Jeffrey Lord
Jeffrey Lord is a Contributing Writer for NewsBusters. Lord is a former White House political director in the Reagan White House and aide to HUD Secretary Jack Kemp. After graduating from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania he went on to work for the Pennsylvania State Senate Majority Leader, then going on to serve on Capitol Hill as a press secretary and legislative director for Congressman Bud Shuster (R-Pa.)
Yes, it’s President Joe Biden’s name on the 2024 ballot as former President Trump’s opponent.
But in reality?
In reality, Trump’s main opponent in this presidential election year is the “mainstream” – aka “liberal” – media.
In truth, this game of targeting potential Republican presidential nominees or presidents has been played for decades. Hop in the time traveling machine and take a look at some of the coverage faced by a rising GOP star named Ronald Reagan.
The New York Times declared that Reagan’s candidacy is “patently ridiculous.” The Times added this of Reagan’s run against then-incumbent GOP President Gerald Ford in 1976:
The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President (Gerald Ford). It makes a lot of news, but it makes no sense.
The left-leaning New Republic was unsparing, one of its columnists writing that:
Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968,” adding that “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…He is a divisive factor in the party.
Then there was Harper’s magazine:
That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.
The Chicago Daily News huffed:
The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense – irrationality conceived and hair-raising in their potential mischief… Here comes Barry Goldwater again, only more so, and at this stage another such debacle could sink the GOP so deep it might never recover.
Then there was the supposedly pro-GOP Time magazine, co-founded by the decidedly conservative Henry Luce:
Republicans now must decide whether he (Reagan) represents a conservative wave of the future or is just another Barry Goldwater calling on the party to mount a hopeless crusade against the twentieth century.
Startlingly, National Review – the conservative magazine founded by Reagan’s friend William F Buckley Jr. – said:
Reagan’s image remains inchoate.… At the outset of his campaign, his image is largely that of the role-playing actor – pleasant on stage, but ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights. Reagan does not yet project the presidential image. He is not seen as a serious man.
And on and on this kind of media sniping at Reagan went.
Moving up to current day, as America moves into its traditional Memorial Day holiday in the middle of the 2024 presidential election between Trump and Biden, it is more than clear that as the media of the day targeted Reagan, today’s media has zeroed in on Trump.
Here’s the New York Times pushing the Democrat strategy of focusing on abortion:
This Is the Democrats’ Best Shot in 2024. And They Are Spending Like Crazy on It.
The same day a Times columnist was headlining:
Trump’s Taste for Tyranny Finds a Target
In the same vein, a Washington Post columnist headlined:
Trump’s fascist talk is what’s ‘poisoning the blood of our country’
No, Trump isn’t Hitler. But his copycat words lead nowhere good.
A Post editor opined this in the same issue:
Some rogues tell truths. Trump just isn’t one of them.
Across the country the Los Angeles Times was headlining the following this week:
Trump and GOP repeatedly echo Nazi and far-right ideology as they aim to retake White House
One could go on – and on and on – with headlines and stories like this that salt the everyday coverage of Trump in the “mainstream” media. (And by all means, don’t forget that similar treatment was dished to then-presidents Nixon and George W Bush.)
All of which means that, as noted, Joe Biden is not Donald Trump’s sole – or perhaps even major – opponent in 2024.
That other Trump opponent, as was true with Reagan, is the “mainstream” media that isn’t even close to “mainstream” – much less is it fair or objective. What Americans are swamped with 24/7 is an ongoing political assault on the man Republican voters quite voluntarily selected as their presidential nominee.
And all of this when it is only the end of May.
There is more of this kind of coverage coming Trump’s way – not to mention similar coverage that will be dumped on whomever Trump selects as his vice presidential running mate.
As Americans head into the holiday weekend, the obvious wisdom from the media treatment of Reagan and now Trump is: buckle in.
And a special thanks to all of those who put on the uniform and gave their lives to protect America’s freedoms. Happy and Thankful Memorial Day.
