Media enabling Trump's mission to destroy democracy

Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the conservative media has engaged in a campaign of misinformation and blame, with non-partisan media failing to do much better. Dr Victoria Fielding reports.

WATCHING RIGHT-WING media treat Donald Trump like he performed a heroic miracle in narrowly avoiding being shot at, for yet unknown reasons, has emphasised the way Right-wing media is used for political campaigning and how the rest of the media fails to hold Right-wing politicians and media to account.

This is the very reason why America’s democracy is back-sliding towards an authoritarian future under another Trump presidency.

Let’s be honest, Trump was lucky to avoid being shot. A bullet fired by an apparently deranged gun-loving local Republican voter killed one person in the crowd, critically injured two others and skimmed Trump’s head, striking him in the ear.

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Rather than present this near-miss for what it was – a lucky fluke – Right-wing media went about doing what they always do with every political event, issue and person, presenting a simplified caricature of reality that put Trump on a pedestal and as per usual, failed to hold him accountable for the context around what occurred.

Unfortunately, the non-partisan media – as per usual – is also helping to idealise Trump in the wake of the shooting, while also failing to scrutinise the part he and his party played in the attack.

This context is abundant, but so far completely left out of most news coverage of the assassination attempt. Instead, News Corp’s The Australian called Trump ‘bulletproof’, The Advertiser described him on their front page as “born again” and Andrew Bolt on Sky News described Trump as “invincible”.

Right-wing media also worked hard to blame the assassination attempt on the Left, on the Democrats and the media, claiming that criticisms of Trump’s anti-democratic authoritarian push led the shooter to do what he did. The shooter was a Republican supporter, but the Right never lets the truth get in the way of its political campaigning.

Other media, in turn, has failed to correct the record of the Right’s attempts to blame the shooting on Democrats. In this terrible display of inept journalism, CNN’s Jack Tapper lets Eric Trump blame the assassination on “them”, without scrutiny, without pulling him up on it, without fact-checking. He misled the CNN audience to assume that there was some nefarious “them” behind the shooting, implying it was organised by Trump’s political opposition.

What was, of course, missing from all the campaigning of the pro-Trump circus – and was sadly missing in non-campaigning media, too – was any accountability for Trump’s role in helping to create a febrile political environment and a culture of un-regulated abundant gun ownership, which fed and enabled this assassination attempt to occur.

Where was the context in the wake of the shooting which scrutinised the Republicans and Trump’s opposition to gun reform? Where were the media questions about whether this shooting was a wake-up call for the Republicans to do something about gun safety?

It’s noteworthy that the shooter used an AR-15-style gun that belonged to his father. This gun is apparently very easy to use and aim, even if, as this article explains, the shooter is not a well-trained marksperson.

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The AR-15 is the same gun that many of Trump’s National Rifle Association (NRA)-loving Republicans worship on lapel badges. Trump himself has also shown callous disregard for victims of other shootings. For example, after an Iowa school shooting in January this year, Trump told his supporters to “move forward” and “get over it”.

Where is this context in discussions of the attempted assassination of Trump? I haven’t seen one journalist ask whether the shooting would put pressure on Republicans to regulate guns. Of course, Republicans won’t ever do this, but where is the media pressure on them to explain this contradiction?

In the wake of the shooting, there has been a lot of discussion about the intensely polarised and hyper-outraged political environment in the U.S. and how this may have contributed to the shooter's motives. But as usual, this discussion vaguely "both sides" polarisation as the fault of both Democrats and Republicans, leaving the architects and beneficiaries of this environment – Trump’s Republicans – totally unaccountable.

For instance, in this ABC piece about the assassination attempt, the author says the shooting means:

‘Joe Biden will now find it harder to prosecute his argument that Donald Trump poses a threat to democracy for the simple reason his opponent has become the victim of an attack on democracy.’

The logic here suggests that the Democrats are partly to blame for the shooting because they have called Donald Trump a threat to democracy. But Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and the shooting has not changed that. Indeed, part of the way Donald Trump threatens democracy is that his supporters are willing to overthrow democracy – such as the 6 January insurrection – in order to install him as president.

If the Democrats aren’t allowed to say this – and also the media isn’t saying this – the author of this piece is suggesting that Americans should let their democracy die because a Republican supporter narrowly missed shooting Donald Trump in the head.

Trump narrowly avoiding being shot – which was not showing his ability, not a miracle, not political genius, not an act of strength; it constituted nothing more than luck – is not an excuse to let him unaccountably destroy American democracy. It is scary that this has to be said, but apparently, considering the news media’s failure to hold Trump accountable, it does.

**President Joe Biden has announced that he will not seek re-election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate**