The liberal media enjoys going after former U.S. president Donald Trump for his mistruths, such as the long-running conspiracy that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Trump finally acknowledged in September that he’d lost to Joe Biden, but only “by a whisker.” That’s not the whole story, however. While the liberal media attacks Trump for misrepresenting the truth, it’s done the same thing to him.
On Nov. 1, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and others ran with stories based on a social media post by left-wing commentator Aaron Rupar, which seemingly showed Trump calling for violence against one of his major critics, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.
On X, Rupar posted a short clip of Trump saying, “I don’t blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual. Very dumb. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Yet Trump’s entire comment, made during a discussion with conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, paints a very different picture: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies,’ but she’s a stupid person and I used to have meetings with a lot of people and she always wanted to go to war with people.”
Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently suggested Trump will ban abortion if he becomes president. The liberal media marched in lockstep right on cue, like it was Roe v. Wade 2.0.
The problem with Harris’s accusation is that it’s complete nonsense. “Everyone knows I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it, because it is up to the states to decide based on the will of the their voters,” Trump wrote on X on Oct. 1.
His position seems pretty clear, and should have been taken into account. Alas, the lying lefty media has operated with a clear anti-Trump bias for years.
Take the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, for instance. The New York Post published a bombshell story on Oct. 14, 2020, which cited emails detailing an alleged 2015 meeting he reportedly set up between his father, then vice-president, and Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which had the younger Biden on its payroll. The information was passed on to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who acted as Trump’s personal attorney. A senior advisor to Trump, Steve Bannon, was also privy to it.
The Post’s story was published three weeks before the presidential election, and the liberal media wasn’t going to rain on Joe Biden’s parade. The veracity of the report was quickly brought into question, with publications like The Economist suggesting a possible “disinformation” campaign.
Twitter and Facebook adjusted their algorithms to prevent wider sharing of the details. In the years that followed, the story was authenticated by other media outlets, but by then it was too late — Biden was already in the White House.
There’s also the most egregious example: Russia, Russia, Russia.
Media organizations claimed that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and Trump was in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s back pocket. The New York Times led the charge and constantly hyped up the Trump team’s supposed connection to Mother Russia. The liberal media suggested there was Russian collusion afoot, a grand conspiracy seemingly at play and a palace coup that led to former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s undoing.
Trump immediately declared it a hoax. Former FBI director Robert Mueller was brought in to investigate. Trump-hating reporters and columnists smelled blood and licked their chops. They firmly believed he was lying, and couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces at the mere thought of Trump going to jail.
The March 2019 Mueller report didn’t completely exonerate Trump, but acknowledged the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or co-ordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Justice Department special counsel John Durham’s report in May 2023 went even further. “Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” it concluded. As for the so-called smoking gun, the Steele dossier, it was described as “unvetted and unverified.” Ouch!
The moral of this story is that if the liberal media wants to accurately report on Trump’s lies, it shouldn’t be engaging in the same type of conduct by spreading lies about him. That’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
National Post