In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump into 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, 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,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self,” was Salon’s take. “Harris Baits and Batters Trump,” wrote the Miami Herald. “Harris Baits Trump Into Arguments,” added CNN. “Harris Baits Trump: Inside their Fiery Debate,” was another Times headline, while The Wall Street Journal went with “Harris Baits Trump in Fiery Presidential Debate.” There were cheers that Harris was able to “bait him into defending himself rather than talking about issues.” And on and 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.
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. “He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him,” moaned Brit Hume 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 The 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. “He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t really happen.” Trump advisers unloaded to Axios, noting 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 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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