AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
In recent weeks, the national media has generated an unusual amount of criticism directed at an unlikely political figure. Though most Americans have come to expect the nearly daily deluge of negative coverage of former President Donald Trump, conservative Supreme Court justices, and Congressional Republicans, the media’s new scapegoat is none other than the man they once hailed as “hero” and “savior”: President Joe Biden.
The summer months have seen a startlingly high volume of handwringing op-eds and cable news segments urging Biden not to seek a second term as president, or otherwise questioning his competency as Commander-in-Chief. On July 24, for instance, the Washington Post ran an op-ed titled “Quit, Joe, Quit!” In late June, Newsweek published a column “begging” Biden not to run in 2024. Several weeks prior, The Atlantic circulated a piece stating “bluntly” that “Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024.” Publications like the New York Times, CNN, The Hill, and others have repeatedly published polls reminding the American people that an overwhelming majority of voters—including most Democrats—do not want Biden to seek the presidency for a second time. The list goes on.
In addition to highlighting just how much of a disaster the Biden presidency has been, these headlines perfectly encapsulate why the media has lost so much trust with the public – and why their attacks on the president look so ridiculous now. The Biden presidency is, after all, the media’s own creation. Most Americans remember well the days of the media’s endless fawning over Biden during the 2020 campaign, as well as their zealous insistence that he was the only one who could, in their minds, save American democracy.
Ahead of the 2020 election, The Boston Globe endorsed Biden as “uniquely poised to restore the integrity of the presidency and to repair the damage of the last four years.” The New Yorker insisted Biden would bring about a “remarkable presidency.” The Economist published an op-ed claiming the next president “has to be Biden,” as that he would undoubtedly put “a fractured country back together again.”
As is clear to anyone with a memory that extends beyond just a few months ago, the same people and entities now calling for Biden’s ouster and deriding him as unfit to serve a second term are precisely the same figures who breathlessly insisted he was a political godsend – and who helped boost Biden over the top after he lagged behind Bernie Sanders in early primary contests.
Biden’s come-from-behind victory in the 2020 Democratic primaries, even after badly losing both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary (at which point the media acknowledged his campaign was “on life support”), can be largely attributed to a mainstream media crusade to coalesce the party’s base behind Biden, who was seen as a more electable alternative to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Biden then went on to win a vast majority of remaining primary contests—including in South Carolina and most Super Tuesday races—proving beyond any reasonable doubt the media’s outsized role in both nominating Biden and ostensibly helping him cross the finish line in the general election. Moreover, the establishment’s present qualms about Biden’s old age were of no concern to them—at least publicly—in the months leading up to November.
Political pundits and elected officials on both sides of the aisle now like to blame Biden directly for the nation’s growing array of crises, including soaring inflation, unaffordable gas prices, unprecedented surges in illegal immigration, a deadly crime wave, historic tensions with Russia and China, and much more. It is true that Biden has enacted a slew of ill-advised policies that precipitated these crises, and voters should hold him and his compatriots in Congress accountable, both this November and in 2024.
But it is also true that none of this would have befallen America without the political activism of the same media that is now working overtime to expel him from office. Also culpable in his rise to power are the self-branded “moderate” politicians (including the “Never Trump” Republicans) who amplified the media’s pro-Biden narratives and aided in their efforts to put him in office. Throughout the 2020 campaign, it was these individuals who not only elevated Biden, but publicly smeared President Trump, even going so far as to help suppress a bombshell story about Biden’s potential entanglements in his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.
All of this was necessary, the media and Washington, D.C. establishment insisted, in order to defeat Trump and “save democracy.” But now, ironically, no one is doing more than Biden himself to pave the way for a second Trump term. It may thus be that first by elevating Biden, and now by tearing him down, the media only delayed – not stopped – a second Trump term.