Blame to go around

Yesterday I wrote that I’m going to keep fighting no matter what, and that I hope you’re willing to keep fighting alongside me. But it is going to take us a moment to figure out precisely what we’re up against and how to fight back. By now we know the enemy all too well. But let’s be real, Donald Trump is fully senile this time and so his actions will be influenced and dictated by others around him. So in that sense we’re going to have to re-learn the enemy all over again.

In the meantime I want to take a moment today to address the blame game that’s understandably begun to crop up. In times like this there’s a natural tendency to direct the blame inward. But that’s not accurate or productive. Kamala Harris was a just about perfect candidate and she ran a just about perfect campaign. We finally got the kind of DNC support we always wanted. The fundraising was there. The momentum was there. The work was there. So many of you reading this put in so much work, and I applaud you for it. We, meaning our side, didn’t do anything wrong.

So let me take a moment to spell out where the blame really goes. First, you have to blame the selfish and stupid lowlifes who voted for Trump in 2024, even once they knew full well exactly what he was. Yes, half of Americans hate what America stands for, and they always have. The Civil War, McCarthyism, this is nothing new. Throw in the inherent sexism and racism of not choosing the Black woman candidate who was superior to the white man by a laugh out loud margin, and this is one screwed up country. I’m starting to understand the point of view of the brilliant George Carlin a little better every day.

All that said, there’s a group that deserves a massive amount of blame, perhaps the most blame of all, and that group is largely failing to get called out for it. That group is the political media. Yes, the media is an easy target. But look what just happened.

The Biden-Harris economy has been booming for years. Yet the major media outlets (on all sides) spent all that time insisting that the Biden-Harris economy was a disaster. Instead of believing what they were seeing – increasing wages and decreasing inflation – a lot of folks simply decided to believe what the media was drilling into them about the economy. The media steadily ginned up a metric ton of economic anxiety in voters, and then the media turned around and acted like they had nothing to do with the “economic anxiety” that voters were feeling.

And don’t get me started on how much of a free pass the media gave Trump this time around. He’s a recently convicted felon, yet you rarely heard it mentioned anywhere in the media down the stretch. Trump also has the most severe case of dementia that any modern political figure has ever displayed, yet you never heard the media use the word “dementia” even once in reference to Trump. Instead the media pretended that Joe Biden, who has been randomly misspeaking on the political stage for fifty years and is aging pretty well, was the one who was cognitively depleted.

Not only that, the entire political media (including your “friends” at MSNBC) decided to gang up on Biden with only a hundred days left in the election in order to dishonestly portray him as fully senile and politically non-viable, when that simply was not the case. At the time the media forced Biden out of the race, he was still polling within the margin of error and he was still capable of running circles around Trump on the campaign trail. Yet the media decided it didn’t want Biden in the race because he was boring and bad for ratings, so it dishonestly made him non-viable, to the point that he had no choice but to drop out.

Presidential incumbency is by far the biggest advantage in all of American politics. You never forfeit the presidential incumbency advantage willingly. Did you ever wonder why most U.S. Presidents get two terms? Did you ever wonder how FDR got reelected a fourth time when everyone could see he was on death’s door? Americans like an incumbent President. They just do. People figure, often dumbly, that if someone has already been in there for four years and didn’t get us nuked, then why risk it with someone new?

It’s why I spent all summer calling for Biden to stay in the race, and trying to force the media to back off from its dishonest plot against him. Once Biden was out, the incumbency advantage shifted to Trump. It didn’t matter that Kamala was a perfect candidate and ran a perfect campaign. It didn’t even matter that she was the sitting Vice President. Dumb voters saw her as the newcomer and Trump as the de facto incumbent. It’s a huge reason why we lost. And it’s entirely the fault of the media for using dishonest tactics to force Biden out of the race so close to the election.

You can look at all these different factors – how the economy was misrepresented, how a Black woman candidate was portrayed differently than a white man candidate, how Trump’s criminal record was downplayed, how Trump’s senility was downplayed, how Trump’s status as an adjudicated rapist was downplayed, and how the incumbency advantage got turned upside down – and all of these things have one thing in common: the media refused to do its job correctly and instead did its job dishonestly.

I know that a small vocal minority of you don’t like it whenever I call out the media. But the media is the main reason Donald Trump is headed back to the White House. The media, with its endless dishonestly about Hillary’s emails, was the reason Trump got into the White House to begin with. If you still don’t want to hold the media accountable, if you’d still rather just stare at MSNBC hosts while they blindly quote dishonest headlines from corrupt newspapers all day, then I’m sorry, but you’re not basing yourself in reality.

Before we move forward, I want to make 100% damn sure that everyone who’s willing to gear up for this new battle understands that the mainstream media is not our friend. Even the major political news outlets that purport to be on our “side” are still doing a ridiculously dishonest job of portraying things. We will hold Donald Trump accountable for as long as we can. In the meantime, we have to hold the media accountable while we still can.