THE MORNING RANT: Media’s Gotchas on Trump Keep Bringing Coverage to Otherwise Embargoed Stories

While the presidential horserace isn’t my normal lane around here, and even though Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice for the Republican nominee (DeSantis was my guy), I’m going to chime in on something I’m enjoying all over again about the media’s relationship with Trump. In their unhinged desire to politically harm Trump with “fact checks” and wall-to-wall outrage about some “extreme” comment he said, they also end up providing coverage of stories that the Democrats need their media allies not to report on. Here are just two recent examples:

1) The “Bloodbath” Storyline: With almost perfect coordination, pretty much every legacy media source ran headlines hyping Trump’s call for a “bloodbath” if he loses the 2024 election.

Social media and conservative new sites quickly provided an abundance of examples of Democrats and left-wing media members saying the same word, so the outrage quickly fizzled out.

But before “the bloodbath scandal” started fading, it was impossible for media stories and TV panels to completely avoid the context of Trump’s remarks, specifically that those words were spoken while he was condemning the Biden administration for its commitment to destroying the traditional American auto industry with EV mandates.

Here’s just one example from the Washington Post:

“Trump predicts 'bloodbath' if he isn't elected” [Washington Post – 3/18/2024]

At a rally in Ohio on March 16, former president Donald Trump, speaking about his proposal for a tariff on Chinese-made cars, told the crowd: "Now, if I don’t get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole - that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country."

As terrifying as the headline is, there is no way to cover the story without partially discussing the auto industry angle.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a consensus that Michigan is in play this election. Here are some recent headlines.

“CNN Poll Shows Trump With 8-Point Lead Over Biden in Michigan” – 3/22/2024

“Biden’s Michigan Problem” [The Hill – 02/27/2024]

What Joe Biden doesn’t need right now is the media highlighting a Trump speech about Biden’s anti-auto worker policies, but that is exactly what the media did when it launched the “bloodbath” outrage. They thought this might finally be the story that causes irreparable damage to Trump. Instead, they may have contributed to Joe Biden losing Michigan.

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2) “Fact-Checking” Trump’s Claims that Biden is Flying Migrants into the Country: This is an amazing example of the media being baited into covering a story that the Democrats desperately needed to keep muzzled.

In his Super Tuesday victory speech in early March, Donald Trump said the following: “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown - migrants were flown in airplane, not going through borders ... It was unbelievable. I said that must be a mistake. They flew 325,000 migrants. Flew them in over the borders and into our country.”

The media’s comically partisan “fact checkers” were activated and they enthusiastically announced that they had caught Trump making a false statement about this topic. But the false statement wasn’t that the Biden administration is flying “migrants” directly into the US from other countries, nor was the number quoted by Trump disputed. Nope, the big falsehood according to the media was that Trump said “parts unknown” when in fact it was known that these aliens were being flown in from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

“Fact Focus: Claims Biden administration is secretly flying migrants into the country are unfounded” [AP – 3/06/2024]

The migrants are not coming in from “parts unknown,” as Trump charged. CBP vets each one for eligibility and publishes the number of airport arrivals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

You got him this time, fact checkers! Well done.

Also, even though Trump himself never stated that the migrant flights were “secret,” the media decided to fact check the report to which Trump was referencing, which had called the flights “secretive.”

In his Super Tuesday victory speech, former President Donald Trump elevated false information that had gone viral on social media, claiming the Biden administration secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States.

Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesperson, said Wednesday that reports of secretly flying people into the country were “categorically false” and that Cubans, Haitian, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans were “thoroughly screened.”

Again, the “fact-checkers” don’t dispute that hundreds of thousands of aliens were flown into the US by the Biden administration, instead they debunked the alleged claim that the flights were done secretly. That is too funny, as is the notion that “thoroughly screened” negates any claim about secretiveness. Non sequitur much? In addition, I don’t think it’s being pedantic to point out that “secretly” and “secretive” have different meanings. The media was debunking a claim that no one, including Trump ever made.

Above all else, with so many media organizations “fact checking” this story, they provided abundant mainstream media exposure to a story that is extremely damaging to Democrats – one that the media never would have covered if they weren’t playing “Get Trump.” Other than affluent white leftists in safe enclaves, there are few voting blocs or demographic groups that support Biden’s inhumane, open-borders program.

But the story gets even better. With all the media coverage about the “migrant flights,” Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) offered up an amendment to the recently passed funding legislation which would have banned taxpayer dollars from being used for these flights. Every single Democrat Senator voted against Hagerty’s amendment. Those facing re-election this November will be seeing that vote highlighted in political ads run by their Republican opponents this Fall.

Maybe Trump is a mastermind who is manipulating the media to cover stories they would otherwise embargo, or maybe the media just doesn’t have the self-control to avoid stepping on rakes around Trump.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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