At The Mossy Log, we put a lot of effort into covering the whole of Lewis & Clark. We try to take a fair, comprehensive cross-section of campus life and to represent a diverse array of experiences and opinions.
Like many publications, we spent the better part of this semester figuring out how to cover the 2024 general election. We updated our style guide with proper formatting and usage of political terms, came up with interesting angles to measure the temperature in the community and took great care to create an artifact by freezing this particular moment in time into our archives.
As copy chief, I read a lot of opinions. Subjects we quoted, events our reporters attended, opinion articles we published; it is part of my job to read every single word we publish. In doing so, I found myself increasingly frustrated with a recurring trend among our community members, and thus in our coverage of them.
It is no secret that LC leans considerably to the left, but there was no outpouring of support among students for the Democratic candidate in Vice President Kamala Harris. There was certainly even less support for former candidate and current President Joe Biden, but, for the diversity-touting coastal elites that we are, I noticed a surprising lack of celebration of Harris, who would have brought a laundry list of “firsts” to the office.
Even more surprising to me was a curious absence of criticism of then-former President, now President-elect Donald Trump. We did not publish any quotes outright endorsing Trump (not for lack of willingness on our part, but rather for lack of quotees expressing as much), but people we interviewed tended to have a lot more criticism of Harris, even if they preceded it with a lukewarm renunciation of Trump before diving into the real issues.
What were the issues that LC students cared about? Climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, the economy and the Middle East.
So, for comparison’s sake, how did the candidates differ?
Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement and thought “clean coal” was cleaned by hand. As a part of the Biden administration, Harris contributed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated $370 billion to advance clean energy infrastructure, address pollution and fight unemployment in the process.
Trump vowed to “keep men out of women’s sports” and called gender-affirming care for minors “mutilation.” Harris has openly supported the Equality Act, which if passed would “prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”
Trump tried to eliminate the Affordable Care Act and has proposed tariffs that economists say would cost households $1700 each year on average, with the poorest Americans being hit the hardest. Harris’ economic plan included robust support for first-time homeowners, continued the Inflation Reduction Act’s cap on the price of insulin and would have increased taxes on corporations and the richest Americans.
But you know all that.
The Middle East is the issue, is it not? My fellow students, on aggregate, denounce the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, and seem to think their preferences are so radical that Harris and Trump would be equally inept at fulfilling them.
Once again, a comparison: Harris supports a two-state solution, has pushed for a ceasefire and refused to align herself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While she has certainly not renounced Israel, as I believe many of my peers would like her to, her stance is both nationally popular and nowhere near the destructive potential of Trump’s. Trump ended U.S. opposition to settlements in the West Bank while in office, said in April about the war that Israel should “get it over with” and was dubbed by Netanyahu as the “best friend Israel has ever had in the White House,” with whom he has a decades-long personal relationship. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said in March that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and that he “would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Kushner was a senior advisor to Trump in his first term, and while his role in the coming administration is yet to be seen, his proximity to the President-elect is still relevant as ever.
As I see it, none of this is news. We know who Trump is. He has been a facet of American politics for almost a decade, and a public figure for decades more. I am deeply troubled by the fact that the people around me — on campus, online and even in some areas of news media — seem to have lost the ability to care.
To care that Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and accused of raping a 13-year-old girl at Jeffrey Epstein’s apartment, along with accusations from fourteen other women. To care that he has 34 felony convictions for covering up hush money payments to a porn star. To care that he called Haiti a “shithole” while he was the President of the United States and made a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in were eating cats and dogs while he was running to be the president again.
Instead, people cared about Harris. Her history as a prosecutor, district attorney and attorney general in California. Her performance as the vice president. For months, I have read every conceivable criticism of her in the pages of this newspaper. That she is “a horrible monster,” “morally repugnant” and was “the lesser of two evils.” That, even when compared to Trump, she is “evil.”
Why? Why spend all that time, all that ink, on dissecting and denouncing Harris? Just because everyone already knows Trump is a racist, sexist, xenophobic threat to American democracy? Because he is so extreme, so predictably deplorable, that we should cease to hold him accountable altogether? I do not think it makes me a broken record to criticize Trump. I think our collective failure to do so is unacceptable. I find it unacceptable that, as the highly political, highly educated young people we claim to be, we have a fatal blindspot in our discourse. A blindspot that is about to be the President of the United States. Again.
It is not unfair, or unnecessary, to critique those in power. Harris is in power, and as her constituents, we have a responsibility to view her critically. When we dissect her every misstep, policy position and public appearance to such an extent, regardless of the progressive, moralistic intentions present, the end result is the mass vilification of a woman of color who has dedicated her life to public service. This comes at the expense of recognizing Trump as a serious, existential threat to our nation as we know it, even if doing so feels oh-so-2016.
Political consciousness, and certainly political time and effort, are finite. We only print so many articles a semester, only have so many hours in a day and only have so many things to say about politics before it is depressing, misanthropic and woefully unproductive. We have to be more thoughtful with how we discuss current events, because there is only so much discussion we can possibly have. Donald Trump is going to take office in less than two months. If we continue to write him off, we will be complicit in his every future transgression.
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