Donald Trump is once again in legal trouble. But he’s had legal troubles all my life.

Beginning with the 1973 Nixon Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit against his company, Trump was involved in more than 3,500 legal disputes before he even moved to the White House. Yes, some, like the complaint against a tenant for not paying rent even though he had been frivolous, but many, like those from the Justice Department, weren’t.

This should all have been a red flag to the media. But it wasn’t.

Instead, media executives put Trump on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous; they gave him his own reality TV show; and they made him spew lies about President Obama’s parentage without providing a shred of evidence.

CNN’s infamous recent Trump Town Hall debate made it seem like How Do We Cover Trump? was a new question. But New York newspapers ran his full-page ads effectively calling for the death penalty for the now-exonerated Central Park Five in 1989, even though their executives knew Trump could not be trusted. And they knew that because their papers had been reporting on Trump for years.

We journalists can certainly use our sharp tongues and witty prose to weed out the cowards in Congress who are afraid to admit that classified documents shouldn’t be sprawled on the floor of a Florida storage unit. But the media was legitimizing Trump long before those red baseball caps became a thing.

Even now, much of the coverage of the federal indictment against the former president has focused on its unprecedented nature. Yet the fact is that this is someone who has been in legal trouble for half a century.

How do we cover Trump? is not the question at the moment. That question should have been asked and answered long before he emerged as the Republican frontrunner for 2024 or 2016.

Trump is now in a fourth consecutive general election, as sometime between “The Apprentice” and the 2016 primary, his importance shifted while his media coverage remained the same. This corrupt figure became the leader of a dangerous movement, but was still treated like an absent-minded celebrity.

In 1991, two years after suggesting that black and brown kids should be executed for a crime they didn’t commit, Trump said, in reference to a black accountant at one of his casinos, Black guys are counting my money! I detest it. The only kind of people I want to count my money on are little boys who wear yarmulkes every day.” as if one had nothing to do with the other.

He was good on TV, so Trump who

had

coined the phrase “truthful exaggeration” decades earlier and didn’t have to provide any proof. Reviews and clicks only.

The non-stop coverage of his 2016 campaign featured an empty stage at times, as media executives only counted on the expectation that he would appear. Trump understood all this. He also understood that millions of Americans felt voiceless. So he took advantage of his celebrity to speak on their behalf with the help of an industry he knew how to manipulate all too well.

The media has been covering Trump and his legal woes for 50 years, and he knows we have yet to get it right. Thousands upon thousands of lawsuits for ossifying its contractors, for shutting it down

tenants’de

heat in the dead of winter and yet he was always able to use his celebrity to say whatever he wanted on the air.

Perhaps instead of asking how we cover Trump, we should ask why.

Why is there an empty stage on the screen? Why is a person

who went south

repeatedly allowed for fraud to question someone’s legitimacy without evidence? And why is the media still wagging the alleged watchdog through Trump’s stories?

@LZGranderson