Donald Trump has kept the Media Research Center busy playing defense for him, what with his authoritarian statements about his opponents being “vermin,” immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his ludicrous promise to be a one-day dictator. The MRC had to stay on defense as people kept pointing just how authoritarian and even Hitler-adjacent such remarks are. Tim Graham played whataboutism in his Jan. 5 column:
On the third anniversary of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Joe Biden and the Democrats still operate as if this one terrible afternoon is the number-one issue of the 2024 campaign.
In a new campaign ad, President Biden proclaims “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency.” He says he and Vice President Harris have pushed for voting rights since Day One of the Biden administration, and “I ask every American to join me in this cause.”
Democrats pose as the guardians of democracy, and smear the Republicans as pushers of autocracy. No one expects the “independent fact-checkers” to look at this Biden-Harris ad and question how their alleged stand for democracy and voting rights stands next to Biden backers trying to rip Donald Trump off primary ballots and deny any Biden-challenging Democrats access to primary ballots.
Graham didn’t explain how citing a Constitutional clause regarding Trump’s eligibility for the ballot after inciting an insurrection wasn’t democratic. Instead, he whined further:
Biden and his media enablers clearly think they can acquire the votes of people disgusted by Trump’s stubborn refusal to concede defeat in 2020 (and his reluctance to stop rioting on January 6) by just citing “democracy” as the all-encompassing issue that cancels all focus on their failures, from inflation to immigration. They’re clearly unwilling to hear arguments that Democrats are the ones who are carrying around the seeds of authoritarianism in their policies.
Note that Graham refused to make the connection between Trump’s “stubborn refusal to concede defeat” — which actually involved deliberately spreading lies about election fraud, something Graham’s employer helped him to do — and the riot he was reluctant to stop (why would he want to stop a riot he incited?).
He went on to cite examples of those “seeds of authoritarianism” Democrats are purportedly carrying around, such as “Covid Authoritarianism” (read: taking commonsense health measures to slow the spread of a highly communicable and deadly virus), “Climate Authoritarianism” (read: trying to save the planet), “Student-Debt Authoritarianism” (canceling billions of dollars in education debt) and “Gender Authoritarianism” (read: not hating LGBTQ people). And he wasn’t done whining:
Anyone who thinks these notions are overwrought should be told that it’s overwrought for Biden-Harris campaigners to imply that asking voters to present a picture ID is some kind of descent into dictatorship or Jim Crow. Requiring an ID isn’t half as intrusive as mandating vaccinations. Democrats are not synonymous with democracy. Energetically arguing that they’re the party of overweening statism is not an offense against democracy. It defines democracy.
The next day, Graham complained that NBC’s Chuck Todd “posted a piece about ‘Confronting Trump’ on NBCNews.com that – shocker – sprung out of a family trip Todd took to Germany, including tours of museums about the Nazi era. This, unsurprisingly, turns to comparisons of Trump and Hitler”:
He lamented the Big Tech deplatforming of Trump didn’t hurt him, and weirdly claimed nobody in the media pays attention to Trump’s Truth Social rants. “Trump simply created his own social media ecosystem, which allowed him to communicate his crazy grievances, and his grievance-driven politics, directly to his supporters without any pushback or notice from mainstream America.”
That’s simply not true. We’re being incessantly told about his “crazy grievances.”
We don’t recall Graham and his MRC co-workers telling their readers that Trump’s grievances are crazy. That’s what’s known as the right-wing media bubble. He concluded with another trademark whine:
If we could ask Todd a question, it would be this: If indicting Trump and impeaching Trump and ripping Trump off the ballot isn’t working, what would happen if the media gave his Republican opponents more of a chance to communicate on their airwaves? Why does Trump receive the lion’s share of attention, and obviously more attention than the current president is getting? Did that work for the media in 2016?
Why doesn’t Graham ask why Fox News or Newsmax or OAN have more Democrats on their airwaves and attempt to be something other than 24/7 Republican propaganda? Of course, that’s what the MRC is too, and Graham clearly doesn’t see the issue.
In a Jan. 7 post, Jorge Bonilla insisted that non-right-wing media failed in their criticisms of Trump:
Across the dial, Sunday political affairs shows took it upon themselves to attempt to make GOP members of Congress squirm in response to statements made by former President Donald Trump. This collective drive-by attempt failed miserably, hitting nothing but air.
First up, Speaker Mike Johnson. Watch as CBS’s Margaret Brennan tries to make him flinch over Trump’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric on illegal immigration during their interview on Face the Nation (click “expand”):
[…]Here Brennan engages in the classic activist conflation of legal immigration with illegal, which we would expect to see on Univision. Speaker Johnson proceeds to brush this aside as he proceeds to shut her denunciation attempt down. Frustrated, Brennan hectors Johnson by cutting him off and saying “because it sounds hateful”. Johnson calmly brings discussion back to the ongoing border disaster, thus ending this attempt.
Bonilla didn’t explain how immigrants’ blood magically because less “poisoned” solely based on legal status (and he also gave Johnson a pass for evading the question). Still, he continued to channel Rush Limbaugh:
Three attempted shamings of Republican members of Congress, which were rebuffed with three different approaches. This is but a reminder that there is still such a thing as the drive-by media. As we kick off this election year, we can expect many more such drive-by attempts.
Bonilla didn’t explain why nothing Trump said was shameful and his supporters shouldn’t be held accountable for backing a candidate who says such hateful things.
Mark Finkelstein huffed in another Jan. 8 post regarding one episode of “Morning Joe”: “The first half-hour served up no fewer than nine mentions of the H-is-for-Hitler word—with one ‘fascism’ thrown in for good measure.” As we’ve noted, Finkelstein refused to discuss the remarks by Trump that make people make such comparisons. And he didn’t mention his employer’s own love of Nazi analogies, such as smearing critics as “digital brownshirts.”