Blue State Blues: Media Condemn Shooting but Wish It Had Tamed Trump

The media panned President Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Thursday night because it was not, in their view, conciliatory enough in the wake of his attempted assassination.

Trump devoted the first portion of his speech to recounting his miraculous experience of survival, and calling for national unity. He only used the word “Biden” once, and spoke in a muted tone throughout his remarks.

But that was not enough for the media, who evidently expected that a speech accepting the presidential nomination at a national party convention should be devoid of any partisan content.

CNN’s panel declared, without evidence, that Trump’s attacks on the Democrats and their “partisan witch hunts” would alienate voters.

Van Jones was exultant: “Trump dodged a bullet on Saturday. Democrats dodged a bullet tonight,” he said, in a particularly tasteless remark.

Note that when President Joe Biden delivered his Inaugural Address, with the nation’s capital under armed guard and barbed-wire fences around the Capitol building itself, he used the word “unity” eight times — but he also attacked the scourge of “political extremism, white supremacy, [and] domestic terrorism,” implying that those labels described his Republican opponents and Trump. He divided the country into good and evil, and called for unity against the latter.

The media praised Biden’s speech, because they agreed with it. Evidently the privilege of calling for national unity while also rallying the country to a common cause is one that only Democrats enjoy.

There need not be any contradiction between calling for unity and also calling on Americans to fight. As Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said during a speech Wednesday, in one of the most memorable passages of the whole convention:

Now, though bloodied by our wounds, we must stand up and we must fight. Fight not with violence or destruction, but with our voices and our votes. Fight not against each other, but for the hopes and dreams we share in common and make us one. And fight for in America where we are safe from those who seek to harm us on our streets and from abroad. And we will not be alone in this fight. For leading us in this fight will be a man who, although wounded and facing danger, he stood up and raised his fist and reminded us that our people and our country are always worth fighting for.

It was clear, as Trump spoke on Thursday, that the near-death experience of the assassination attempt had changed him. Actually, viewers could see the change on his face all week. He was supposed to have made a grand entrance on Thursday evening, but changed his plans to attend every day of the convention, sitting there, listening to everyone.

In his address, he was still pugnacious, attacking the opposition and the media.

But he also exposed a deeply personal and vulnerable side, taking the country into his confidence: “I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell.”

He kissed the helmet of the late firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died in the hail of bullets — an intimate gesture, the kind men rarely display in public.

That was not enough for the media, who seem to have expected the assassination attempt would transform Trump ideologically, as if the shooting served some higher purpose.

“This was billed as was a totally rewritten speech focused on unity. There’s no denying the beginning was certainly compelling,” CNN’s Kaitlin Collins complained. “Then we got to the middle, and it sounded like a normal, typical Trump rally that would have happened before Saturday.”

Actually, that was good. Trump’s voters needed to hear something familiar, to know that he was all right.

Had Trump not been Trump — had he ended after 20 minutes, having only talked about unity, the media would have speculated that the bullet had weakened him, and his voters would have wondered what happened to him.

We are told the assassin’s motives are unknown, but the media are trying to use the shooting for their own purposes.

That’s what Trump is fighting.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.