The Media Research Center spent a lot of time earlier this year complaining that Donald Trump’s extremist and authoritarian tendencies were being called out. For instance:
- Whoopi: Poors Shouldn’t Care About Prices, Trump Wants You in a Camp
- PBS’s Barron-Lopez Crowns Biden Savior of Democracy vs. Trump’s ‘Stochastic Terrorism’
- On MSNBC: If Elected, Vengeful Trump Will Be ‘Guy With Machine Gun Spraying Everyone’
- CNN’s Tapper Skeptical GOP Senators Would Convict Trump Of Ordering Rival’s Assassination
- CNN Democrat Commentator Jamal Simmons: Trump A ‘Walking, Talking, Middle Finger’
- Crabby Chris Matthews Rants at Trump Voters: Hope You Enjoy the Tyranny!
- Rachel Maddow: Republicans Are ‘Very Eager to Buy’ Dictator Trump, End Elections
MRC generally don’t actually rebut those claims — they simply whine that the claims were made. Meanwhile, P.J. Gladnick spent a Jan. 16 post insisting that this narrative had been undermined when it, um, hadn’t:
Recently there has been an ever increasing drumbeat from the media for a narrative portraying that Donald Trump would be a dangerous dictator if he returned to the White House in 2025, despite not becoming one during his first term. Further undermining the media’s “Trump as dictator” narrative was an NBC News article on Monday that presents plans by liberals both in and out of government to curtail “dictator” Trump’s power by using the law to thwart him, and hyped a Collusion Hoax peddler as the standard-bearer for that effort.
The FIVE writers NBC crammbed [sic] into the article, Peter Nicholas, Katherine Doyle, Megan Lebowitz and Courtney Kube, plow forward trying to convince readers that a dangerous dictator can be constrained by mere law in “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House”:
[…]So the NBC News writers want us to believe that a dictatorial president willing to assassinate political rivals would also be constrained by law? Are these NBC writers so clueless as to not understand that real dictators don’t follow the law at all? Did the Communist China constitution limiting presidents to two terms stop that country’s dictator Xi Jinping from serving a third (and probably lifetime) term?
Imagine a Soviet official going into the Kremlin to inform Joseph Stalin he is breaking the law. It never happened because any such official would know that he would be in the basement of Lubyanka prison before the day was over facing certain execution if he were so naive as to think the law could put a limit on Stalin’s power.
No, P.J., that doesn’t undermine the narrative — in fact, Gladnick seems to be endorsing the idea of a Trump unconstrained by law. And Gladnick clearly didn’t read the Mueller report if he thinks that claims of collusion between Trump and Russian operatives are a “hoax.”