President Trump Versus the Media | Opinion
The upcoming presidential election, just a little over four months away, is supposed to represent a choice between Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.
That is, if only the president were allowed to run against Joe Biden.
Instead, as Joe Biden does his level best to remain hidden in his basement, this year's presidential election is being cast as a referendum: a battle between the real President Donald Trump and the fatally flawed caricature of the president that has been created by the mainstream media (MSM) and activist organizations.
If this were a true choice between himself and the flawed, corrupt and muttering Joe Biden, the president should very easily win. But if he is competing against an illusion of himself, chances for victory become more elusive.
A new set of polling conducted by Siena College for The New York Times shows the president is trailing "Sleepy Joe" in six key swing states that he was able to win in 2016. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina are all solidly blue right now, with Biden leading in some of those states by more than 10 points. A Fox News poll even has the president trailing Biden by one percentage point in Texas. While we all know polls have proven to be fatally wrong in the recent past (2016 and Brexit come to mind), the trend lines are clearly moving in the wrong direction for the president. Right now, his re-election is in trouble.
Standing in marked contrast to all other presidential campaigns of the modern era, we are getting close to entering July and the Democratic-Republican presidential contest hasn't even started yet. The media has artfully managed both the China virus crisis and the George Floyd-sparked racial unrest to transform President Trump from an almost unbeatable incumbent to a weak president incapable of keeping the country from coming apart at the seams.
This is unfair. This is not true. And this is also working very effectively.
Through the media's relentless one-sided reporting on the effects of the virus and through its equally one-sided reporting on the Marxist-inspired riots and street occupations throughout the country, the media has managed to make many people feel as though they have just had enough. They can't take it anymore. They will happily take "anyone but Trump" so long as the chaos stops.
Who is that anyone?
That would be Joe Biden, who has not held a press conference for more than 80 days. Where is the outrage on the part of the MSM toward a man who wants to "lead the nation" by completely dodging tough questions on either his policies or his highly dubious and corrupt track record? There is no outrage because the MSM knows that if the real Joe Biden comes out to play, the American people are not going to like what they see.
In addition to his career flirtations with racism, Biden should have to deal with his admitted corruption and influence-peddling regarding his son Hunter's involvement with Burisma in Ukraine and his relationship with China. He's been dead wrong on practically every foreign policy debate of the last four decades—a fact which President Obama's own secretary of defense, Robert Gates, freely admitted. Oh and not to mention he's now directly linked to the illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition team.
Those are issues that the MSM is simply refusing to investigate or report. Their goal is to keep the American voters blissfully ignorant.
A friend of mine in the Chicago suburbs shared a conversation they had with a middle-aged woman who says she is a Biden supporter. She semi-sarcastically asked him if he had seen the recent video of President Trump in which he appears to struggle lifting a glass of water. He said he had, as has every American. He then asked her if she had seen any of the countless examples that would seem to indicate that Joe Biden is suffering from severe cognitive issues?
She genuinely had no idea what he was talking about.
The MSM knows that a conventional campaign run as between Trump versus Biden may not leave the confused former friend of the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) looking so good. It may leave Joe looking more like a lying, dog-faced, pony soldier. If you are a Biden supporter who accidentally is reading this column, you may not understand the reference I just made. If you don't, try searching conservative news sites. They are the only media trying to cover Biden's misstatements, gaffes, outright offensive comments and mindless meanderings.
The MSM knows that the media world has become so siloed that well over half of all voters will never know about Joe Biden's incredible weaknesses and corruptions so long as they don't say anything. They also know that the social media algorithms won't distribute such news as long as they don't spill the ink in the first place.
The only logical conclusion is sinister, I admit, but hard to ignore. The mainstream news media wants the economy kept locked down. They want the public to be inundated with images of angry protests and civil disobedience 24/7. They want anything and everything other than seeing or hearing Joe Biden.
This race is and always has been an "anyone but Trump" election, but if the president has one massive advantage heading into November, it's this: the "anyone" he is facing is a corrupt and incompetent tool of the far Left who is utterly unfit for the presidency.
The media knows this. And President Trump will win re-election if he can find a way to let the American people in on the secret.
Charlie Kirk is the author of The New York Times bestseller The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future and host of The Charlie Kirk Show.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
