How The Media Screwed Up The Midterms And Trump's Nazi Dinner
The press in America wants one thing when it comes to covering politics. And it isn't balance.
by Justin Rosario
Two weeks ago, Donald Trump announced his third run for the White House. I had very little doubt he would run again. Trump craves the power and attention running will bring as well as the money. He also believes being a candidate will shield him from his mountain of legal troubles. I’m a little more dubious about that last part but we’ll see.
The question I have personally been waiting to have answered was not, “Will Trump run again?” but rather, “Will the press retain a shred of dignity when he does?” The answer, it turns out, is a big fat, “No.”
This does not bode well for the future of democracy.
Republicans (and only Republicans) are good for ratings, apparently
Back in March, a recording was leaked of CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani discussing the need to hire Republican talking heads because they were going to sweep the midterms.
There are two curious things about this: the first is that, as far as I know, none of those Republicans have been replaced with Democrats now that the red wave has smashed into a blue wall. If hiring was based solely on the outcome of the midterms, logic demands CBS (and other networks) hire more Democrats.
The second is that cable news did not rush out to hire Democrats in 2018 ahead of a historic blue wave. Instead, they spent months downplaying what was extremely obvious: Republicans were about to have a very bad election.
There were many signs that indicated that the red wave was an illusion this time around and that Republicans were about to have another very bad night. Despite this, the press clung to the red wave narrative until about 7 PM EST, and then they were apparently shocked that Democrats curb-stomped the GOP in most parts of the country. There was very little introspection and even fewer apologies. Media infallibility mode, activated.
Fortunately, Donald Trump declared his candidacy soon after allowing the press to move on from what can only be described as a monumental failure. But if you think they’ve learned anything from the debacle, think again. Over the last two weeks, we’ve had an ugly preview of how the press is going to behave for the next two years, and it’s not going to be pretty. It started with, of all things, a wedding.
Dude, where’s my invitation?
If you haven’t been following the drama around Joe Biden’s granddaughter’s wedding, I envy your blissful ignorance and apologize in advance for ruining it. This kind of petty whining from the press is exactly why a fascist movement is thriving in the United States.
Until this nonsense started, I had no idea Hunter Biden had kids, much less 5 of them, much less adult ones. Why? Because, frankly, I don’t care. As long as they’re not involved in politics or work in the White House, literally nothing they do concerns me. Not even if one of them, Naomi, decides to have her wedding at the White House.
Over the years, there have been over a dozen weddings at the White House. I didn’t know that because, again, I don’t care. I promise you, the overwhelming majority of the country didn’t know, either because they also do not care. Nobody cared until the White House press corps wasn’t invited. Then they threw a temper tantrum.
Here’s the abbreviated version: Naomi and her fiancé, Peter, decided to have a private ceremony, no press allowed. But a week before the wedding, a single reporter and photographer from Vogue were allowed to do a piece on the family. The press took deep offense to this and threw a hissy fit on Twitter:
One can almost hear the petulant foot stomping from here. If that’s all it was, that would have been not great but then Ashley Parker, White House reporter for the Washington Post and a senior political analyst for MSNBC, jumped in and made it infinitely worse:
The NYT’s Maggie Haberman, always ready to defend a fellow weasel, jumped in as well. Haberman has taken to shielding herself from criticism by limiting who can see or respond to her tweets, because she’s a true champion of unfettered free speech. For herself, not you. So here’s a screencap:
Here are a few things to put all of this in context: If the name “Ashley Parker” is ringing a bell, it should. Parker is the 100% unbiased reporter that I’ve mentioned before that gave us neutral tweets like this:
And this:
Maggie Haberman, of course, once famously said that it wasn’t the job of the press to say someone lied:
Haberman noticeably broke this rule for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden while spending four full years refusing to call Donald Trump a liar. This suggests Haberman sees her job as not saying Republicans lied.
While Rogers, Parker, and Haberman have been getting dragged mercilessly for their wedding whining, the whole sordid affair sends a very clear message about how the press plans to deal with Trump’s time in office and his coming campaign.
“Both sides”
What we are seeing here is the press beginning the process of rewriting the past. Sure Trump lied but Biden lies, too.
What is the point of doing this? Good question.
