How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? Journalists are at a loss. Vox's Tara Golsham this week pointed out one representative example of how difficult it is to deal with Trump, zeroing in on his response to the Orlando murders:

"Trump claimed the shooter, Omar Mateen, was 'born an Afghan' (he was born in America). He (baselessly) pointed fingers at the Muslim community for harboring terrorists. He (baselessly) insinuated that President Barack Obama had something to do with the attack. He (falsely) claimed the United States has no vetting process for Syrian refugees. And so on."

Golsham wonders how journalists are supposed to address "so many wild insinuations" without giving them more currency or getting bogged down in Trump's Rube Goldberg-like world view. Worse, she wonders if it even matters, seeing as journalistic fact-checks are now increasingly filtered and manipulated by people's ideological biases through their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

"Journalists are no longer gatekeepers in the way they were," journalism professor Lucas Graves told Golsham. "Even a decade ago you could meaningfully speak of journalists being able to police to some extent the focus and nature of public discourse, and that is simply not true anymore."

The result: FactCheck.org, the nonpartisan "consumer advocate for voters," says that Trump "stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong."

In response, a band of acclaimed American historians, horrified that the Republican Party is about to nominate Trump for the presidency, has thrown off their usual unspoken rule to avoid engaging in present-day politics. Led by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough, they have created a Facebook page called "Historians on Donald Trump" that warns Americans against what the real-estate magnate truly represents: hatred, strife, lies, chaos.

"Like so many others," McCullough says in a video posted to the Facebook page, "I keep asking myself how in the world can it be that the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, is on the verge of nominating the likes of Donald Trump for president of the United States?"

He points out that Trump has never served his country in any way, that in his long career Trump has only ever served himself. McCullough continues: "President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who so admirably served his country his entire career, said there were four key qualities by which we should measure a leader: character, ability, responsibility and experience. Donald Trump fails to qualify on all four counts. And it should be noted Eisenhower put character first. In the words of the ancient Greeks: Character is destiny."

David McCullough David McCullough has twice received the Pulitzer Prize -- for "Truman" (1992) and "John Adams" (2001) -- and twice received the National Book Award -- for "The Path Between the Seas" (1977) and "Mornings on Horseback" (1982). His other acclaimed books include "The Greater Journey" (2011), "1776" (2005), "Brave Companions" (1991), "The Johnstown Flood" (1968), "The Great Bridge" (1972) and "The Wright Brothers" (2015). He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Posted by Historians on Donald Trump on Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Kai Bird compares "the know-nothing candidacy of the real-estate huckster Donald Trump" to Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who fueled the Red scare in the 1940s and '50s and destroyed innocent people's lives through false claims about communist infiltration of the U.S. government.

Bird points out that Trump "has no facts, no understanding, no philosophy, no values, no heartfelt empathy for anyone or anything. He is clearly a charlatan." But he also points out that "farce can be dangerous" in politics.

Adds still another Pulitzer Prize winner, Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro: "History tells us we shouldn't underestimate [Trump]. History is full of demagogues who sometimes rise to the very heights of power by appealing to things that are unfortunately a part of human nature: racism, which I think is a part of human nature no matter how hard we try, and excessive virulent patriotism that goes by the name xenophobia."

The Clinton factor

Donald Trump is a world-class dissembler and rabble-rouser. But if he wins in November and brings upon the ruin many economists fear would follow, one of history's villains just might be his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

How is Trump her fault? The fact that he's competitive in the polls has more to do with Clinton's inherent weaknesses as a candidate than it does with Trump's strengths, goes the argument. In the aftermath of a Trump presidency, Clinton therefore would be remembered as a politician whose time had passed -- and who was mortally wounded by 25 years of conspiracy theories and scandal -- but who called in her markers and ran for president again anyway.

Robert Reich, the Labor secretary in Bill Clinton's administration,

a photo that showcases just how ambivalent even Democrats are about their standard-bearer this year. In the photo, a bumper sticker on a parked car says, "Bernie 2016," referring to Clinton's democratic-socialist challenger in the primaries, Bernie Sanders. Next to it is a newer sticker that says, "OK, Fine. Hillary, I guess."

Joe McCarthy is a name that frequently comes up when historians and journalists look for historical equivalents to Trump. Another is Huey Long, the powerful Louisiana governor and senator in the 1930s. For those who insist we have nothing to worry about with Trump because Americans have flirted with dangerous political characters before and always ultimately rejected them, it is recommended that you read up on Long. If not for an assassin's bullet -- the best thing that ever happened to the Kingfish's reputation -- he very well could have become president. His biographer T. Harry Williams wrote of how Franklin D. Roosevelt "feared" Long's demagogic skills and believed the Louisiana politician was the only rival "who might unseat him from the presidency."

Long himself -- who told voters he'd make "every man a king" -- certainly believed he could best Roosevelt. Here's what he had to say about FDR in 1935: "I can take him. He's a phony ... He's scared of me. I can outpromise him, and he knows it. People will believe me and they won't believe him. His mother's watchin' him, and she won't let him go too far, but I ain't got no mother left, and if I had, she'd think anything I said was all right."

In the here and now, journalists are trying to figure out what to do about Trump's outright denial of facts and his Huey Long-like skill at ginning up emotion. So far, they are flailing. They simply don't know how to cover a candidate who can't be shamed by having his lies exposed -- and whose backers just don't seem to care that their candidate is lying. At a certain point, a "Why bother?" weariness set in: just run a live feed of Trump talking at a rally, they decided, and call it a day.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen believes political journalism must evolve quickly and dramatically to address the Trump phenomenon.

"Everything that happens in election coverage is premised on a kind of opinion: that our votes should be based on reliable information about what the candidates intend to do if elected," Rosen wrote this week in the Washington Post. "Remove that assumption and the edifice crashes. But this is exactly what the candidacy of Donald Trump does. It upends the assumptions required for the traditional forms of campaign journalism even to make sense."

What Rosen is saying is that, unlike all modern major-party nominees that have come before him, Trump isn't even trying to come up with serious solutions to the country's problems. He is offering pure populism straight from the can, bypassing voters' brains entirely and hitting them right in the gut. He calls Trump's proposal to build a wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it "a parody of policy discussion, a kind of goof on the political class."

At least the wall is a specific proposal that Trump has held onto. On almost every other issue, he's impossible to pin down, which showcases the real-estate magnate and reality-TV star's scary political genius. Rosen argues that Trump wants to "increase" public confusion about where he actually stands on any issue. That way voters are forced to react to him emotionally.

So how does journalism respond to the Trump challenge? Lucas Graves calls for live fact-checking during the fall TV debates between Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The candidates would be challenged on every false or misleading statement and wouldn't get to move on to another subject until they had directly addressed their difficulty with facts. Good luck getting either campaign to embrace that idea.

Then there's simply dogged professionalism. Political reporters should track everything Trump says and highlight the outright lies, the dog-whistle racism, the irresponsible insinuations -- and explicitly call them what they are. And they should do this, day in and day out, for the next four months. Graves, still willing to give American voters credit, believes this approach probably would pay off. But it's a gamble -- a big one.

"The fact that Trump ignores the fact-checkers does not mean that fact-checking will not have an important impact on this race," he said. "This is a really unusual contest. Trump is a really unusual candidate, and the long-term result to Trump is an open question."

-- Douglas Perry