Journalists can’t read Trump supporters’ minds. But they pretend to.
A recent survey of Americans’ views of the news media by Gallup and the Knight Foundation “goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media,” according to an Associated Press report of the findings, “to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive.”
Fully half of respondents disagreed with a statement that national news organizations don’t intend to mislead; only a quarter agreed with it. There were similar numbers about whether journalists act in the public’s best interests — no way, the public says.
This comprehensive disdain for the media isn’t so “startling” if you pause to consider that much Donald Trump-related reporting resembles an unremediated Superfund site.
My opinion on that front was only hardened by the nearuniform contempt journalists showed for the audience at the recent CNN town hall with the former president. I’ve seen a lot of scorn for Trump supporters expressed over the past eight years, but never so concentrated as the wall-to-wall condemnation of the audience that night.
Any objective observer could tell that many of the New Hampshire Republicans in the audience were sitting on their hands, but that truth was inconvenient to the quickly established narrative that the audience reaction was, well, deplorable.
The New York Times reported that “the audience’s regular interruptions on behalf of Mr. Trump were like a laugh track on a sitcom.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution political columnist Patricia Murphy, reflecting a widespread appalled reaction in the legacy media, wrote that “the crowd went crazy” after Trump blasted E. Jean Carroll, winner of a partial court victory the day before, when a Manhattan jury rejected her rape allegation but found Trump responsible for sexual abuse and defamation, and awarded her $5 million in damages.
Apparently, it horrifies the legacy media to encounter skepticism of any verdict against Trump or to show approval for his version of events. I was watching the town hall, and neither was the audience unanimous in its support of Trump nor did it “go crazy.”
Most of the audience did seem to approve of Trump’s casting aspersions on Carroll. That likely reflected not just doubt about her story, fueled by the split verdict, but also — more important — a deep skepticism among GOP voters of the apparently endless legal pursuit of Trump by those who want to bring him down. That includes special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the House of Representatives in two impeachments and now special counsel Jack Smith as well as New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg and ongoing Georgia grand jury proceedings.
Republican audiences are skeptical of legal attacks on Trump because they have seen so many of them. Just because people applaud various Trump remarks does not make them certified enemies of the #MeToo movement or conspiracy theorists about voting machines. I don’t know what the individuals clapping in New Hampshire that night were thinking. Nor do any reporters, pundits or analysts in the national media.
The AP reported that Tom Jones, a senior writer at the media research institute Poynter, had favored the idea of CNN’s town hall with Trump but “was surprised by the conduct of the audience, which he had expected to be more neutral.” Really? Why would a town hall for Republican voters in New Hampshire be expected to be neutral when Trump has a commanding lead in GOP polling?
An Insider report ladled on the contempt for the audience, noting that “a video taken after CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump shows the audience cheering for and thanking the former president after he spent over an hour touting election lies and making light of the sexual abuse case he was found liable in earlier this week.”
I believe many of Trump’s characterizations of the 2020 election have been flat wrong; I declared on election night, and since then, that Joe Biden won, and convincingly so. I have told Trump that in person.
But I also think that when he says “the election was rigged,” many in the legacy media hear only “the voting machines were fixed,” or other absurd conspiracy theories, instead of the entirely justified “the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed to help Joe Biden” or “we faced a series of improvised voting rules that struck us as deeply unfair.”
Many changes in voting law were made during the pandemic, often with little notice and zero debate, some imposed by courts or seemingly with an almost reckless disregard for traditional voting norms. Extended deadlines for voting, the expansion of mailin voting and the scattering of ballot drop boxes conflicted with long-established rules and jarred many who follow elections closely. Many millions of Americans might reject the idea that voting machines were manipulated but think that many measures taken before the 2020 election were suspect.
And their skepticism might be growing. Consider recent revelations by Republican-led House investigations about the 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials strongly suggesting that the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. Now it seems the letter was ginned up at the request of the Biden campaign — and one of the instigators was Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken, now secretary of state. Right on cue, the letter was released before the 2020 election, with a massive media publicity boost.
Now we’re on to the 2024 campaign, and the legacy media’s contempt for Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who support him still burns with the heat of a thousand suns. Journalists shouldn’t be surprised when they discover that the feeling is mutual. But they also shouldn’t assume, absent an in-depth interview, that they know what any individual Republican voter, much less an entire audience, is thinking — or why that person might be applauding. The only safe assumption is that, for many of these voters, Trump simply has all the right enemies.