That’s just the sort of catchy little melody to get you singing in the showers

In the last weeks of the campaign, Trump keeps fashing up:
Former president Donald Trump suggested that a heckler would later get “the hell knocked out of her” during an insult-laced speech here Saturday that portrayed a dark image of the country and demonized undocumented immigrants.
As Trump called the Nov. 5 election a “chance to send a message,” he stopped his remarks and turned to the crowd.
“Back home to mommy, she goes back home to mommy,” Trump said, resuming his speech and appearing to address a heckler. “‘Was that you darling?’ And she gets the hell knocked out of her. Her mother’s a big fan of ours, you know that right? Her father, her mother. You always have that.”
It was not the first time Trump has used violent language to attack hecklers who interrupt his rallies. In 2016, after a heckler interrupted a Las Vegas rally, Trump told the crowd: “Here’s a guy throwing punches, nasty as hell, screaming at everybody else,” before adding: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” In Iowa during the same campaign, he also encouraged supporters to “knock the crap” out of potential hecklers.
The last graf is also important — the ratio might be increasing but none of Trump’s fascist rhetoric is unprecedented. The biggest difference is that Trump will be in a better position to act on it if he wins again.
In related news, Michael Barbaro playing dumb to Margaret Sullivan here is a real “how we got there and might get there again” moment:
Positioned directly next to each other, as they were on the Times site, they were quickly seen as a microcosm of What the Hell is Wrong with Media Today. “This arrangement and editorial gloss may stand for, capture, the journalism about the entire campaign,” noted Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo.
One, on a story about how Harris has avoided specifics in order to stay on message as she does press interviews read: In interviews, Kamala Harris continues to bob and weave.
The other, on a story about Trump’s alarming language about migrants as carriers of supposedly impure bloodlines and genes read: In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.
Commenting on the second headline, the author Stuart Stevens, who writes about how democracies turn into autocracies, suggested: “These two headlines should be studied in journalism classes for decades.”
After I responded, “Not a bad idea,” a prominent voice from the New York Times chimed in. Michael Barbaro, who hosts The Daily podcast, posed a challenge to me: “Care to explain what the issue is with these headlines?”
I mean, come on. It’s deeply weird how a Savvy pose in journalism means pretending that you just arrived into town on the back of the rutabaga van.
For the record:
Barbaro, whom I know from my days as public editor of the Times, is a smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he knows what the issue might be.
But sure, I’ll explain: The Kamala Harris headline is unnecessarily negative, over a story that probably doesn’t need to exist. Politicians, if they are skilled, do this all the time. They answer questions by trying to stay on message. They stay away from specifics that don’t serve their purpose.
“Can you be a political reporter and have perhaps never seen a politician be interviewed before?” Marshall mused. “Is this article even real?”
This is not news, but it fits in with the overhyped concern over how Harris supposedly hasn’t been accessible enough to the media — or if she is accessible, it’s not to interviewers that are serious enough. It doesn’t seem to matter that just days ago, she submitted to an interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” known for its probing style; meanwhile, we know that Trump first agreed to, and then backed out of a 60 Minutes interview, apparently in part because he didn’t want to be fact-checked.
So, it’s a negative headline over a dubious story. By itself, it’s not really a huge deal. Another example of Big Journalism trying to find fault with Harris. More of an eye-roll, perhaps, than a journalistic mortal sin.
But juxtapose it with the Trump headline, which takes a hate-filled trope and treats it like some sort of lofty intellectual interest.
That headline, wrote Stevens, “could apply to an article about a Nobel prize winner in genetic studies.”
The article itself got to the heart of the matter — but not until its 11th paragraph.
Democracy dies in the anodyne headline that gets to the story only in the 11th paragraph.