The new progressive complaint.
The new progressive complaint.
S ure, the president of the United States is failing and the White House has been dishonest about it, but what about Trump?
That’s the reaction of left-of-center opinion-makers to the media’s current fascination with one of the most consequential and dramatic stories on the planet — namely, is the president of the United States up for the job, and if not, what should be done about it?
Guardian columnist Margaret Sullivan admits that the Biden story deserves a lot of coverage but complains that it is disproportionate — “too much in quantity and too breathless in tone” — and distracting the media from their prime directive of opposing Trump.
According to Sullivan, “A story even more important is shoved to the back burner,” which is “the former president’s appalling unfitness for office.”
There are legitimate and stinging counts in an anti-Trump indictment, including, obviously, his conduct after the 2020 election, whitewashing of the January 6 rioters, and flirtation with exacting revenge on his political enemies, but all of these have gotten extensive coverage in the media and come up constantly in media interviews with Trump VP possibilities and other surrogates.
The thing is, the news business is supposed to be about news, but almost everyone on the left — and too many reporters and editors themselves — considers the media an anti-Trump advocacy organization writ large.
If the press had been playing it straight all along, and demonstrated a natural amount of journalistic curiosity about Biden’s obvious, very public decline, it might be that Democrats wouldn’t be in the throes of this crisis four months before a national election.
Now the media are playing catch-up, but the questions they are belatedly delving into are truly momentous: Does Joe Biden have a serious medical condition, diagnosed or undiagnosed? Is he fully carrying out his duties? What were the contours of the White House cover-up of his feeble condition, and what is it still not telling us? Can he or should he continue as the Democratic nominee, and where is the debate among Democrats headed on these questions?
Sullivan doesn’t want too overwhelming a focus on any of this, when the walls of the Project 2025 scandal should be closing in on former president Trump.
She writes that Trump’s disavowal of the project “is a ridiculous lie, but I doubt most members of the public know anything about it, nor do they likely know much — if anything — about Project 2025.”
She’s certainly correct about the public knowledge of Project 2025, since the public usually doesn’t keep abreast of sprawling 900-page policy tomes produced by Washington think tanks.
Slate contends that both Project 2025 and Trump’s allegedly disingenuous denunciation of it are signs of incipient fascism, and that they, “not just Biden’s (genuine) challenges, should be the issue dominating public discourse.”
There are several things to say about this. One, there has indeed been a lot of coverage of Project 2025. Two, the idea that Trump was really following it closely presumes that he is a policy maven tracking what Washington thinks tanks are producing and what essays and book chapters some of his vast cadre of former aides are writing; sorry — he’s just not. Finally, anyone with a passing familiarity with Trump world knows that Trump’s team has long been annoyed by attempts to portray Project 2025 as his agenda and transition-in-a-box, when — whatever its other merits or failings — it is not either of those things.
If it’s not Project 2025, the media are supposed to be focused on any number of other anti-Trump chestnuts. “What,” Sullivan asks, “of Trump’s obvious cognitive decline, his endless lies, his shocking plans to imprison his political enemies and to deport millions of people he calls ‘animals,’ his relationship with the late accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein?”
Again, even if you accept Sullivan’s terms, the media have covered all these things, and many of them aren’t remotely new. (Interest in the Epstein story in progressive circles seems to have revived after Biden blew himself up in the debate.)
Showing it’s possible to believe anything if you are motivated and blinkered enough, over at the Atlantic, Tom Nichols posits a media double standard in Trump’s favor.
Nichols contends, “If Biden had suggested setting up migrants in a fight club, he’d be out of the race already; Trump does it, and the country (as well as many in the media) shrugs.”
Given that Biden demonstrated for the entire world his flagrant lack of acuity in an extremely high-stakes setting and is still in the race, he probably could get away with making a crass joke at a rally.
Also, the media routinely cover and sometimes get entire news cycles out of Trump riffs at his events.
The fundamental reason that Trump is ahead of Biden is that people think, in retrospect, that he did a pretty good job, especially on the economy, and that Biden is doing a remarkably poor job, while being too old for the office.
It is understandable, given how the press has traditionally operated and how it has further disgraced itself in the Trump years, that progressives desperately want the media to compensate for this state of play and focus less on the emperor who is parading through town half-clothed at best.