There is a conspiracy against Donald Trump, believes The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, but it’s inanimate: a “conspiracy of facts,” not a “conspiracy of liberals” in the media. The facts, Tomasky claimed in a Tuesday column, “simply do not damn [Hillary] Clinton in the way that [Trump] and his supporters believe they should. Take the new story, about the FBI and State and the alleged ‘quid pro quo.’ As all the news stories state plainly, eventually, in the sixth or seventh graf, there was no quid pro quo.”
“Trump is blaming his problems on the media,” sniped Tomasky. “It’s an age-old right-wing trick. An age-old fascist trick…It’s all ridiculous whining…And the flip side, that the media are in Hillary’s pocket. Lord. The New York Times has been after her since 1992, with its Whitewater stories. The Times broke the email server story in March 2015. Is that the act of a paper conspiring to get her elected?”
Tomasky commented that even if the sexual-misconduct allegations against Trump are valid, his “more important predation is against all of us; against this country...He will defile and rape our Constitution whenever the moment requires it, if he’s elected…The fact that he probably won’t be elected will allow the Republicans who aren’t standing up to him to skate away without blame…If Hitler had never come to power…we would not today know the names of the quislings as we do.”
On Wednesday, Paul Waldman of The Week conceded that “reporters, as a group, find Trump appalling...That's because he is appalling, and he presents a unique kind of threat to many different democratic institutions…But journalists haven't reacted to all that is repugnant about the man and his candidacy by saying, ‘We must stop him.’ They've reacted by reporting as accurately as they can who he is, and what he's doing and saying.”
Waldman closed by offering advice to conservative critics of the MSM:
For years, the assertion of media bias has been a crutch on which conservatives leaned too heavily, a way to write off every presidential defeat as not the product of their candidate's shortcomings or the public's lack of enthusiasm for their program, but as the product of what Donald Trump would call a rigged system. It's comforting, because it assures you that you didn't do anything wrong and you don't need to change. If that's what Republicans tell themselves about the 2016 election, they're going to have a lot more losses to contend with in the future.
