Welcome to the presidential election watch, where everything 2024 is 2016 again. You remember the days when Donald Trump used to appear frequently on Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and the gang up to the point where he became the GOP nominee for president? Then, all of a sudden, he was the worst person on Earth. And media coverage, once the Beltway press had the candidate they wanted against Hillary Clinton, threw the kitchen sink at Trump in order to get Hillary elected. Of course, Trump won, and Scarborough has been asking for forgiveness ever since.

Flash forward to the GOP primary battle in late 2023 and early 2024. Media was quite happy with very carefully covering the campaign by attacking Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and everyone else in the field who might be a threat, thinking to themselves how great it would be if they could pick the Republicans' nominee again, because this time for sure, there's no way Donald Trump would win in a general election. He's got far too much baggage, he's facing four sets of indictments and trials, and there's no way people are going to forget how much of a carnival the last administration was, right? 

Joe Biden, despite all odds, seems to have found a way to cut through all of Trump's negatives by performing at such a low-approving rate that Americans are longing for the mean tweets, if that's all they have to suffer through in order to have gas, groceries and rent no longer cost an arm and a leg. Media is like the proverbial dog that chased down the car and chomped down on the bumper. Now that they've caught it, and it's still driving unabated, they're getting panicky.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump held a rally in Dayton, Ohio, and was talking about how China is building auto manufacturing companies in China in order to sell those cars in the United States. Trump indicated that he would impose a 100% tariff on those cars if that happens, protecting the American auto industry. He then said if he doesn't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for Detroit's Big 3 automakers and union workers on the assembly line. 

Regime media cherrypicked a one-minute statement down to 3 seconds, and instantly got the vapors. 

How badly did media overplay their hand? Here's the headlines from the NBC, ABC, and CBS.



The aforementioned Scarborough, in a now-deleted Tweet, said this.



It's going to be another J6. It's going to be another incited riot. Except that's not at all what he said, and one has to hate Trump to such an absurd degree as to be willfully obtuse to spin it this way. For context, here's what Trump actually said. 

Elon Musk humiliated Scarborough enough to get the Morning Joe anchor to delete his post. 

Our friend, Tom Elliott over at Grabien came up with a very impressive montage of the same media bubble beside themselves at Trump's violent rhetoric using the expression bloodbath more than a few times in recent memory, all without the same instant condemnation of inciting insurrection. 

In short, regime media is desperate, so they're throwing anything up against the wall they possibly can to see if it'll stick. Lawfare hasn't worked thus far. It's actually had the opposite effect. Instead of bleeding away support for Donald Trump, it's galvanized support for him, and earned him new supporters from constituency groups not normally favoring the GOP. 

With this bloodbath stunt, even Never Trump charter member Jonah Goldberg at the Dispatch realizes that dumb attacks like this help Trump rather than hurt him. 

I don’t understand how some folks don’t understand that distorting the “bloodbath” thing helps Trump. It bolsters the spin from Trumpers that *all* of his indefensible utterances are distorted by media. The election will be decided by folks susceptible to those defenses.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) March 17, 2024

Goldberg goes on to lament, and rightfully so, that Trump backers will use this bloodbath hoax to excuse away every indefensible comment Trump has or will make, which is true. Trump has made statements at times that are indefensible, and this sophomoric attempt by media to slime him will certainly weaken the anti-Trump argument. 

There are many problems that plague regime media in the Beltway, but one of the major symptoms is the revolving door between left-wing administrations and media. Case and point? Former Biden administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who now serves as anchor of a weekend MSNBC program. After the blowback to media, once context was pointed out, she doubled down. 



You know what is a bloodbath? Nikki Haley's performance during Super Tuesday. A bloodbath is what California's scam tram is doing to the budget in the Golden State. The Marvels and Madame Web both suffered bloodbaths at the box office. Donald Trump's bloodbath certainly isn't as bad of a bloodbath as an average American trying to buy gas, groceries or pay rent every month. It certainly wasn't as big of a bloodbath as the stock market faced in 2008. 

We're in March. The election is still almost eight months away. If this is the level of rhetoric and reportage we can expect out of media, the only bloodbath we're likely to see is in their newsrooms when the pink slips resume in 2025. When an entire industry sets fire to their credibility, it's hard to expect people to continue to watch them and trust in their news and analysis.