Former President Donald Trump announced his third campaign for president Tuesday night, and the resulting headlines were revealing.
SO WHAT
It feels like 2016 all over again.
THE HEADLINES
Trump’s 2024 announcement, and the hour-long speech that accompanied it, sparked a flurry of reactions from the journalists and news outlets that the former president has dubbed “the enemy of the people.”
- Most of the major broadcast networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — declined to air Trump’s speech, while Fox News and CNN carried only a portion of it.
- But that didn’t stop the media from giving Trump’s address heavy, and overwhelmingly critical, coverage.
- Here are some of the headlines.
“No.” — National Review
“To paraphrase Voltaire after he attended an orgy, once was an experiment, twice would be perverse,” wrote the editors of the venerable conservative magazine, which also opposed Trump in 2016.
“Donald Trump, who tried to overturn Biden’s legitimate election, launches 2024 bid” — NPR
“This really has to be the baseline for coverage of Trump. Conservatives will scream that this is biased, but these are a.) facts, and b.) relevant. Good on NPR in this case,” tweeted journalist Parker Molloy in response to NPR’s framing of Trump’s campaign announcement.
“Florida Man Makes Announcement” — New York Post
The Post mocked the former president on the bottom of its cover Wednesday, and buried the news of his campaign launch on page 26 – part of an apparently coordinated anti-Trump campaign by Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire.
“Trump’s low-energy reset” — Axios
Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen seconded a tweet by Jeb Bush Jr. that repurposed Trump’s insults of his father during the 2016 presidential campaign to describe the speech.
“Trump is out for vengeance — and to protect himself from prosecution” — The Washington Post
“He was always going to run. Absent incarceration or interment, and perhaps only the latter, he inevitably would seek the presidency again. His narcissism, his megalomania, his delicate yet illimitable ego, would have it no other way,” Trump-nemesis and Post contributor George Conway wrote of his wife’s former boss.
DEJA VU
As Trump recently noted on Truth Social, the mainstream and conservative media were similarly aligned against him when he first ran for president, treating his candidacy as either laughable or dangerous.
- “This is just like 2015 and 2016, a Media Assault (Collusion!) …,” he wrote last week. “They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately we will win. Put America First and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”