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IS THE ENTIRE WORLD CONSPIRING TO MAKE IT LOOK LIKE TRUMP LOST THE
DEBATE?  
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Jonathan Chait
September 12, 2024
New York Magazine
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_ Why did so many journalists describe the debate similarly? Matt
Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated from liberal-hating
leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, suggests the entire news
media was taking orders from the Democratic Party. _

"Matt Taibbi Occupy Wall Street 01", by OccupyTVNY (CC BY 3.0)

 

In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate
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most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had
transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump
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an angry, frequently incoherent performance.

Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it
so similarly? To Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated
from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there
could be only one explanation: The entire news media was taking orders
from the Democratic Party.

Taibbi’s post-debate column
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headlined, “DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate
Headlines,” advances a bold hypothesis. Taibbi amasses suspicious
evidence of media collusion:

Conspiracies, pet-eating, and the “same old tired playbook”
figured prominently in morning headlines. “Harris baits Trump over
and over
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wrote the _Christian Science Monitor. _“Harris baits an aging
Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self
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was Salon’s_ _take. “Harris Baits and Batters Trump
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wrote the _Miami Herald_. “Harris Baits Trump Into Arguments
[[link removed]],” added CNN. “Harris
Baits Trump: Inside their Fiery Debate
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was another _Times _headline, while _The_ _Wall Street
Journal _went with “Harris Baits Trump in Fiery Presidential Debate
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There were cheers that Harris was able to “bait him into defending
himself rather than talking about issues
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on. Instantly, bait everywhere. No wonder Jake Tapper talked about
fishing after the event.

“As one of the last relics of the ‘Boys on the Bus’ era, I
don’t recall campaign messaging being this crude, or politicians,
press, and audience acting so overtly as a chorus,” he writes,
“the DNC or RNC just backing up to the commentariat, dumping loads
of phrases, and seeing them instantly converted to conventional
wisdom, that’s new.”

Taibbi’s theory suffers from two serious flaws. The first lies in
the linear nature of time. Taibbi seizes on a Democratic Party press
release summarizing reactions to the debate and concludes that the
reactions were implanted by the party into the media. But the news
release came _after_ the reactions. That is how it was able to quote
them.

The simplest account of how this occurred, and one that comports with
mainstream physics, is as follows:

The debate occurred.
Many observers, witnessing the debate, had more or less the same
impression.
They recorded their impression on social or traditional media.
The Democratic Party’s media-relations staff read these accounts and
shared some of them.

I believe this makes much more sense than Taibbi’s belief that the
Democrats secretly instructed a wide array of journalists what to say
happened at the debate.

The second flaw with Taibbi’s analysis is that the belief Trump
looked terrible was shared by many people who could not possibly be
controlled by the Democratic message machine. As the debate occurred
in real time, online betting markets moved in Harris’s direction,
and Trump’s scammy meme stock plunged
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What’s more, the conclusion that Harris effectively baited Trump
into an incoherent performance was echoed by many observers who are
sympathetic to Trump. “Trump Took the Bait. Harris Kept Her Cool,”
wrote Eli Lake in _The Free Press_
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“He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him,” moaned Brit
Hume [[link removed]] on Fox News.
“She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and
goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and
vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always
takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set multiple traps so he spent much of
the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about
immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of
Americans in the next four years,” complained
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Wall Street_ _Journal_ editorial page.

If Trump’s performance was in any way flawed, Taibbi argues, it is
only because the moderators rigged the contest in Harris’s favor.
“The world of that debate contained no speech panic, no arrest of
Pavel Durov, no assassination attempt, no cover-up of Biden’s
health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of
a half-dozen bizarre things that only just happened,” he insists.

Interestingly enough, Taibbi’s assessment of Trump’s performance
is much more forgiving than that of Trump’s own advisers, who were
apoplectic over his incoherent rants. “The [former] president was
supposed to pivot but Trump blew it,” a campaign insider tells Marc
Caputo
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“He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t
really happen.” Trump advisers unloaded to Axios
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that Trump simply declined to exploit the opportunities given to him
by ABC News. “He was told to hold her accountable for the deadly,
hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet when the moderators teed up
that softball_ twice,_ he swung at other topics.”

So where a supermajority of the viewing public, investors, betting
markets, numerous conservative pundits, and Trump advisers all saw the
same thing, Taibbi discerned something totally different. The Donald
Trump Taibbi watched was a lone voice of reason, much as Taibbi sees
himself:

Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated
conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo
…

They surrounded Trump with rigid consensus framing and watched him
flail against it, which did make him look frustrated, old, and at
times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? Not
sure about that. If conventional wisdom says you’re crazy, that
doesn’t make it true. What if it’s the other way around?

Yes, perhaps the only two sane people in the universe are Donald Trump
and Matt Taibbi. Or maybe there is some other explanation.

_Jonathan Chait [[link removed]] has been a
political columnist at New York since 2011 and writes the
newsletter &c. He is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama
Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail._

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* Kamala Harris
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* Donald Trump
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* Matt Taibbi
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* conspiracy theories
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