Following the dramatic reveal of Joe Biden’s age-related decline on a national debate stage, there was a brief period of self-examination among the press where they asked themselves whether regurgitating Democrats’ credulous and self-serving narratives was in the best interest of the American people. That lasted about a week, and was clearly insincere.
We’re now three weeks from the press hounding Biden out of the race because they looked like fools for defending years of video clips showing him stumbling around on the international stage non compos mentis. And with no remorse or self-awareness, the media are already back to doing everything they can to serve Democrats’ narrative.
What this means in practice is that, unlike a traditional presidential campaign, there’s been virtually no discussion of actual issues such as the economy, immigration, education, taxes, health care, foreign policy, and so on. The last four years have been pretty disastrous. As a result, if this campaign becomes about issues and what’s happened under the Biden-Harris presidency, Trump is going to benefit greatly from that discussion. So the press won’t let it happen.
Kamala Harris could not survive the scrutiny of a real presidential campaign, and the media know this. They figure they can skate by with three months of embarrassingly puffy coverage and fool just enough voters with the talk of “vibes” and “joyful” campaigning, because vibes are all the Harris campaign has. The Harris-Walz record is indefensible. There’s a reason their website has seven donation buttons, but no webpage dedicated to issues.
Again, it is worth noting just how crazy and disturbing recent events have been. Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president just a week ago through an unprecedented and dubious “roll call” of delegates on the internet without Harris receiving a single primary vote, and even more incredibly, without answering a single substantive question from a member of the press.
Harris still has not done a major interview, and has only made noises about doing an interview “before the end of the month.” Meanwhile, major news organizations are just declaring themselves impotent preemptively. It’s pathetic. Here’s an actual CNN headline: “Trump’s campaign cranked up the pressure on Harris to do a major interview, hoping to goad her into a forum in which she’s been historically more vulnerable.” Why is the Trump campaign the one to put pressure on her here? Isn’t it the press’s job to push politicians out of their comfort zones and make them answer tough questions? And here’s a terrifying thought: If Harris is “historically vulnerable” to doing something as basic as giving a press conference, should voters trust her to negotiate with hostile foreign leaders?
It’s true Harris often defaults to embarrassing and ignorant gibberish when she has to talk at any length. Seems like an issue the press should put to the test! Instead, the media doesn’t want to put any pressure on Harris speaking without a teleprompter. The media could easily make the pressure unbearable on Harris and her running mate Tim Walz simply by giving them tough coverage highlighting important issues in their own records.
This is not a hard thing to do. Kamala Harris has flip-flopped on major issues, such as the fact she supported a ban on fracking. She has offered no more of an explanation for her change of heart than a generic campaign statement. She was, despite the press’s frantic and unconvincing walkback, the “border czar” when 10 million-plus illegal immigrants were let into the U.S. She now “promises to go tough on border security,” and the press doesn’t seem concerned about making her explain what she’ll do now that she wasn’t doing before.
And then there’s Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who cowardly bailed on a combat assignment and lied about his National Guard service. As governor of Minnesota, Walz openly sympathized with BLM rioters and was very slow to act as they burned 150 buildings and did half a billion in damages to his state. He’s presided over a huge spike in murder and major education failures in Minnesota, and is generally a progressive radical.
Any mildly adversarial reporting on Harris and Walz would pretty quickly see them face real pressure to explain themselves publicly.
By contrast, in the last week Donald Trump held a press conference where he took on all comers from a hostile press, and J.D. Vance did a series of interviews with network news that were almost absurdly adversarial. CNN’s Dana Bash went straight at combat veteran Vance for criticizing Kamala running mate Tim Walz’s questionable decision to abandon his unit and retire from the National Guard before deploying to Iraq. She told millions of viewers that Walz did not know his unit was deploying — which is decidedly untrue.
And then ABC’s Jon Karl also acted as a surrogate for Walz by flatly accusing Donald Trump of lying because he said that Walz supported “kidnapping” children from parents who don’t support their children being hormonally sterilized and surgically mutilated because too much time on the wrong parts of the internet made them confused about their sex.
Contrary to Karl, the fact is that the Minnesota law that Walz enthusiastically supports made the state a “trans refuge” and allows for the state to invoke “temporary emergency jurisdiction,” aka taking kids from parents if there’s a custody dispute over a child getting what the state falsely deems “medically necessary” treatment for being trans. Instead of asking Harris and Walz whether they think undermining parental rights is something Americans support, Karl is cartoonishly calling Trump and Vance liars based on his own misunderstanding of what Walz has done.
It’s worth watching Vance’s response to Karl in full because he does a masterful job of pushing back on his ridiculous defense of Walz’s radical policies. But perhaps what’s most notable about the exchange is the way that Vance calls out Karl and the press for not discussing real issues:
Here’s the more important thing, Jon, why aren’t we talking about inflation? Why aren’t we talking about the fact that groceries are unaffordable thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies, and so is housing? We’ve talked a little bit about the border. Why aren’t we talking about the fact that the entire world is on fire because Kamala Harris’ foreign policy, she’s just asleep at the wheel? We have a set of plans. You talk about sticking to the facts. Donald Trump and I have a set of plans to lower the cost of housing and food, to bring peace back to the world with American leadership, that is all that we want to do. And I think it’s telling that the Harris administration is focused so much on these side issues instead of on the real substance, why Americans are unhappy with Kamala Harris. … What are their policy views? They don’t have a policy position on their website. Should she sit down and answer tough questions with you? I think she should. Where is she?
The reality, of course, is that the Trump campaign should know they can’t count on the media to do their job. They are openly campaigning for her and the double standards are blatant — when Harris recently stole the Trump campaign’s proposal to stop taxing tips, you might be able to detect a slight difference between how the proposal has been covered depending on which candidate is espousing it.
America’s failing media establishment knows that if Trump were elected it would be a massive repudiation and further erode their credibility. They’re going to do what they can to help Harris get elected. If the Trump campaign needs this race to be about issues, they had better have a plan to bring these issues to the public and make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz account for their lack of honesty and failures. The press won’t do this and time is running out.