Trump’s Media Haters Still Don’t Get It

This is an actual headline that appeared in a “journalism” newsletter 13 days before the election: “How much coverage of Donald Trump is too much?”

The column is from Tom Jones, senior media writer at the Poynter Institute and, you’ll not be surprised to learn, a man consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’ve said in the past that Jones’ daily “Poynter Report” column would be more accurately titled, “Why I Hate Donald Trump and Fox News.” (For what it’s worth, Jones would dispute this. In 2020, I sent him an email pointing out glaring biases evident in his commentary. He responded, among other things, by writing, “I can promise you that I don't have an agenda other than to point out really good journalism and call out shoddy journalism.” Self-awareness apparently isn’t his strong suit.)

These days I only occasionally read Jones’ tedious, predictable commentaries, and only then for the same reason that a child pinches himself: to see how much pain I can endure.

In this instance, Jones claims to be upset that the legacy media has devoted so much time to Trump trolling Kamala Harris in a McDonald’s photo op and his outrageous asides, most notably ruminating on the late Arnold Palmer’s junk.

Jones also displays the blind spots of someone immersed in the Leftist bubble: “Just as disturbing, (Trump) keeps talking about the enemy within this country — his political opponents whom he has seemingly threatened with punishment if he becomes elected. And he repeatedly doubts that he’ll accept the result of the election if he loses.”

There is no shortage of video of Democrats denying election results, with no end in sight. Just two weeks ago, Axios reported that Democrats would not commit to certifying Trump if he wins. That sounds kind of insurrection-y.

As for the “enemy within” theme, well, can you blame Trump? Just this year, he’s been the target of an orchestrated lawfare campaign in New York, Florida, Georgia and the District of Columbia. He routinely is compared to Hitler (even Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin in the same column by one recent critic), and has survived two assassination attempts by nutjobs who clearly were motivated by the overheated rhetoric of the Harris campaign and the media, who have done their damnedest to memory-hole those attacks.

The reality, which eludes Jones, is that the legacy media, for which he runs cover, focuses on these peripheral matters to avoid talking about what voters say are the election’s most important issues – the economy, inflation, border security and crime. On those issues, voters favor Trump.

Jones tries to draw a dichotomy between the supposedly frivolous Trump and Harris, who he says is (caution: cliché approaching) “laser-focused on speeches, interviews and the traditional things candidates do in the final sprint to the finish line of a race.”

Jones’ timing was odd. It came after Harris had taken most of the previous day off, aside from a friendly sit-down with NBC in which she insisted, without evidence, that she had no idea about President Biden’s mental decline, which has been obvious for years. (Journalist Mark Halperin said he noticed Biden’s decline in 2017, and called the media coverup “the worst scandal in American journalism history.” That’s probably a reach, but it’s in the conversation for worst scandals.)

Meanwhile, Trump spent the morning meeting with Hispanic business leaders in Florida and later gave one of his stemwinders at a rally in North Carolina. So much for the “Trump’s exhausted” narrative pushed by Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself).

Look, Trump talks a lot. Too much. His typical campaign speech lasts 90 minutes, sometimes longer. He tends to go off on tangents that make guys like me wince because he’s just providing fodder for CNN and MSNBC. Ho-hum. As Salena Zito famously observed in 2016, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” (For the record, I left the top of my ballot blank in 2016, but did vote for Trump in 2020 and already have done so this year. He’s an imperfect vessel for my conservative agenda.)

At this writing, Trump is scheduled to do a three-hour marathon on Joe Rogan’s podcast Oct. 25. It’s laughable to consider Harris trying to do that, given she has zero political and personal skills. Friendly media try their best to nurse Harris through 10-minute softball interviews, to no avail. There’s a reason why she was called Biden’s “insurance policy” – too inept to ever replace him. How’d that plan work out?

Elections are about choices, and this isn’t a particularly difficult one. For all of Trump’s bluster, his first term was characterized by low inflation, energy independence, secure borders, a constrained China and Russia, and the Abraham Accords, which would have earned any president not named Trump a Nobel Peace Prize. The chaotic Biden years have been defined by high inflation, vaccine mandates, the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the utter lack of accountability, a bizarre culture war, and the prospect of WWIII breaking out any day in the Middle East, Eastern Europe or possibly Asia.

This isn’t lost on voters. The majority of Americans say they were better off four years ago than they are today. Of course they were. Jones and others in the media want me to focus on Trump’s loose and occasionally profane rhetoric. I prefer to focus on his policies and the relative normalcy of his first term.

As my brother recently said, “There are so many times I find my saying, ‘Shut up, Donald.’ And I’ll be happy to do that for another four years.”