The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms

The Donald Trump campaign inadvertently performed a public service when it exposed the weakness and vulnerability of the euphemisms long used by political journalists. News organizations have been forced to acknowledge that phrases like “stretched the truth” and “fudged the facts” are useless for describing a candidate who speaks falsely in virtually every breath. Genteel circumlocution has given way to calling out lies as lies.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has also made it difficult for opinion writers — even those disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt — to avoid describing his behavior as racist. The signal moment came when, having already characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, he declared an American-born judge of Mexican descent unfit to preside over a lawsuit against the con game known as Trump University. Even the House speaker, Paul Ryan, had to concede that this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Instead of using phrases like “racially inflammatory” or “racially insensitive,” editorial pages were calling racism by its name. The shift was clear in the language of the endorsements Hillary Clinton received from news organizations across the political spectrum.

The Cincinnati Enquirer — endorsing a Democrat for president for the first time in a century — observed that Mr. Trump seemed incapable of even opening his mouth “without saying something misogynistic, racist or xenophobic.” The Dallas Morning News — in its first Democratic presidential endorsement since before the United States entered World War II — argued that Mr. Trump’s appeal to racism and other pathologies brings out the worst in the country. The New Yorker recoiled from a Trump campaign it described as “sickeningly sexist and racist.”

This brand of frankness came second-hand to the traditional press through social media, especially Twitter, where younger African-Americans are more likely than other internet users to be heavily engaged. That Americans in general — and news organizations in particular — are increasingly using social media has also helped push frank racial discussions to the fore.

The black-inflected online community has offered a nonstop tutorial on the nature of institutional racism and how it has led to tragedies like the Charleston church massacre and the shootings of Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castile and many others.