Marine Le Pen sprang from a bigoted movement: her father’s National Front party.
Donald Trump sprang from a bigoted movement: the birther conspiracy theory.
Le Pen said that France should greatly reduce immigration and shut down mosques; Trump said we should ban Muslims from entering the US and said he would consider registering Muslims and monitoring Muslim neighborhoods.
He was also publicly opposed to the mosque being built near Ground Zero, tweeting, “The Ground Zero Mosque should not go up where planned. It is wrong.”
Le Pen and Trump both campaigned hard against undocumented immigrants, scapegoating them for their respective country’s problems. Both praised Vladimir Putin – to a ridiculous level – and both were helped out by him.
{mosads}Both promoted isolationism: Trump called China a currency manipulator and threatened to hit it with a huge tariff; he consistently told supporters that outsiders were stealing their jobs. Le Pen campaigned against the globalized economy and the E.U., stating, “I want to bring the E.U. to its knees.”
Both also campaigned against allowing in refugees and promised to make their countries “great again” and put their countries “first.”
Both even had known bigots as fathers.
Basically, they are of the same mold, though one could argue that Trump is in fact worse.
So why then did France vociferously reject Le Pen – by a vote of nearly two to one – while we somehow wound up with Trump?
Well, part of the reason, of course, is that Trump was helped out by an anachronistic Electoral College system, FBI Director James Comey’s interference, and a better coordinated and long-lasting effort by Russia and WikiLeaks.
But part of the reason is also the giant hole in our media. Whereas Le Pen was consistently and accurately referred to as a right-wing extremist with bigoted views, Trump was referred to as a “controversial billionaire.” The more accurate way to refer to Donald Trump would’ve been to call him what he is: a white supremacist with extremist policies.
The media could have introduced him each time “the leader of the racist birther movement,” which would’ve been objectively honest, but such honesty was avoided out of fear of seeming biased.
After the Access Hollywood tape emerged, it would’ve been completely correct to refer to Trump as a misogynist and as a “sexual assault boaster,” but that wasn’t done either. In fact, many in the media were far too enamored with Mr. Trump, considering him “fascinating” or “always interesting” – as if his entertainment value somehow made up for his bigotry and inexperience.
After his 2011 F-bomb tirade in Las Vegas, Wolf Blitzer remarked: “Say what you will about Donald Trump – he’s never, never dull.”
Unfortunately, CNN kept that mentality throughout the 2016 campaign, giving Trump an inordinate amount of coverage while adding a billion dollars to their profits.
And then there’s Fox “News.”
“We don’t have a Fox News in France,” Johan Hufnagel, managing editor of Libération told the New York Times. In comparing the hack of Emmanuel Macron’s emails to the hacks done by Russia to hurt Hillary Clinton, he said, “There’s no broadcaster with a wide audience and personalities who build this up and try to use it for their own agendas.”
The impact of Fox “News” has done more, though, than just legitimizing Trump and his racism: it also acts as a magnet that consistently pulls the national conversation to the right. Fox is so good at complaining about unfairness that it forces other, legitimate, non-propaganda-based networks from reporting things accurately, afraid they’ll be said to have an agenda.
The network succeeded in making “mainstream” a bad word. The irony, of course, is that it’s Fox that has the agenda and they push it night after night after night.
But the media alone can’t bear all of the blame. Some of the blame rests with the American voter. It’s (unfortunately) become the accepted view of late that Trump voters did nothing wrong, even though they all knew they were supporting an openly racist, openly bigoted, openly misogynistic candidate.
Certainly, the media bears some responsibility for making such support acceptable – but let’s not kid ourselves: this election revealed a tremendous amount of prejudice in our country, some of it outright hatred, much of it a more pernicious subtle bigotry.
In France’s case, they rejected that bigotry: Le Pen was soundly defeated, as she deserved to be.
What’s wrong with us, then, that we don’t see the horrible, horrible thing we did in allowing our version of Le Pen to become president?
Ross Rosenfeld is an educational reformer, historian and political pundit who has written for Newsday, the New York Daily News, Charles Scribner’s, MacMillan, Newsweek.com, Primedia and others. He is a frequent contributor to The Hill.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.