What I Learned From My Brush With Trump
Journalists
should never again allow someone to create an alternative reality in order to
seize the presidency.
By Jorge Ramos
Mr.
Ramos is a contributing opinion writer and an anchor for the Univision network.
- Dec. 4, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
MIAMI — I had the honor once of being
kicked out of a Donald Trump news conference. I asked him a question he didn’t
want to answer and a security guard threw me out. It happened on Aug. 25, 2015, in Dubuque, Iowa, during
Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign.
The news conference revealed with
astonishing clarity who Mr. Trump really was: a dangerous populist, an
anti-immigrant bully, and a threat to democracy and the free press.
Some were paying attention. But as Mr.
Trump’s base of support grew, journalists and politicians began paving his way
to the White House. Ignoring that early warning sign in Iowa cost the United
States dearly.
My tussle with the
president in Iowa can be traced back to the announcement of his presidential
campaign a couple of months earlier, when he rode down an escalator in Trump
Tower and then made a speech in which he called Mexican immigrants
criminals and “rapists.” Those racist comments were simply
unacceptable.
So, like any sensible journalist, I
wrote to the new candidate and asked him for an interview. However, instead of
answering my letter, he posted it on Instagram along
with my phone number. As a result, I received hundreds of hateful calls and
texts and I had to change my number.
What I didn’t change was my
determination to challenge his views on immigration, which led to our clash at
the news conference.
Here’s how it all went down in Dubuque. I waited for a pause in
Mr. Trump’s comments, raised my hand, said I had a question about immigration
and stood up to start speaking. Mr. Trump pretended he didn’t see me and
pointed to another journalist. But I kept talking.
“Sit down!” he ordered me four times. I
ignored him. “You haven’t been called,” Mr. Trump said. “Go back to Univision.”
It was the Trumpian version of the racial slur: “Go back to your country.”
He then gestured at a
nearby security guard, who started pushing me back from Mr. Trump, and
eventually I was forced out of the room. As the guard pushed me out, I told him
not to touch me and that I had the right to ask a question. Outside the
conference room, one of Mr. Trump’s supporters told me to “get out of my country,” not knowing that I was a
United States citizen. Hate is contagious.
Of all the reporters who were there,
only MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt and ABC News’s Tom Llamas defended me against Mr.
Trump. I was soon allowed to return to the room, where I was finally able to
ask Mr. Trump some questions. David Gergen, a longtime presidential adviser, told The New York Times soon after the news
conference that my exchange with Mr. Trump was going to be “one of the lasting
memories of this campaign.”
After my confrontation with Mr. Trump,
several journalists expressed their solidarity with me. And yet, strangely and
dangerously, the incident failed to shift the media’s obsessive coverage of Mr.
Trump, which over time normalized his rude, abusive and xenophobic behavior.
Some members of the press seemed fascinated by the Trump phenomenon; others
wrongly thought that he would soon change his ways. The prevailing attitude was
something along the lines of “That’s just the way Trump is, and we have to
cover him no matter what he says.”
Unfortunately, the things that Mr.
Trump kept saying were fundamentally against the idea of equality enshrined in
the Declaration of Independence. He insisted that he would build a border wall
between Mexico and the United States — and that Mexico would pay for it. He
said he would consider closing mosques in the United States as a
way of fighting the Islamic State.
None of these odious comments, and many
others like them, should have been surprising given that the same candidate,
back in 2011, falsely claimed on a radio
program that President Barack Obama “doesn’t have a birth
certificate.”
Despite that behavior, journalists
sought constant access to Mr. Trump during the campaign, and the media aired —
sometimes without any criticism or context — many of his most mind-boggling
comments.
All of which contributed to Mr. Trump’s
surprise, poll-defying victory in the 2016 election. And yet the attitudes and
behaviors that came to define Mr. Trump as president were already visible in
2015. Several journalists — especially those of us who had worked in Latin
America and covered strongmen there — saw this dynamic clearly and denounced
Mr. Trump. But it wasn’t enough.
At the time, I
believed, as I still do, that the new normal established by Mr. Trump was great
for ratings, but not for civility or democracy — and I made this clear
publicly. If Mr. Trump could attack me, he could attack other journalists. And
that’s exactly what he did as president, by calling certain media organizations
“the enemy of the people.”
In Mr. Trump’s convulsive, chaotic four
years in the White House, he separated thousands of children from their parents
at the border while failing to condemn white supremacy. At the same time, he
was able to fill three vacant seats on the Supreme Court with conservative
justices, extending his influence over America’s judicial system for many years
to come.
But ultimately his presidency was
overshadowed by a terrible tragedy: more than 270,000 people dead in the United States
and roughly 14 million infected, partly as a result of his irresponsible and
erratic handling of the coronavirus.
The United States will never fall prey
to tyranny. The nation’s balance of powers has survived quite well for nearly
two and a half centuries. And yet the celebrations I saw in the streets of
Washington and other American cities after President Trump’s defeat last month
reminded me so much of what I experienced in Nicaragua in the 1990s after the
fall of Sandinismo and in Mexico in the 2000s after the fall of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party’s “perfect dictatorship,” which had lasted 71
years.
All were celebrations of unburdening,
of something close to revenge — the bully who had dominated public life for so
long had finally been forced out. A huge weight had suddenly been lifted from
everyone’s shoulders.
We journalists should have been tougher
on Mr. Trump, questioning his every lie and insult. We should not have let him
get away with his racism and xenophobia. We should never again allow someone to
create an alternative reality in order to seize the presidency.
Perhaps it was the pandemic that was
most responsible for putting an end to Mr. Trump’s presidency. But the entire
debacle might have been avoided if we had simply paid greater attention — and
offered more resistance — to the words and gestures of the undeserving man who
descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower in 2015.
Jorge Ramos (@jorgeramosnews) is
an anchor for the Univision network, a contributing opinion writer and the
author of, most recently, “Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the
Trump Era.”
