"The Washington Post"s Dana Milbank called Halperin's analysis in the 2016 United States presidential campaign "soulless" and "amoral," and cited a number of instances where Halperin praised Republican nominee Donald Trump. Alex Shephard, writing in "The New Republic", criticized his coverage for being overly focused on the horse race and for shallow analysis. Conversely, Benjamin Wallace-Wells of "The New Yorker" writes that Halperin's "The Circus" is "both an argument for horse-race journalism and a way to see its inner workings, and so to track Heilemann and Halperin in their long traipse across the American interior is to see the media discovering its own vulnerabilities, just as Trump was exploiting them."