Barely six minutes into Donald Trump’s 76-minute speech to launch his 2020 re-election bid this week, CNN cut away to its panel of ever-condescending pundits, demonstrating why the mainstream U.S. media remain the President’s most useful foil as he seeks a second term.
You’d think by now that American media elites would be over themselves – and Mr. Trump’s endless assaults on them – and stop playing into the President’s hands. But they just can’t seem to help it. Every time Mr. Trump mocks the press, the self-important folks at CNN get their knickers in a knot and act all offended at his insinuations that they are “fake news.”
Instead of asking themselves why Mr. Trump’s critiques of their work resonate with his voters, U.S. media types insist on tabulating his “lies” in a demonstration of the limits of data journalism that distracts them from actually covering and explaining this presidency. As a result, they continue to miss the bigger picture unfolding beyond their inflated egos.
Here’s some breaking news for the tabulators of Mr. Trump’s untruths: No one cares but you.
That is not to say that the President should be let off the hook for his lies. But to fixate on his fabrications, as if every politician who came before him did not have a tortured relationship with the truth, is to lose sight of what’s really happening as Mr. Trump transforms his country. By driving the left to distraction, he has provoked a civil war among Democrats that threatens to ensure a second term for him that neither the United States nor the planet should have to endure.
“Our political opponents look down with hatred on our values and with utter disdain for the people whose lives they want to run,” Mr. Trump told his riled-up supporters at Tuesday’s 2020 kickoff rally in Orlando, well after CNN had cut away to its talking heads.
Not since Bill Clinton claimed to feel Americans’ pain has a presidential candidate connected so viscerally with his supporters. Mr. Trump is a cry baby with a persecution complex. Yet, his base not only tolerates his neediness; it feeds it. His rallies are 90 per cent about him and 10 per cent about the “forgotten” Americans he claims to be fighting for. And they lap it up.
Mr. Trump may never crack the 50-per-cent barrier in popular support. But what he does enjoy, somewhat improbably, is unity among Republicans. He put the party through the wringer in 2016. But whatever opposition existed to him within the GOP has largely gone silent since.
Regardless of who Democrats eventually nominate to take on Mr. Trump, it is not clear they can come together in 2020 to beat him. The party has moved so far to the left as to become utterly unrecognizable – if not outright threatening – to the white working-class voters who once sustained it. And it won’t win them back by talking about reparations for African-Americans and granting asylum to Central American migrants.
Meanwhile, the only Democratic candidate with a fighting chance at appealing to the folks in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, who put those states in Mr. Trump’s column in 2016, has already shot himself in the foot multiple times since jumping into the race two months ago. Just this week, former vice-president Joe Biden waxed nostalgic about the good ol’ days in the U.S. Senate when he could work with Southern segregationists to pass legislation.
“At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished,” said the 76-year-old Mr. Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972. “But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other any more.”
Indeed, and that’s exactly how most of the young Democrats elected to Congress in last fall’s midterm vote like it. By evoking his collaborations with segregationists, Mr. Biden also reminded everyone that he would be the oldest president ever and more than twice the age of the youngest in the race – Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind. And while Mr. Biden is only four years older than Mr. Trump, the President does not have 50 years of political baggage.
Twenty of the 23 candidates for the Democratic nomination will debate for the first time next week in Miami. There are too many of them to fit on stage at one time, so they will debate in two groups over two nights. But if all Americans hear about is democratic socialism, Medicare for All, impeachment, free tuition, open borders and reparations, the Democrats might as well cede the 2020 election to Mr. Trump before the official campaign even begins.
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