(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The mainstream media appears to have launched a coordinated smear campaign to brand former President Donald Trump as a dangerous dictator, Townhall reported.
The initiative is being led by publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic.
The latter recently dedicated a series of 24 op-eds to addressing the dangers of a second Trump term (although it remains unclear how this differs from what the TDS-afflicted magazine otherwise would have written about).
Naturally, they reached the conclusion in the series, “If Trump Wins,” that if Trump were to return to the White House, his second term would be much worse than the first.
While some of the attacks seemed to have been coordinated well in advance, other media hopped aboard the bandwagon the wake of a Tuesday night Trump campaign event in Davenport, Iowa, during which the GOP frontrunner took the bait by responding to a question from moderator Sean Hannity about the media attacks.
President Trump says he’d only be a dictator on the first day of his second term.
He has my full permission to extend that to a month or 6.
— JoMa (@joma_gc) December 6, 2023
Trump was asked point blank if he would ever “abuse power” or seek “retribution.”
In response, the former president said he would bolster America’s oil production and shore up the border—two prerogatives deemed controversial by the media.
“We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling,” Trump said, alluding to the reawakening of the oil industry. “After that, I’m not a dictator.”
Ripping his remarks out of context, the leftist media has had a field day calling Trump a dictator.
France’s AFP warned of “dark scenarios” ahead with its “grim predictions” about the nature of a second Trump term.
The news agency cited former Rep. Liz Cheney, who said Sunday that America was “sleepwalking into dictatorship,” while hinting at a possible third-party run, which would likely pull votes from Trump’s opponent.
"One of the things that we see…is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States."
Liz Cheney forewarns John Dickerson if Donald Trump is re-elected, it could mean the end of the republic & expresses concern about her party's comfort with Trump and his lies. pic.twitter.com/JBh7nKkbfP
— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) December 1, 2023
NeverTrump neocon Robert Kagan also penned a recent Washington Post op-ed warning that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
Comparing Trump to Rome’s Julius Caesar, Kagan said that Trump is pursuing the office of “president for life.”
For current President Joe Biden, the moment is so dire that he feels compelled to run again, despite the fact that he is 81 years old.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running. But we cannot let him win,” the Democrat said at a recent Massachusetts campaign event.
Writing for the conservative Townhall, Kaelan Door, the chief marketing officer for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and former head of global engagement for GETTR, expressed skepticism that these attacks all happened organically.
“[H]aving been a communications professional in Washington D.C. for the better part of a decade, I can assure you there are no such things as coincidences as far as legacy media is concerned,” Door wrote.
“[Y]et we’re supposed to believe that the Atlantic rolled out ten op-eds about an authoritarian Trump on the same day that the New York Times and Washington Post also decided to publish articles about how a second Trump administration would be ‘radical,’ and a ‘dictatorship‘?” he continued. “The State-owned and manipulated media feels awfully authoritarian to me.”
Meanwhile, The Federalist noted that the panic-mongering seemed a bit disingenuous considering all the things that critics were warning Trump would do were things that the Biden administration had already done to Trump and his supporters—hence the word “retribution” in Hannity’s question.
“Surely the reporters and editors behind this laughable piece of agitprop know that this is exactly what the Biden Justice Department and powerful Democrats nationwide are now doing to Trump,” wrote the website’s John Daniel Davidson.
Nonetheless, he said, they’ve dug a hole so deep for themselves that their only option is to keep on digging.
“They lean into the gaslighting, claiming over and over in the most outlandish terms that a second Trump term will bring about everything that’s happening now under President Biden,” wrote Davidson.
“Why? Because they’re desperate,” he continued. “They know that owing to the weakness and corruption and unpopularity of the current president, there’s a chance Trump just might win next year.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
