The left-leaning Huffington Post, one of the most trafficked news websites, is changing course on its Donald Trump coverage.
Since March, the Post has maintained that Trump was not a serious presidential candidate, and relegated all coverage of Trump to the site’s “entertainment” section, rather than its politics section.
Post founder and Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington penned a blog post on Tuesday that said Trump’s latest comments on Muslims mean that his campaign deserves new scrutiny. On Monday, Trump called for a “total” ban of Muslims trying to come into the U.S.
Huffington said that Trump’s campaign has “morphed into something else: an ugly and dangerous force in American politics.”
“[A]t first, this over-the-top xenophobia, though disgusting, played as the sour shtick of a washed-up insult comic,” Huffington said. “Now that Trump, aided by the media, has doubled down on the cruelty and know-nothingness that defined his campaign’s early days, 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 said that Trump will now be covered as a serious candidate but with special attention: “So if Trump’s words and actions are racist, we’ll call them racist. If they’re sexist, we’ll call them sexist. We won’t shrink from the truth or be distracted by the showmanship.”
Trump and the Post have had a contentious relationship dating back to at least 2012, when Trump wrote a series of messages on social media that were personally critical of Arianna Huffington.
Back when the Post had initially decided not to cover Trump as a legitimate candidate, he told the Washington Examiner media desk that it was “a very dishonest organization” and that “they never cover me honestly.”
Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. comes in light of two separate terrorist attacks, one in the San Bernardino, Calif., and one in Paris, that were directly related to the terrorist network the Islamic State.
