How the Media Covers Trump in a Crisis

A short take

When I was on the Left and COVID hit, I was just as Trump-deranged as everyone else on my side. I believed he was an existential threat and had been doing everything in my power to help the Democrats defeat him in the upcoming election. Once COVID hit, however, I began to notice a pattern emerging. It seemed to me that no matter what Trump did, the media would treat it as a failure.

On my side, you weren't allowed to question any of it, and still aren’t. You are only allowed to go along with whatever bad news there is about Trump. Then, and only then, you are safe.

Still, I was curious about the way the media and the Left distorted things he said, like “drink bleach,” for instance. I remember thinking, why are they distorting it? Why are they making a bad situation even worse? Shouldn’t it be “all hands on deck” to deal with this once-in-a-generation problem?

It seemed that no matter what Trump said, it led the news as the worst thing a person could say during a crisis. I couldn’t deny the truth that kept bubbling up, even as a Democrat: they need him to fail because how else to take out a one-term president with a strong economy?

His daily press conferences had to fail. His solutions had to fail. They could not afford to paint any of it as a win. The entire thing had to be produced and executed like a scripted series so that the American people would think about how dangerous it was to have a guy like that leading the country in a crisis.

In March of 2020, before COVID hit, it was flying high at 49% per Gallup:

Then, in September of 2020, just months before the election:

And finally, October of 2020:

This paper argues that COVID killed his chances for re-election:

So now, when I see tweets like this, it feels like Deja-Vu all over again, especially for the faction of MAGA that wants Trump to end the war:

So the question is: how much of this is real, and how much is manufactured ahead of the midterms?

Matt Glassman writes:

And then explained further when challenged by me:

True, the media was at war with Nixon and every Republican thereafter, but until Obama, we never saw a “whole of society” approach to bringing down the opposition. So this doesn’t pass the smell test:

And while it may be true that Trump says divisive things, it is also true that those things are the only things the public sees. They don’t see the speeches where Trump is unifying, kind, or decent. That never breaks through. Trust me, I remember what it was like to be on the Left and inside the bubble. You do not see what the media and the Left don’t want you to see.

What is different this time is the so-called “podcast lane,” which has largely positioned itself against the war. In other words, imagine if all of them had been against Trump during COVID and aligned with the rest of the media.

Their anger at a war that they believe is “over Israel” has made them less inclined to defend Trump, to put it mildly, and to align themselves with the legacy media’s coverage of the war. All bad, never good, can’t trust Trump’s leadership, etc.

The message from the establishment media is the same as it was in 2020: you can’t trust Trump or anyone in MAGA to lead this country through a crisis, whether a pandemic or a war.

This simply did not happen to FDR during World War II. Even though sharply divided, the country came together in war. It did not happen with Ronald Reagan because we were living through an era where there was still some Conservative power in the media and even in Hollywood. It also didn’t happen after 9/11 when most people felt it necessary to back the president, at least for a time.

With Trump, however, they never take their foot off the gas or their thumb off the scale. They cannot and would never paint the war, or anything else, as a success, no matter what. The same was true for COVID. Trump had to fail in an election year. It had to be a “whole of society” effort to take him out of power.

Yesterday, a rocket sent the first woman to the moon in preparation to eventually build a space station there, and here is this morning’s Page One of the New York Times:

Then down the page:

And finally 2/3rds down:

And true, they didn’t get out of the rocket and step onto the moon, but this is phase one of a much longer plan to build a space station there. No president has done this since JFK. It seems to me that Trump is always making big moves, but no matter what, he never gets the win.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be legitimate criticisms of the war on Iran, how Trump is negotiating it, or how he is handling it. But when he tries to give a speech to reassure the public, it has to go badly, just as it did with COVID.

One of the reasons I always defend Trump is that he is always being attacked, and honestly, I’ve never seen anyone under that kind of pressure and still wake up and face the next day. That is what I need in a leader. That’s especially true now that I know too much about how the sausage gets made.

Because of the media’s treatment of Trump during COVID, because I lived through that deception, I find it much harder now to believe anything or even know what is true anymore.

One thing I know for sure is that it would not matter what Trump did or said, there would be a “whole of society” effort to position it as a failure because there has never been a Plan B.