Immediately after the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts painted a similar picture of events: Kamala Harris had provoked Donald Trump into an angry, often incoherent performance.
Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it in such a similar way? For Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has transformed from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there can be only one explanation: The entire news media took orders from the Democratic Party.
Taibbi’s post-debate column, headlined “DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate Headlines,” poses a bold hypothesis. Taibbi gathers suspicious evidence of media collusion:
Conspiracies, animal-eating and the “same old, hackneyed script” were the headlines in the morning newspapers. “Harris keeps luring Trump,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Harris makes the aging Trump be his grumpiest, weirdest self,” Salon’s “Harris baits and beats Trump,” wrote the Miami-Herald. “Harris lures Trump into arguments,” CNN added. “Harris lures Trump into arguments: Inside their heated debate,” was another Just Headline, while The Wall Street Journal was “Harris bait Trump in heated presidential debate.” There was cheering that Harris had managed to get him “to defend himself instead of talking about issues.” And so on and so forth. Bait everywhere. No wonder Jake Tapper spoke of fishing after the event.
“As one of the last relics of the ‘Boys on the Bus’ era, I can’t remember the campaign messages being so crude or the politicians, press and audience behaving so obviously like a chorus,” he writes. “For the DNC or RNC to simply join the commentators, fire off a bunch of phrases and then immediately see them translated into common wisdom is new.”
Taibbi’s theory suffers from two serious flaws. The first is the linear nature of time. Taibbi takes a Democratic Party press release summarizing the reactions to the debate and concludes that the reactions were planted in the media by the party. But the press release came after the reactions. So she could quote them.
The simplest explanation of how this happened, which is also compatible with current physics, is as follows:
A debate ensued.
Many observers who witnessed the debate had more or less the same impression.
They have captured their impressions on social or traditional media.
Democratic Party press officials have read these reports and shared some of them.
I think that makes a lot more sense than Taibbi’s assumption that the Democrats secretly gave instructions to a large number of journalists about what to say at the debate.
The second flaw in Taibbi’s analysis is that the opinion that Trump looked terrible was shared by many people who couldn’t possibly be controlled by the Democratic news machine. As the debate played out in real time, online betting markets moved in Harris’ direction and Trump’s fraudulent meme stock plummeted.
Moreover, the conclusion that Harris effectively tricked Trump into an incoherent performance was shared by many observers who are sympathetic to Trump. “Trump took the bait. Harris kept his cool,” Eli Lake wrote in The free press. “He kept rising to the bait when she provoked him,” Brit Hume moaned on Fox News. “She won the debate because she came up with a strategy of mocking Mr. Trump and getting him to descend into rabbit holes of personal grievances and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always bites the bait, and Ms. Harris laid multiple traps so that he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not about how he would improve Americans’ lives over the next four years,” complained Wall Street magazine Editorial page.
If Trump’s performance was flawed in any way, Taibbi argues, it was only because the moderators had rigged the contest in Harris’ favor. “In the world of this debate, there were no panic attacks, no arrest of Pavel Durov, no attempted assassination, no cover-up of Biden’s health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of half a dozen bizarre things that just happened,” he stresses.
Interestingly, Taibbi’s assessment of Trump’s performance is much more forgiving than that of Trump’s own advisers, who were furious at his incoherent rants. “The (former) president was supposed to pivot, but Trump blew it,” campaign insider Marc Caputo tells us. “He was supposed to make her own Biden’s record. That didn’t really happen.” Trump advisers weighed in with Axios, noting that Trump simply refused to take advantage of the opportunities ABC News gave him. “He was told to blame them for the deadly, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. But when the moderators posed that soft question, twice, He touched on other topics.”
So while an overwhelming majority of television viewers, investors, betting markets, numerous conservative pundits and Trump advisers all saw the same thing, Taibbi saw something entirely different. The Donald Trump Taibbi observed was a lone voice of reason, just as Taibbi sees himself:
Trump continued to lash out as if he were clinging to an outdated concept of reason, as if he hadn’t gotten the memo about reality by decree…
They surrounded Trump with a rigid consensus framework and watched him struggle against it, which actually made him seem frustrated, old, and at times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? I’m not sure about that. Just because the general consensus says you’re crazy doesn’t mean it’s true. What if it’s the other way around?
Yes, maybe Donald Trump and Matt Taibbi are the only sane people in the universe. Or maybe there is another explanation.
