Now that Republicans have formally nominated Donald Trump for president and the party’s convention went off this week without a hitch, it’s a good time to check in on how the media processed these past few days. Spoiler: not well.
Let’s look at a few articles encapsulating how they’re acting out in typical fashion.
July 18, Axios: “Top Dems now believe Biden will exit.”
That headline came along with a “breaking news” report from the ever-creepy Mark Halperin, who wrote on X that President Biden “plans to announce withdrawal from nomination as early as this weekend, with Sunday most likely.” He also claimed Biden wouldn’t be endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the Democrat replacement nominee.
Nobody but Biden and probably his godawful wife, Jill, WebM.D., knows for sure whether he’s contemplating at all to exit his reelection campaign. That clearly won’t stop the news media, openly praying for it, from allowing themselves to be used by other Democrats to make him.
Republicans just had a raucous convention, the most exciting and unified one I’ve seen in my adult life — that Hulk Hogan speech was phenomenal — and in just a few weeks, Democrats are supposed to host their own convention, which will surely have all the fireworks of a funeral. The only way to possibly resuscitate what’s usually a celebratory occasion is to push the Biden corpse aside and turn it into an open contest.
Best of luck to them, but it’s preposterous to suggest Biden won’t be endorsing Kamala. The only way that happens is if he already knows the convention will be fixed in her favor, thus creating the illusion that she earned the nomination on her own.
In any event, Biden’s close adviser Anita Dunn told Politico on the final night of the RNC that the president, currently sick again with Covid, isn’t dropping out.
July 17, New York Times: “Republicans’ Depressingly Effective Minority Outreach Strategy”
Charles Blow had a rare moment of legitimate insight this week when he wrote at the Times that the GOP convention featured potent pitches to black, Latino and gay voters with its speaker lineup. “It would be easy to mock this week’s lineup of speakers of color as mostly performative, but you would be wrong to do so,” he said. “Republicans are strategically — almost surgically — trying to carve away minority voters from Democrats. And to some degree they’re succeeding.”
Unfortunately, that was the extent of Blow’s brilliance. We’ll have to wait for the next total eclipse for more.
He went on to say that the reason polls show Trump garnering record levels of support from minorities is because, “Racial and ethnic tension extends well beyond the white-nonwhite binary.”
Democrats in the media will do anything but admit that their party’s pro-poverty, anti-personal independence policies have taken their toll these past three years and that their leader (for now) is the least inspiring figure since Jimmy Carter. Just because the media believe in ranking their resentment by race and sex doesn’t mean everyone else has to.
July 16, Politico: “Trump upstages Vance on Night 1.”
The first night of the convention started a few hours after Trump announced Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, as his running-mate and as mildly exciting as I’m sure that was for some people, it’s unclear exactly what Politico was expecting. “The effect of combining Vance’s announcement and Trump’s grand entrance on the same night was for the latter to overshadow the former,” the authors of the site’s marquee newsletter wrote. “On CNN, for example, they kept the camera tight on Trump for most of the hour rather than on the two candidates together. We were down among the throngs of delegates gathered below the Trump-Vance box and it was pretty clear which of the two was producing all the energy and excitement.”
I suppose Trump was the center of attention that night, and every night of the week, what with being a former president and the likely next president. Oh, and he was nearly assassinated just two days prior.
Presumably this was an attempt to portray Vance as a flat choice, though for what purpose remains a mystery. The Federalist had multiple people on site for Vance’s on-stage speech later in the week and they said the audience was rapturous. Whatever.
That’s all for the convention, but if you missed Hulk Hogan’s speech, here it is because that’s how great it was:
