Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of the New York Times, was in a grave mood when she wrote her latest column in the flagship left-wing rag The Guardian.
"The public doesn’t understand the risks of a Trump victory. That’s the media’s fault," was the headline. Once again, we're hearing the trumpets blare and the tocsins sound, raising the threat level about Donald Trump.
Where is Paul Revere when we need him?
We don't "understand" what would happen if Trump won? If any column ever took the intelligence of the American people more for granted, I haven't read it.
Since 2015 when Trump announced for the presidency, through his four years in office, his years out of office (when you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference in coverage), and his current campaign for president, there has never been an American more vilified, more warned against electing, or more hysterically opposed by most of the American media than Donald John Trump.
Nixon might have given Trump a run for his money as the most hated politician in America in his day. But Trump has to be the winner in the "most hated" contest simply because the media landscape is so much more saturated today than it was in the 1960s.
And that media landscape is all anti-Trump, all day, all the time.
Related: Donald Trump Is a Nazi, and the Left Says It Can Prove It
Consider the cold sweat the left broke out in when the recent Siena poll showed Biden losing to Trump in several key swing states. To Sullivan, this meant the press wasn't doing its job of trying to defeat Trump.
Is that really the job of the free press? Sullivan thinks so.
The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities. Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization,” as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race – rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.
Margaret Sullivan would repel if she dressed in a short skirt and white socks and waved pom-poms around as an anti-Trump cheerleader. But does she really have to? Matt Taibbi is no conservative, no Republican, and a verified Trump hater. But even he couldn't believe Sullivan's thesis that the press isn't doing enough to defeat Trump.
A small sample of headlines you’ll find on a simple “Trump threat democracy” Google search include: Trump’s Threat to Democracy Now Systemic, Trump’s Violent Rhetoric Threatens Democracy to the Core, How Trump’s rhetoric compares with Hitler’s, Trump’s Recipe for a Shockingly Raw Power Grab, and my personal favorite, Charlie Pierce’s Nazi-Curious Madman Currently Under Indictment For 91 Felonies Gives Speech. You can’t bend over to clean up after your dog without running into one of these.
And it's the press's fault that Trump is winning? The bottom line for Sullivan's lament about the press is that you're too stupid to understand this complicated stuff. We in the press try to make it as easy as possible to read. We try not to use words that contain more than three syllables. And we compare Trump to Hitler so often you might think Adolf is his uncle or something.
The only conclusion one can come to looking at polls like the recent New York Times/Siena College survey Sullivan referenced (and didn’t link to, calling it only “that poll” that “sent chills down many a spine”), is that all the media “vigor” either no longer moves people, or more likely, has begun to move them in the other direction, through sheer force of annoyance.
Margaret either smoked the world’s biggest bag of crack before writing that piece, or this is actually Andy Kaufman’s last, greatest disguise. If the latter, it’s take-a-bow time. Less “pussyfooting”? More “vigor”? More repetition? Genius. This has to be a joke. Right?
Unfortunately, no. As I've been saying for months, every Trump/Hitler reference is good for 10,000 more votes for Trump. And the fact that Sullivan and the rest of the left don't understand that and believe that the real problem is that the American people are stupid tells us that Trump should start measuring for new drapes in the Oval Office.