The press spent five long years refusing to call Trump a liar. It didn't matter how often and how loudly he lied or how insane the lie was. They simply refused. At one point, the media consensus was, "We don't -know- that he's lying. He might believe what he's saying." The problem here was that it would mean instead of being a pathological liar, Trump was clinically insane. But the press also refused to go there, choosing to turn the incoherent rambling of a deeply unwell person into comprehensible speech so the public would be protected from the reality of a mentally deranged president. This is the same press that has been quick to ask if Joe Biden is mentally competent enough to be President.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, the press didn't have to pretend he wasn't lying anymore, so for the last two years, they have been calling Trump’s attack on democracy “The Big Lie.” This is a problem, however, now that Trump is running again.
Calling a Republican, especially a candidate, a liar is strictly verboten. Once Trump announced, Facebook stopped fact-checking him. So things are already off to a fantastic start. But it’s not like the press can erase the last two years of “Big Lie” coverage or pretend that they never said Trump was lying. What to do?
Deploy bothsiderism and downplay it, of course. Sure, Trump lied but was it ever really that bad? And look at how Biden lies! It’s not that different, is it? This cannot be repeated often enough: When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. That is the explicit purpose of the “both sides” lie. Judging by how recklessly it was used over something as trivial as a wedding, we can expect to see an explosion of it in the coming months as the press scrambles to provide cover for Trump’s egregious behavior.
That’s assuming the press even bothers to report on said behavior much at all.
Dinner with a Nazi? No biggie
Last week, Trump sat down to dinner with Kayne West (or Ye or whatever his new name is) along with Milo Yiannopolous, Karen Giorno, and…Nick Fuentes. I’ve mentioned Fuentes before and he’s recently been coming up frequently on The Banter Roundtable podcast. Fuentes is a Nazi. Not Nazi-adjacent or Nazi-like. He’s an actual self-professed Nazi and he spends a whole lot of his time railing against The Jews™:
Fuentes also wants women subjugated, fascism brought to America, Gays executed, etc., etc.
Milo Yiannopolous is a bit player desperately trying to reclaim relevance after his edge-lord routine spectacularly self-destructed his career. Karen Giorno is a background character whose name you will forget by the end of this paragraph. But Nick Fuentes? Fuentes is a rising star on the right and a truly dangerous individual. Much more so than Yiannopolous and the other one whose name you just had to go back and check.
And yet…not much news about Trump’s dinner with an actual Nazi. Certainly no media feeding frenzy or real outrage. Trump even praised the little shit and…mostly business as usual. A notable exception is Peter Baker of the New York Times who, shortly before I put this piece to bed, took a hard look at Nick Fuentes and his history of vile hate speech. Better late than never, I suppose. Where is the rest of the press?
I want you to step into the way-back machine to the distant past of the year 2008. Barack Obama was running for president and a video surfaced of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose church the Obamas attended, saying some unpleasant truths about the United States. Over the course of 1 month, the press churned out over 3,000 articles about Obama and Wright. That is not a typo. That is almost 100 articles a day. Even Hillary’s emails didn’t get that kind of hysterical coverage.
The press spent months crying bloody tears about candidate Obama associating with someone they found objectionable who said things they didn’t like. It’s been a full week since Trump sat down with Fuentes the self-professed Nazi and said, he was “really impressed” with him. We should be closing in on 700 articles by now. I’d be surprised if we have cracked 35 and Baker’s is the only one I’ve seen so far that takes Fuentes seriously.
Somehow, a Black preacher saying America has done racist things is worse than a self-professed Nazi saying he wants America to be a fascist state and for Jews to “Get the fuck out.” How does that work, exactly?
The only answer that makes any sense is that we are, once again, back to the majority of the press normalizing the abnormal. Trump breaks the law? Normal. Trump can barely string a sentence together? Normal. Trump tries to overthrow democracy? Normal. Until he’s out of office, at least.
There is very good reason to believe that Trump’s campaign will be centered on anti-Semitism to appeal to the hardest of the hardcore white nationalists. He’s already exhausted his playbook on Muslims, immigrants, “crime” (read as: “Black”), and China. DeSantis has the market cornered on LGBTQ hate. Teachers are fertile ground but talking about schools can get complicated. Trump needs something new and simple. The recent outburst of anti-Semitism has shown him both that the base is incredibly receptive to it and the media is not good at pushing back.
Trump's meeting with Kayne West was part of this, West being one of the most famous Jew-haters in America right now. Perhaps Trump was thinking he could have West as his running mate, his “black friend,” so to speak. In Trump’s addled brain, a famous Black man would totally 100% get the Black community to rally to his banner. But West is so unstable that he asked Trump to be his running mate and the idea of playing second-fiddle to a Black man deeply offended Trump. Astonishing, I know.
