicans would respond to deadly terrorism by pushing corporate tax breaks. As The New York Times’ Paul Krugman explained at the time, the Republican proposal “was so extreme that when political consultants tried to get reactions from voter focus groups, the voters refused to believe that they were describing the bill accurately.”

More than a decade later, it happened again: A super PAC supporting Barack Obama’s re-election informed focus group participants about Paul Ryan’s budget plan and Mitt Romney’s support for it. As the New York Times reported soon after, respondents “simply refused to believe” what they were hearing, despite the fact that what they were hearing was true.

Sometimes the truth is too awful to believe. And so a lot of folks don’t.

All of this means there are so many Americans who won’t pay attention and won’t believe what the media says about Donald Trump. A lot of those Americans like it. Maybe the media should scream a bit more. I certainly plan to. But the problem isn’t that Americans aren’t being told what’s going on.