He’s guilty. Let’s get back to business.
Rather than focusing on a soaring national debt, stubborn inflation and a looming entitlement crisis, our political system has been transfixed on a legal spectacle that most voters haven’t cared about. While historic, this trial has taken our eyes off the ball. With the verdict now in, both campaigns would do well to move on and get back to what matters most: the financial future of America.
While both campaigns and the media seize upon the verdict to drive their usual narratives, the rest of the county — the commonsense majority — sees this as yet another distraction. They’re tired of our political system focusing more on personalities than problems. It’s why they have been steadily tuning out of politics for the past few years, which has continued with this election. A survey last month found that interest in the race was the lower than during any election since 2012 and had actually declined since September.
This is because of an extraordinary disconnect between what voters care about — their financial future — and what the media and both campaigns focus on. It’s not that Trump and Biden don’t have positions on inflation, the debt, entitlements or monetary policy. It’s simply that those messages are playing second fiddle to personal grievances, gotcha politics and backward-facing controversies like the Trump verdict and Hunter Biden trial.
National media deserves a lion’s share of the blame. It tried in vain to cast the Manhattan proceeding as “the trial of the century,” even as polls showed that most voters weren’t paying attention. Now the verdict is sparking wall-to-wall coverage, making our political conversation more like “Entertainment Tonight” than the policy debates of C-SPAN.
In this climate, voters would be hard pressed to articulate the difference between Trump’s prescriptions for the economy and Biden’s. How will either candidate address the fact that the Social Security trust fund is set to go bankrupt in eight years? How will either candidate stop the spending spree that has helped drive up inflation a cumulative 19 percent since the pandemic?
It’s the media’s job to extract these positions from the candidates and clarify them to the public. We need editors and producers who work to clarify policies, reporters that are not afraid of complicated issues, and commentators that speak for the majority of America and not their political interests.
Where I live in Dallas, voters see Washington, D.C. as almost like another planet that is drifting farther and farther away from them. They feel completely alienated and cynical about the direction of our politics. It may sound pollyannish, but we need political leaders to offer hope and a path out of the madness.
To be clear, it’s certainly true that people should be held accountable for what they do, Trump not least of all. The problem comes when the pursuit of justice begins to resemble pro-wrestling rather than meaningful discourse, and when it crowds out more important conversations about the country’s fiscal future.
The trial’s verdict comes at a crucial moment as we head into the summer months and toward the first of two major debates. Both candidates will face a decision, as will the media: Do they dwell exhaustively on the trial’s conclusion? Or do they treat it as just that — a conclusion — and move on to bigger issues?
Millions of voters, myself included, are hoping for the latter, and the debate in June is a perfect opportunity. There is too much at stake to make Stormy Daniels the focal point of that long overdue forum, much less the election. It’s incumbent on the candidates and the organizers to use the debate to get back to what matters: the future.
Mike Rawlings, a No Labels co-founder, was mayor of Dallas from 2011 to 2019.