We are no fans of the former president and see his influence on our democracy as chaotically pernicious. Still, the collective hatred of Trump and the scorn with which his pronouncements typically were greeted meant that many in the media suspended one of journalism’s most crucial creeds: to check everything out.
Just because a person lies or talks nonsense some of the time does not mean that they are not wise or truthful at other moments. And too many journalists failed to see that substituting a kind of collective groupthink certainty as a weapon against Trump was deeply problematic. That’s especially true given the lack of any evidence that Trump was actually wrong when he called on an obfuscating China to come clean, to investigate its research activities and to make its findings available to the wider scientific community.