CNN’s Jim Acosta probably likes to think of himself as the thorn in the Trump administration’s side and the journalist who just won’t back down. In reality, he’s the dorky kid who manufactures reasons to lash out at whoever is in front of him.
However, he also shows us he has a tragically short memory.
You see, Acosta is concerned. He fears that Trump’s anti-media positions will somehow lead to violence against reporters.
“The problem is that people around the country don’t know it’s an act …. They take what he says very seriously,” Acosta told Variety. “They take attacks from Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders and what they do to us on a daily basis very seriously. They don’t have all their faculties in some cases. Their elevator may not hit all floors.”
Now, this is a fair point. Some Trump supporters may not have an “elevator” that hits all the floors. However, Trump supporters aren’t unique in that respect. Every president has had both supporters and detractors who were/are at least a little bit insane. I’m not going to hit Acosta too much over that, although he should have mentioned that the same can be true on the flip side of the coin.
But then he says, “My concern is that a journalist is going to be hurt one of these days. Somebody’s going to get hurt. And at that point, the White House, the President of the United States, they’re going to have take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves whether or not they played a role in this, whether they created this toxic environment that resulted in a journalist getting hurt.”
I kind of wonder if Acosta and his compatriots did that.
After all, there has been political violence since Trump took office. Even if we don’t count the riots, we still have Rep. David Kustoff being run off the road due to his vote on the healthcare bill. And who can forget the congressional baseball practice attack in Alexandria, Virginia, that left Rep. Steve Scalise seriously wounded? Even the assault of Sen. Rand Paul was thought to potentially be motivated by politics, though prosecutors now don’t think so.
After each of those attacks, did Acosta and those in the liberal media take a moment and wonder if the outrage they’d spent so much time ginning up might have contributed to such a thing?
No? Color me shocked.
To be clear, I don’t blame anyone for these attacks other than the people who committed them. But an attack on a journalist, should such a thing happen, won’t be the Trump administration’s fault as things currently stand. While Trump routinely lashes out at the media, he hasn’t advocated for any violence against journalists. Unless he does, you can’t remotely claim he’s responsible for the acts of the deranged, just like Acosta and company shouldn’t be blamed for the attacks that have already happened against GOP lawmakers.
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