Jonathan Martin on Accurately Covering Trump: ‘I Think Ten Years On, We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet’

EXCERPT:

MARTIN: "Look, the challenge with Trump is that you’re damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t. I don’t say that to look for a sympathy. I don’t say that to say to say 'woe is me'. Covering politics is the great joy of my life and I think it’s the best job in the world. But here’s what I mean. If you cover Trump straight and cover him for years and what he says, how he conducts himself, it basically demands page one, 'Pearl harbor' or 'Man walks on Moon' headlines day every day. You can’t do it! if you grade him on a curve, and you try to put him in that great blender of between the 40-yard lines, post-World War II consensus era of American politics that all of us has grew up in, you’re, doing the reader or viewer disservice, because you’re not really covering him for what it is. You’re pretending, like he’s a conventional figure, when he is emphatically not a conventional figure, he’s a break from modern American politics. So what do you do? It’s really tough. And I think, 10 years on, we haven't figured it out yet."