Bloomberg’s daily political show With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann explained, “I do not hate Donald Trump, but I do not take him seriously. I thought, you know, everything that was garish and ridiculous about him was fully on display. . . . Will it get him anywhere close to becoming the nominee or the President of the United States? I think not.”
PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff calmly relayed, “So far, Trump has placed near the bottom in public opinion polls of the Republican presidential hopefuls.”
She was right to say that. He was tied for tenth at just 3 percent in a CNN poll of self-described Republicans (and independent-leaning Republicans), and that was where her colleagues thought he’d remain, too.
“He can’t win, but he can get a lot of votes,” Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, a former political reporter, predicted on MSNBC’s The Last Word. The Huffington Post’s Marc Lamont Hill agreed over on CNN: “Of course he’s not going to win.” CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes echoed that opinion: “No one expects Trump to get close to winning the nomination.”
The morning after Trump’s announcement, MSNBC Morning Joe pundit Mike Barnicle chortled, “Can we stipulate for the purposes of this conversation that Donald Trump will never be President of the United States?”
CBS This Morning host Norah O’Donnell reported that “some Republicans say they’re worried Trump will turn the campaign into a circus,” and the subsequent story by correspondent Nancy Cordes cautioned that “party leaders worry Trump’s presence will turn the primary into a joke.”
NBC’s Today relegated the news to a dismissive twenty-three-second brief but made sure to include this insulting sentence: “America’s largest Latino civil rights organization called Trump ‘an exceedingly silly man.’”
That night, NBC’s evening newscast took it to the next level, featuring a rare narrated piece by Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who unloaded on Trump. “On the one hand, he’s a late-night joke,” he stated. “On the other, he’s the proverbial skunk at the garden party. How does the Republican Party handle a political streaker who knows how to get attention?”
With “moderators” like this, who needed left-wing Democratic Party spokespersons?
The Associated Press rounded up all the delighted late-night comedians as part of its “news” coverage. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump would be like a “president and an amusement park all rolled up into one.” NBC’s Seth Meyers said that “in a speech cobbled together from forwarded emails from your uncle, he let us know what he thought that America needed.” Despite leaving The Daily Show, Jon Stewart released a video calling the announcement speech “over a half-hour of the most beautifully ridiculous jibber-jabber ever to pour forth from the mouth” of a billionaire.
On Bloomberg TV’s With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann acknowledged that all this carried a whiff of elitism: “For the national press corps and other elites, Donald Trump’s campaign is a pure vanity exercise, and a target ripe for outright mockery, or low-level derision.”
Translation: Viewed through the eyes of his colleagues, only single-toothed welfare inbreds with second-grade educations could vote for Donald Trump.
The mockery and derision have never stopped. The media had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that a large segment of Americans wasn’t listening to their chattering. In fact, these nonstop insult barrages were galvanizing his supporters.
We acknowledge that it would seem easy to dismiss Trump’s chances in the Republican primaries if you were looking at this through the lens of traditional electoral politics. He had never run for any political office and was certainly rough around the edges, to be kind. He was loud and obnoxious, the polar opposite of presidential timber. Pundits looked at the gravitas and experience, the fund-raising process and endless endorsements, and the brand names of candidates such as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and expected them to land the two nominations for those reasons. Indeed, these were foregone conclusions for most reporters. The “experts” were about to be exposed as dinosaurs, thoroughly out of touch with the American electorate.
On the first night, Trump’s announcement captured just four and a half minutes of airtime on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts. NBC made Trump the third story. CBS waited until the sixth story. ABC made it the ninth item of the night.
To put that level of uninterest in its proper perspective, compare that with their coverage of the last president’s announcement. When Barack Hussein Obama announced his presidential bid on February 10, 2007, he too was an outsider without endorsements or branding, and he was registering just 18 percent in the polls, far behind the presumed nominee, Hillary. Yet the same reporters covered it as an inspirational moment in American history. He didn’t need to have a long résumé. In fact, he had no accomplishments. But he was black, a radical leftist, and charismatic, and so his self-narrated life story (including a memoir full of casual lies) was enough to qualify him as the next leader of the free world.
The day Obama announced, they went nuts for him.
Both ABC and NBC led their evening broadcasts with the Obama story even though it had been anticipated for months. CBS had scrapped its newscast, preferring to run sports instead, but its Saturday Early Show made up for it. They previewed it by devoting over nine minutes of “breaking news” time to Obama’s decision. It included Politico’s Mike Allen quipping, “Senator Obama has gotten such great publicity all his life that one of his friends joked to me that this morning, he’s throwing his halo into the ring.” So true. (And just imagine how Hillary must have responded to this coverage! No lamp in whatever room she was in was safe that night.)
Still, this was their dream, not their reality. She still had it in the bag. Shortly after that day we were in the green room at Fox preparing to do the Hannity show. Asked what chance Obama stood, former Clinton advisor Dick Morris echoed the media’s outlook on the 2008 presidential election outcome: “You conservatives are going to have to face reality. The next President of the United States of America will be Hillary Clinton.”
Democratic campaigns often are described in happy word pictures provided by “close friends” of the candidates. Liberals are awarded gold stars and twenty extra IQ points just for being liberals. They promise “hope” and “change” and never have to define what it means, knowing that their friends in the media will never call them out. But conservatives? They are presumed to be either evil or stupid and sometimes both. Anyone around in 1968, 1976, 1980, and 1984—the years Ronald Reagan ran for president—will remember that.
Donald Trump made it clear that his days as a liberal Democrat were behind him. Like Reagan, Trump declared he was now a conservative Republican. Now the leftist press was going to despise not just his personality but his policies, too.
Right off the bat they erupted over his comments about illegal immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” In the first month of his campaign, ABC, CBS and NBC aired a combined thirty-one evening news stories discussing this comment ad nauseam. It would be so, one controversial statement after the next, throughout the campaign. Trump thoroughly controlled the news cycle.
Trump opponents on both sides of the partisan divide kept finding moments when they just knew his campaign would self-destruct. The opening speech about Mexico sending rapists. The statements that John McCain was a loser for getting captured in Vietnam. The presumed resistance to filling out any financial disclosure forms. Daring to withhold his tax returns. Pledging to suspend Muslim
