The Media's Responsibility for Trump's Assassination Attempt

The media has told us for years Trump is Hitler. Is it possible someone believed them?

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has shocked the nation, and the world. At a moment when America's political culture couldn't seem to more troubled, the former president and Republican candidate was seen dodging a literal bullet, his life—and, perhaps, the stability of the country—millimeters from disaster.

We don’t know much about the shooter or his deranged motives. What we do know, however, is that the media bears responsibility for creating a climate of extreme fear-mongering and racial animus that has set the country ablaze. That the assassination attempt took place in this environment of outlandish accusations about Trump, destroyer of democracy and second coming of Hitler, cannot be ignored.

For the better part of a decade, the American news media has engaged in what can only be class as political and cultural crusade. For more than five years, the press built a narrative about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia to swing the election. That virtually no aspect of this alleged Trump-Russia conspiracy was ever substantiated by evidence mattered not one iota to the media.

The massive, four-part deep dive by a Pulitzer-winning former New York Times investigative reporter, Jeff Gerth, published in the nation’s most prestigious journalism publication, the Columbia Journalism Review, showing how the narrative was constructed was simply ignored. Not a single major newsroom had the professional decency to make its leadership available to Gerth for an interview.

The narrative deepened. “Is the President a Russian Asset,” the Atlantic innocently pondered. Vanity Fair, throwing nuance aside, asked in a faux-question, “Is Donald Trump a Manchurian Candidate?” But the Manchurian candidate narrative—a metaphor brazenly used as the file name by one reporter, former New Republic editor-in-chief Franklin Foer in one of his fake Trump-Russia hit pieces that he submitted to FusionGPS for review, an outrageous violation of journalistic ethics that the media didn’t even report on—was only the beginning.

As they watched the lawfare effort fail as Trump’s poll number continued to rise, and his fundraising effort out-raise their that of their own candidate, the media shifted into high gear.

This was no longer about racism, sexism, or Russia collusion. This was now about fascism—as it’s been endlessly pounded into the American public consciousness. Over recent months, the press has gone all in on building a narrative about Trump as a fascist who will overthrow American democracy and install himself as dictator. But not just any dictator. Trump, we are now straightfacedly informed, is the next incarnation of Hitler.

The New Republic ran a cover for its ailing print magazine with the likeness of Trump made to look like Hitler. This was only the most egregious, on-the-nose example. In truth, the media campaign to besmirch Trump—whose daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jews—as Hitlerian is as deep as it is widespread. Take a look at just a small sampling of this coverage:

• ABC News ran a December “analysis” titled “Donald Trump's history with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi writings.”

• Bloomberg opinion intoned in April that “Trump’s Hitler Fascination is an Ominous Echo of the 1930s.”

• The AP told us that “Trump says he didn’t know his immigration rhetoric echoes Hitler. That’s part of a broader pattern.”

• USA Today reported—without evidence—that Trump supposedly said Hitler “did some good things.” (Even Snopes had to debunk this one.)

• The New York Times, not one to be left out of a good media pile on, ran with “Trump, Attacked for Echoing Hitler, Says He Never Read ‘Mein Kampf”

• The Washington Post wants you to know that, “Yes, It’s Okay to Compare to Trump to Hitler. Don’t Let Me Stop You.”

Take this, for a moment, with the seriousness it deserves. This is the august, fabled American press, after all. The American media too pristine to accept as head of one of its top newsrooms the former editor of a British newspaper. These leading lights are telling you—they are shouting from the rooftops—that Trump is a rising Hitlerian maniac. Given this as the premise, what do you imagine would be the logical response? What would be the courageous, necessary response to a rising Hitler?

It’s not a difficult question to answer. Imagine yourself in Germany in 1935 and you had a chance to kill Hitler, thereby preventing the deaths of millions and the unimaginable suffering of tens of millions. Would you honestly not take that opportunity? You would be insane not to do it.

This is the danger of the game the media has been playing. They have pursued the most extreme narrative, relentlessly and shamelessly, going so far as to abandon even pretense of their most precious asset—their objectivity, their neutrality, their very credibility—to ensure that the other party’s candidate does not win an election.

The New York Times infamously argued in the very pages of its newspaper that the age of Trump called for a radical shift away from neutrality and objectivity (two concepts, by the way, that we were told were inherently “white” and a product of structural racism and white supremacy). This is what the Times’ media reporter wrote in 2016:

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”

What they didn’t tell you is what’s been obvious to the rest of us. It’s not that they would “move closer” to “being oppositional.” It’s that they would go to any length to stop Trump from being elected. And the weapons in the media’s arsenal are words, ideas and, more than anything, narratives. This is precisely what we got.

Despite the pompous editorials from news outlets and the somber tones on cable news shows about political violence, there is almost no doubt that most of these people would have celebrated had Trump been killed. The political-soul-searching editorials would have appeared the next day. The deep dives. The podcasts. The photojournalism worthy of one more precious Pulitzer. But in the safe spaces of the American elite, they would have celebrated.

Thankfully, Trump survived this attempt. Like the media, the assassin’s aim was off by just a hair’s breadth. All the stentorian admonitions about political violence notwithstanding, you can be sure that recent events will not stop the great narrative mill of the American news media from grinding out its latest lie, no matter what the cost.

Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.