The only way to stop President Donald Trump's rise in the polls is for the media to stop talking about him, Matthew Walther writes in an op-ed in This Week on Tuesday.
To be more precise, Walther muses, the media needs to "stop making Trump the universal metric according to which all of human conduct is weighed and considered."
The myriad scandals and chaos and policy reversals of the administration — even the president's continued "championing of the Wall Street gazillionaires against whom he had supposedly been running in 2016" does not matter to the "not-quite-majority of Americans who voted for Trump," who still like him.
Walther says that this is because "The reasons for opposing Trump were clear from the beginning. He was a crude, mean-spirited man whose most noteworthy accomplishments were kicking old people out of their homes to make room for casino parking lots, speculating publicly about whether the duly elected president of the United States was a jihadist plant, and pretending to fire Gary Busey in the fake board-room of a made-up company on NBC."
The bulk of the media's decision to go all-out against Trump has backfired and diluted the significance of each scandal involving the president and criticism against him, whether it is legitimate or not, Walther contends. In all the back-and-forth accusations and bluster, "Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what is false and have decided that they do not much care either."
The media's harsh criticism of Trump, he argues, has created a situation in which "Pretending that anything the president says or does is bad because he is the one saying or doing isn't just bad journalism. You might as well be wearing a MAGA hat and whooping about the Wall."
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