Media Victim-Blames Trump for Assassination Attempts. But They’re the Ones Sowing Chaos.
Jarrett Stepman /
By a miracle, really a series of miracles, former President Donald Trump has survived two assassination attempts in little more than two months.
The implications of Trump being murdered are almost too disturbing to contemplate. The fact that a man running for president continues to be targeted like this is certainly worth a “national conversation.”
Yet, the media is treating the story of the second assassination attempt—already fading from the back pages of national newspapers days after it happened Sunday—as if it’s no big deal.
When the media can be bothered to mention it at all, they switch to rabidly blaming the victim. In this case, the man they hate so much: Trump.
What we should take away from the treatment of this story is more than just the obvious fact that the news media is biased, although that’s almost cartoonishly the case right now.
It’s clear that the media thinks that another news cycle about a Trump assassination this close to the Nov. 5 election has to be downplayed. It’s double bad that the would-be assassin Sunday has a record of donating to Democrats and copied the Biden-Harris campaign message about Trump being a threat to “democracy.”
The legacy media seem particularly agitated that Trump gets to adopt the “language of victimhood,” as one author put it in the Guardian, a London-based newspaper. That’s usually the Left’s favorite language. No fair!
Trump in this case was the direct, twice-over victim. That makes no difference to a hostile media. The language of victimhood is all about power, not about actual victims.
So how do they solve the Trump-as-victim conundrum?
There is an old phrase in the media world for when you’re in an interview and don’t want to answer a specific question. It’s called a “block and bridge.” That’s what the media has done collectively with this story to make it go away.
First, they’ve done their best to block discussion of the event entirely. The story often was missing on the front pages of newspapers across the country. That includes Florida Today, a subsidiary of USA Today, radio and TV talk-show host Chris Plante notes.
Plante noted that the second Trump shooting story was on the last page of the B section of the Florida newspaper, even though the assassination attempt took place in West Palm Beach, Florida.
USA Today, the national publication, also left the story off the front page in the next day’s paper. Well, OK, it was in a tiny insert in the corner. The real front-page news is a random fluff piece.
So, the bias is obvious. You already know how this would have been covered if it was Vice President Kamala Harris who nearly had been assassinated for a second time.
It seems that right now corporate media outlets are cynically counting on Americans to be desensitized to assassination attempts on Trump. Yet the story lingers.
And here’s where we get to the “bridge” part. USA Today, when it bothered to report on Sunday’s second assassination attempt at all, insinuated that it’s Trump’s fault that people are trying to kill him.
Here is USA Today’s summary above its story about the FBI’s investigating the second assassination attempt on a former president: “The incident occurred on the same day Trump posted ‘I hate Taylor Swift’ on his Truth Social platform and his running mate said he had no regrets for propagating fake stories about Haitian migrants.”
See, you shouldn’t have sympathy for Trump or his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Those meanies really deserve what they get.
Just imagine what a wonderful and peaceful world we would live in if only Trump and his supporters would just disappear.
Here’s The Cincinnati Enquirer on the social media site X.
The Enquirer ended up changing the headline about Trump’s bringing violence on himself for not “meeting their editorial standards.” Of course, the Ohio newspaper left in a summary that Trump “brings the crazies out, and one of those crazies tried to shoot him.”
A writer argued in The New Republic that Trump is simply being engulfed by the chaos he created.
Deranged leftists keep trying to kill Republicans, and it’s apparently the Right’s fault. Trump is to blame for Trump derangement syndrome.
Oh, and while the media has generated this narrative about Trump’s “rhetoric,” here’s the rhetoric we get from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton said in an MSNBC interview with host Rachel Maddow—aired just a day after the assassination attempt—that the media needs to be even more relentless in how it defines Trump as a “danger to our country and the world.”
According to Clinton, the media have just been too fair and even-handed when dealing with Trump.
Again, we are supposed to believe that bad things happen because opposition to the Left exists and hasn’t been shut down.
The message from the Left and their media allies has been clear and growing. They think it’s fine to perpetually frame Trump as an existential threat to the country, Hitler 2.0.
Instead of victim-blaming Trump, it’s time for much of America’s corporate media outlets to look in the mirror and consider that they, not Trump, have become a threat to democracy.
They’re the ones who’ve sown chaos and kept the country in a state of hysterics.