The Paradox

At The Hill Kevin Naughton explains how, paradoxically, adversarial major media outlets may be President Trump’s greatest allies in his re-election bid:

There is no doubt that the country is going to go into a significant recession of undetermined length and casualties will be high.

However, the bar for “success” has been set very low — not just by Trump, but primarily by the media outlets he disdains. Every end-of-the-world report depresses public expectations. Since politics is all about perception, the anti-Trump media have done the president an immeasurable service in their criticism. Trump doesn’t have to do a good job against the coronavirus — he just has to do a barely competent job to exceed expectations.

With new estimates bringing the expected mortality toll down to approximately 60,000 and a collapse of the health care system — even in hard-hit regions — looking to be a much more remote possibility, Trump is set up to declare a victory of sorts. Certainly, there could easily be more flare-ups or a return of the virus in force in the fall, but Trump may well win an expectations game his opponents set up perfectly for him.

Determining responsibility for the spread of the pandemic in the United States is like “Murder on the Orient Express” — everyone did it. Whether it is the Chinese (blamed by 90 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats) or a World Health Organization whose main competence appears to be toadying to China, Trump has two easy targets on which to focus his considerable bile.

And, while the Trump administration was not ahead of the curve in preparation, neither was the rest of the world. The European Union failed to act, even as an outbreak began sweeping Italy. Japan looked to have successfully avoided a major contagion, only for it to hit in the past week. Outside of South Korea and Taiwan, hardly any developed country has escaped an outbreak.

Trump is helped in the United States by the failures in the New York City region. The states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut account for approximately half of all confirmed cases (Note: “confirmed cases” is certainly a severe undercount of the total, but assuming that the American states and other developed democratic nations have roughly the same error rate, “confirmed cases” can be used for comparison purposes). The late response by New York politicians, scandalously encouraging people to go out and not disrupt their lives, allow Trump to drop blame for half the epidemic on leaders in a state that did not and will not vote for him.

For every attack levied at Trump, he has a response that may resonate with enough voters to either win the argument or sufficiently muddy the waters.

Moreover, the major media outlets are overwhelmingly located in New York City, Washington, and Los Angeles. That their views are disproportionately based on what’s happening in New York is not entirely surprising under the circumstances.

If the major media outlets had maintained a professional detachment, they would not have assumed the role of foil for Trump they have assumed. However, with the New York Times running front page op-eds and editorials opposing Trump as early as 2016, nearly every crawl on CNN bearing an anti-Trump message, and with the outlets putting their weight behind every foray into impeachment efforts (which began as early as June 2017), that ship sailed long ago.