Erick Erickson:
People are idiots. Donald Trump will keeping winning because people are idiots. And no, I am not talking about Trump supporters. I am mostly talking about the press corps.
Let’s review Saturday shall we?
The press decided to give massive coverage to the Women’s March in Washington with members of the press gleefully reporting every insult against Trump, but patently ignoring that one of the key speakers opposed the collapse of the Berlin Wall because she thought the communists were better than us. Another speaker, Ashley Judd, suggested Trump supporters were Nazis.
Consider the reaction of the press had this been said of Barack Obama. Well, we do not have to ponder it. We know. The press was outraged. Remember how a congressional staffer got fired for tweeting something about the Obama kids? On Friday, multiple people with blue checkmarks on Twitter were attacking Barron Trump and the press said nothing. (UPDATE: Well, one reporter was pretty vocal about it at least) We also know how the press responded when anyone called Obama a muslim, Nazi, commie, etc.
All this reinforces in many people’s minds that there is a double standard. And that double standard went into full force on Saturday. Supposedly objective reporters spent the day as activists and you all know it.
Overnight Friday, Zeke Miller tweeted out that the MLK bust was gone. It set off an uproar online. But he was in error. He tweeted out, basically, a “my bad” later that night. The bust had been hidden behind a door or secret service agent or something.
On Saturday, Donald Trump went to the CIA and bashed Miller, though not by name. The press flew into full outrage, using the fact that Trump stood in front of a memorial to dead CIA agents as the pretext for attacking Trump for attacking one of their own.
They failed, in the process, to report that Trump’s remarks about the press were met with uproarious applause by the agents of the CIA. Trump acted exactly like Donald Trump acts and the press not only considered it news, but because he went after one of their own it suddenly became the biggest news of the day. A skillful way, by the way, to take away coverage from the Women’s March.
Later, when Sean Spicer lashed out at the press for daring to report Trump’s inaugural crowd was smaller than Obama’s, the press had a complete meltdown. But Spicer threw in a sleight of hand the press never picked up on. He clearly meant not just actual attendees, but also viewers and listeners online, on radio, and on television around the world. He still probably is not accurate, but it gave Trump supporters a pre-text again to go after the press for bias yet again.
Now, here we are at the close of Saturday, and the press has been fixated on a President of the United States daring to fight them. They have never had a President push back against them before like this. So now they’re screaming “First Amendment” and offended that Trump is doing all this.
They are screaming and moaning over treatment from a man who won a national election after video revealed he thought he could grab women by, well, you know where. And somehow the press thinks that voters who voted for Trump after that will care about this.