Why Media Will Move On So Quickly From Second Trump Attacker

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 even new behavior. After the first Democrat-inspired target on Trump’s life in July, Mike Allen at the influential Axios news outlet asked his readers to envision a Republican convention speech in which the former president apologized for almost being murdered in front of his own supporters.

“Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility,” wrote Allen. “Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language — and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.”

Recall that before this latest episode of left-wing violence — all current evidence indicates the suspected shooter is a Kamala Harris supporter and Democrat donor — the media acknowledged Trump’s first run-in with an attempted assassination for all of about a week, although that incident was just short of fatal, as Trump suffered a bullet wound to his head. That affair was discarded like any other news cycle, and not even mentioned at the presidential debate between Trump and Kamala last week until Trump brought it up well into the thing.

Guess what did come up at the debate: January 6, 2021, a political riot more than three years old and during which the single fatality was of an unarmed Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol police officer in the neck (a fact that also went unmentioned until Trump brought it up).

The media aren’t scandalized by Democrat-inspired violence. They believe it’s justified. More often than not, they instigate it. They believe political violence is only out of line when it comes from their opponents.

That’s why the Washington Post just three days before Trump’s second near-death experience ran the headline, “Trump stokes suspicions about assassination attempt, raising fears of more violence.” The article said that by speaking publicly about what happened to him, the details of which to this day are unclear, he “could inspire some of his supporters to resort to violence in his defense.”

Then, just one day after the plotted attack, the Post called it “Another chance for Trump to frame Democrats as dangerous.”

A former president was nearly murdered for a second time, and corporate media are still talking about how he’s at fault for it and in the wrong for being offended.

If he can’t talk about it after it happens, if it’s inappropriate for him to acknowledge the ramifications when it does, the only logical conclusion is that the media are fine with people trying to kill Donald Trump. They’ve deemed it just barely newsworthy that a president was almost killed two times during a campaign. Because he’s not a Democrat.

Maybe instead we should be considering how ugly the media will react if one of these attempts is a success.