The Canadian Press
Alexander Panetta
WASHINGTON—Let the record show that this was the moment in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign that Donald Trump effectively was yanked from the funny pages.
Media that frequently derided him as a buffoonish sideshow in the serious process of picking a president suddenly were comparing him to things far more sinister than a clown.
That abrupt shift in coverage was triggered by his proposal to ban Muslim travel into the United States—a policy that one spokesman indicated even would apply to citizens returning home, although Trump clarified today that they’d be exempt.
The change appeared on multiple fronts—perhaps most graphically on the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News.
“The New Furor” was its lead headline under an unflatteringly timed photo of Trump with an extended arm.
An interviewer on MSNBC told him: “There’s a number of Americans you’re really scaring right now, including me.”
Another interviewer on CNN put it more bluntly.
“Leaders from your own party [are] saying this is un-American and extreme, and that it makes you a fascist. How do you respond?”
This was the day after Trump read out a statement on his new policy to a partisan crowd.
He received cheers throughout a caustic speech where he railed against the media in the back of the room as “absolute scum.”
Around the time he was taking the stage, the Huffington Post announced its own policy change.
Trump no longer was to be treated as a joke. The website had covered Trump in its entertainment section since the summer.
Now the primaries are less than two months away and Trump remains in first place in the Republican polls.
And he’s supplemented his promise to deport 11 million mostly Hispanic illegal migrants with a policy aimed at Muslims.
It would be the U.S.’s first culture-based entry ban in roughly seven decades since the repeal of Asian-exclusion laws.
The comic relief is over, the site founder declared.
“[Trump’s campaign has] morphed into something else: an ugly and dangerous force in American politics,” Arianna Huffington wrote in a post.
“So we will no longer be covering his campaign in Entertainment. . . .
“The ‘can-you-believe-he-said-that?’ novelty has curdled and congealed into something repellent and threatening—laying bare a disturbing aspect of American politics,” she added.
