Left-wing media’s Trump bashing is 2016 all over again

Demonstrators carry effigies of Donald Trump and former vice president Mike Pence during a Chicago protest against hate, white supremacy groups.

Democrats are having a panic attack as Donald Trump pulls ahead in national and battleground polls with a little more than a week to go. Three surveys in the past week show that voters rate him more favourably than Kamala Harris, and Gallup found his positive rating has hit 50 per cent for the first time in his three campaigns.

All of this comes despite, and perhaps because of, unhinged Democratic attacks on him and a partisan press that doesn’t attempt to disguise its bias. Trump is suddenly becoming a sympathetic antihero.

Consider some headlines featured on the New York Times’s homepage on Thursday evening: Harris Packs Star Power as Trump Rails Over Legal Trouble, Oy, This Ad: Jewish Stereotypes in Service of Trump as a Safer Option, Sweeping Raids and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s Immigration Plans and As Election Looms, Justice Dept Tries to Steer Clear of Politics.

The last one is hilarious considering the Times last week reported on a Justice Department letter to Elon Musk warning that his $US1m ($1.52m) sweepstakes for registered voters who sign a petition to support the First and Second amendments could violate federal law. Election interference, anyone?

Such left-wing bias has caused many Americans to tune out the press. A Gallup survey this month showed trust in the media has hit a record low (31 per cent), principally owing to a decline among independents and Republicans. The media can shout that Trump is a threat to democracy until the cows come home, but how many Americans are listening?

Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet summed up the media’s credibility problem in an essay last year for the Economist magazine: “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

Americans don’t like being condescended to by a media that denies everyday realities. Until Joe Biden’s disastrous debate in June, the media insisted the President was sharp as ever. Harris still does.

One-sided “fact checks” fuel the distrust. The Washington Post last week gave four “Pinocchios” to Trump’s ad saying Harris “supports EV mandates, killing Michigan jobs”.

Writer Glenn Kessler declined to address the substance of the claim, ignoring that the Environmental Protection Agency has imposed rules requiring automakers to produce increasingly more EVs and that Michigan has lost 9500 auto- and parts-manufacturing jobs in the past five years amid ramped-up EV production. Kessler relied on statements from Harris and the United Auto Workers, which has endorsed her.

Or consider a USA Today “fact check” this month of an Instagram post about a Biden administration broadband program. “Kamala Harris and Joe Biden promised to use $42bn … to expand internet to the entire country and not one single house or business received service,” conservative strategist Joey Mannarino wrote.

That is accurate, but fact-checker Chris Mueller labelled it false because some money has been spent on “planning”.

Many Americans who dislike Trump also dislike the media’s disparate treatment. When Harris fumbles or dissembles, the media covers for her. When Biden exceeds his presidential authority, the media cheers him on. Such slanted coverage engenders sympathy for Trump even among sceptics, as the federal and state prosecutions of him have done.

It’s comical to hear the press warn that Trump will target his opponents while ignoring how Democrats have used lawfare against him. Their warnings have a boy-who-cried-wolf quality, since they said the same about Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush before him.

“Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest,” Jonathan Chait wrote in the New Republic in 2003. Chait has been among the most strident and simple-minded voices decrying Trump as a fascist.

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson mused in 2003 that what Bush haters like Chait “truly resent is that his popularity suggests that the country might be more like him than it is like them … On one level, their embrace of hatred aims to make others share their outrage; but on another level, it’s a self-indulgent declaration of moral superiority – something that makes them feel better about themselves”.

The same could be said of those who loathe Trump. It’s true that the former president often exhibits a lack of restraint and self-awareness. But so do Democrats and left-wing media. Their attacks on Trump and condescension toward his supporters in 2016 helped propel him to victory. They could do so again.

The Wall Street Journal