We should place bets on how long the national news media will pretend to take interest in Donald Trump nearly being assassinated for the second time in as many months. My guess is that, 48 hours post-murder attempt, we’ll hear next to nothing about it again.
Not even 24 hours later, they were blaming Trump for someone trying to kill him. MSNBC’s Alex Witt asked a guest on air Sunday, “Do you expect there to be calls from within the Trump campaign to do that, because he’s going to reach out to his supporters and say, ‘Let’s [tone] this down’?” She added, “Do you expect to hear anything from the Trump campaign about toning down the rhetoric, toning down the violence, or would that be atypical of the former president?”
(Dim)Witt’s colleague Lester Holt on NBC placed the assassination attempt in the context of “fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail.” He specifically checked Democrats and his media peers for their repeated and false claim that Trump is a “threat to democracy” and that he’s just like Adolf Hitler.
Wait, I’m sorry. That’s wrong. Holt’s example of “fierce rhetoric” wasn’t from Democrats at all. Instead he cited Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance for “continu[ing] to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in [Springfield] Ohio,” because, “This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town.” (There is plenty of evidence to back up locals’ claims about tens of thousands of Haitian migrants wreaking havoc on the Midwest.)
This isn’t
