President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. We should all wish President Joe Biden a good time. We shouldn’t expect media nastiness, or glee.
But this presents an obvious occasion to remember just how the “objective” press made a frenetic, mean-spirited, and hyperbolic mess out of former President Donald Trump’s bout with the virus, which was announced on Oct. 2, 2020. In their ardor to get Trump removed from office, they couldn’t imagine acting with decency or restraint.
First and foremost, cable news channels couldn’t pause for a day or two from their routine smear that Trump was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Take ex-GOP strategist Rick Tyler on Al Sharpton’s show on MSNBC:
I see this as a drunk driving who injures himself in a car wreck, and kills the oncoming sober driver. Donald Trump has injured himself … and 200,000 people, other drivers, have died due to the coronavirus.
After Trump was infected, CNN analyst Carl Bernstein just doubled down that “his response has been homicidal negligence.” CNN brought on then-Washington Post opinion editor David Swerdlick, who couldn’t get rid of Trump fast enough: “President Trump is the president until at least Jan. 20 at noon, and every day, people’s lives are in the balance.”
So let’s just lay out the numbers again. After Trump’s departure, nearly 400,000 Americans were lost to COVID-19. The death toll has increased to 1.02million since then, thanks to Biden. But the media blamed Trump for every single death on his watch—and Biden was assigned zero blame for anyone’s demise.
You can loathe Trump’s remarks early in the pandemic trying to downplay the threat, but to accuse him of mass murder—which was routine in 2020—was apparently what the liberals call “reality-based journalism.” No “independent fact-checkers” objected.
On the reliably liberal program “Reliable Sources,” former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron lost all sense of reality after Trump was infected, proclaiming, “This is the collapse of a democratic republic because of its leadership and its honesty.” Democracy was always dying.
But that’s not as bad as Masha Gessen, a Russian American writer for The New Yorker. Brian Stelter told her it could be compared with the Josef Stalin death watch.
In the last few days, there have been many comparisons to the Soviet Union. They are not unfounded, I believe. The particular period I am thinking about is something I have written about a lot, which were the days of Stalin’s death watch, right? All of the foreign correspondents and domestic correspondents were aware of what was happening. They were not given any information. Everyone was anticipating the final call.
Trump didn’t die, but CNN wanted to speculate about it. CNN loved comparing Trump with Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, for many years. Stelter even showed a kook who claimed Trump would kill more people that all those mass murderers together.
The real irony of all this was CNN host Don Lemon then offering a glowing tribute to Biden for refusing to politicize Trump’s infection. He proclaimed, “Here you see Joe Biden showing you what a real man does—what a real human being does.” It’s not at all what they did at CNN.
Biden didn’t have to exploit Trump’s illness. He had a whole media-Democrat complex to do it all for him. Remember this: Democrats will always be able to make a good impression when they have media hackers like CNN doing all the dirty work.
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