Still, the dinner allowed Fuentes to get on Trump’s radar and for someone looking to ramp up the hate in their campaign, Nick Fuentes is definitely the man you want on your team. Trump is currently pretending he has no idea Fuentes was a hate speech-spewing monster but he also has yet to condemn him. I guess that would make for an awkward job interview later.
The fact that the press appeared to be more outraged over not being invited to Naomi Biden’s wedding than the presumed GOP frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election hanging out with a Holocaust denier tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the next two years.
The mainstream press is not the enemy of the people. But they’re not our friends, either
The press is supposed to stand for something larger than itself. There’s a reason it is the only industry specifically named in the Constitution. But greed, fear, and pettiness have reduced far too much of our media landscape into little more than clout-chasing divas who refuse to acknowledge their multitude of mistakes. And so, they continue to repeat them. Sometimes on purpose.
After all, Republicans are good for business. Their corruption, scandals, and deviancy make for exciting (and easy) headlines. Democrats, by comparison, continue to be so damn boring. Fixing roads, building bridges, planting trees, and governing like adults. Where’s the drama? Where’s the action? Biden hasn’t had a single sex scandal or criminal probe and it’s been two goddamn years!! Sure, Trump was a monster who killed half a million Americans and collapsed the economy but he put on a show! Would a little fascism be so bad if it meant great ratings?
Keep this in mind as Republicans take control of the House and launch a thousand and one ridiculous investigations. If the press were serious about its role, it would hold each investigation up to the light of day and watch it burn away as the gossamer web of lies and innuendo they will all invariably be. But they’re not serious so instead, the press will almost certainly play along with the charade by “just asking questions.”
Meanwhile, Trump will spew hate against Jews and the press will find itself conveniently unable to ask any questions at all. They’ll be too preoccupied with Hunter Biden’s cell phone charger or underwear draw or whatever idiocy Fox News whips up every other hour.
Our most important task between now and election day 2024 will be to swat down every ludicrous hit job and make the press suffer public humiliation every time they try to enable the GOP. Maggie Haberman used to wallow in criticism from the left and but she drew enough flack that now her Twitter account is now protected. She has to hide because she’s afraid of accountability. Not Republicans. The left. As long as Twitter exists, we should use it to make the Habermans and Parkers and Cillizzas afraid to peddle their fascism-enabling “both sides” garbage in public. Get to work. Tuesday, November 5, 2024 is closer than you think.
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Here's Why Trump Went Full Nazi
Trump invited two rabid antisemites to the White House, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Why? The answer is bleak.
by Ben Cohen
In The Banter Roundtable Podcast, we have long discussed the need to talk about Holocaust denying, White Supremacist Nick Fuentes. I argued recently that Fuentes would become a big MAGA star and would in time be totally normalized by the GOP. As Justin has often reminded me, what is considered extreme on the right today will almost always be normalized tomorrow.
Fuentes, I figured, fit this formula exactly. The rabid Jew hater is young, incredibly stupid, and extraordinarily confident. In the MAGA world, this combination of traits is a perfect recipe for stardom. Figures like Milo Yiannopolous, Candace Owens, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have paved the way for the rise of Fuentes, and he only needed the Orange stamp of approval to become a bonafide MAGA star. This, I figured, would only be a matter of time.
So when the news broke that Donald Trump had invited America’s most prominent anti-semite Kanye West and none other than Nick Fuentes to Mar-a-Lago, I wasn’t surprised at all. I was in fact, kind of relieved. Why? Because I have always known that anti-semitism is one of the major driving forces behind the MAGA movement, and that Trump was almost certainly an anti-semite himself. Trump has flirted with borderline antisemitic statements in the past, but has always been quite careful (at least for him) about openly hating Jewish people. Now he is openly palling around with virulent Jew haters just as he begins his ‘Make America Great Again, Again’ campaign.
This is a good thing in my opinion, just so we can be clear about what we are facing this time around.
A more serious question though, is why Trump decided to invite two of the most repellent political/cultural figures in America to Mar-a-Lago for a chinwag? I spent a good deal of time thinking about this over the holiday and have come to quite an unnerving conclusion…
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Just heard on the press briefing this morning on Sirius POTUS channel the reporter praising the proposed GOP investigation in mismanagement of funds spent on COVID. Thought to myself lady where the fuck have you been? The last time the GOP ran a responsible investigation was Watergate. They have done Jack and shit since then.