The No. 1 trending question related to Donald Trump on Google right now is “Who tried to shoot Trump?” Which means a lot of people don’t know the answer. Which is probably because the assassination attempt on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee hasn’t been covered as a major news story.
The answer, authorities say, is Michael Steven Sandford, a 20-year-old British citizen who was in the United States illegally after overstaying his visa. Sandford allegedly tried to pull a gun from the holster of a police officer at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on Saturday. He was arrested and later told the Secret Service that he had driven to the event from California and had been planning to kill the candidate for a year, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Nevada.
News outlets have certainly reported on the incident, but it hasn’t gotten anything resembling wall-to-wall coverage.
So far, so good. Just the facts. Then they do a good job of bringing up an element of the story that I had not realized, since we got rid of cable at Chateau d’ Bob some time ago:
Cable news shows devoted little time to Sandford Tuesday morning and afternoon. Trump’s dismal fundraising report from May and his recent firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski received far more attention. Trump called in to the Trump-friendly “Fox & Friends” morning show and wasn’t even asked about the attempt on his life.
It’s worth noting that the real estate magnate didn’t bring it up, either. Trump hasn’t so much as tweeted about it, which suggests he doesn’t consider it a huge deal or doesn’t want to talk about it.
And why would this be? Our friends at WaPo have the answers! The article starts well enough, citing that the assailant didn’t even come close to succeeding, and cites several other instances of would-be assassins who did not become darlings of the news cycle. But being the WaPo it’s only a matter of time before they go off the rails.
From Trump’s perspective, Sandford doesn’t fit neatly into his campaign narrative. The billionaire has positioned himself as a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, so he certainly won’t use the failed assassination attempt to push for gun control. Sandford is an illegal immigrant — and Trump is all about deporting illegal aliens — but the candidate’s focus is on building a wall to keep out Mexicans and barring foreign Muslims from entering the United States. A Briton who overstayed his visa isn’t a very good poster boy for the cause.
“Doesn’t fit the narrative”. I’ll grant them that point, even if it is a shaky one. Overstaying one’s visa drops you firmly in the category of illegal immigrant, There’s no good reason for Trump to have not made this into a bigger story. The Post even posts a counter point from Hot Air:
Can you imagine the coverage we’d be seeing if someone had attempted to shoot Hillary Clinton? The same could be said if it had happened with Barack Obama in the summer of 2008. Questions would be debated on air for weeks on end about the evil lurking in the hearts of men and why someone would be so desperate to prevent the election of the first black or female president. But when someone plots for more than a year to kill Trump, travels across the country to find an opportunity and then launches his attempt, it creates barely a ripple in the media pond.
The next logical step for a journalist would be to follow up on this obvious point, no? If you guessed “no”, you were correct! The article closes by making a bizarre leap straight to pointing out that some Trump supporters on social media are blaming Glenn Beck & Brad Thor’s friendly-fire anti-Trump rhetoric and using that as the closing argument in the post.
I thought the “Maybe it was ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative” was a great angle to explore, but unfortunately the article stopped at the right side of the aisle. Maybe this would have been a better question to ask of the PR wing of the Radical Left, aka the mainstream press. The elements are certainly there for a story not fitting the narrative – a foreigner in the US illegally, weapon of choice would have been a stolen government issue gun; where have we seen this before? Kate Steinle was unavailable for comment.
If you want a more intelligent analysis of the story, click over at PJ Media, where Debra Heine asks the question, Was Trump’s Would Be Assasin Inspired by a “Climate of Hate?” This story is a textbook example of why, despite their biases, it is still useful to read the MSM. I hadn’t know that even the Trump-friendly sources were keeping relatively quiet about this story, and I’m still not sure why they did. And it’s equally useful to know that leftists who believe that they are journalists remain blissfully unaware of the biases that taint their reporting.
And to the Washington Post, Stay stupid, my friends.
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