If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.

Let’s start from the last item of that list, TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, because I’ve seen people claim that it doesn’t exist and they can prove that by showing the sorts of criticism that Kamala Harris gets from the Right match those that Trump gets from the Left.

It’s not that. Twenty years ago the term Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) was coined to explain why the criticism of Bush went beyond attacking his various policies to attacking the man himself – which is normal for a democracy, but in this case began to happen almost all the time and in areas outside of politics, and for things like his “smirk”. Sure, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and most other US Presidents had comedians making fun of their facial, verbal and body language idiosyncrasies, but Bush tipped this over into the worlds of ordinary people, with them varying from making fun of him to outright hatred, with a familiar twist:

Perhaps it was due to the rise of the Internet with people more connected to such things than just nightly newscasts, talk shows, press conferences or Presidential announcements? A President and his people were more face-to-face than ever before and this is what caused it all to cross the borders of politics into everyday life?

For Trump it’s been dialled up to 20 on the 1-10 hysteria scale since he won in 2016 (before that it was “fun” for his opposition) and suddenly there were no borders (guardrails?) preventing Trump from being inserted into the conversation. Starting with the entertainment industry, where they’re too numerous to list, but top-of-mind dishonours go to:

  • A 2017 NY Central Park performance of Julius Caesar where nobody could doubt who was really getting stabbed to death.
  • Failed comedian Kathy Griffin holding up a bloody, severed Trump head.
  • All of the late night shows hitting Trump several times every night (their superior forebears Carson, Leno and Letterman didn’t bother with politicians outside of elections or big scandals)
  • Demands that his cameo scene in Home Alone II be removed.
  • Every talk show covering Trump frequently, but not by inviting him on, as in the past, instead inviting guests like famous actor Robert De Niro to go spastic in expressing their hate. The View, with its target audience of White Boomer Affluent Liberal Females, is probably the leader here.
  • All of the same stuff happening across the Western world, even here in little old New Zealand with an RNZ Gardening show apparently (I’ve heard from numerous rellies that it’s been relentless on local TV news as well for years now).

Even sport, as witnessed just the other day during the World Series.

This set off a firestorm of complaints from such people, all annoyed or outright angry (“Canโ€™t even watch the World Series without the nastiness of MAGA“) that a Trump fan was ruining their game – and in Los Angeles, California to boot. Outrageous!

And everyday life. How would you like to live in the same neighbourhood as that POS screaming at the door? I bet she watches The View everyday.

As for the “news” parts of the MSM, they at first found Trump a bonanza. Through 2015-16 TV channels like CNN and MSNBC would even cut to an empty podium for a minute or more before a Trump speech, so eager were their audiences to boo and hiss. Of course the MSM undoubtedly loved the fact that they were screwing with the GOP primary by sucking all the oxygen out of the room for the other candidates, leaving only “the clown” to be beaten like a drum by Hillary in the general election.

After the shock of that blowing up in their stupid, arrogant faces, the likes of the NYT and MSNBC saw huge audience growth by exploiting Trump Hate, and although they lost a lot pf people when he was defeated in 2020 they figured it was worth it to see him banished into history.

So now what do they do? Trump has powered back despite everything thrown at him by his opponents, all amplified by the MSM; he’s forced Biden from the race and finds himself in good shape against Biden’s replacement, the vacuous pantsuited figure of Kamala Harris.

Well there’s always the endorsements, and that’s where things have really gone haywire. In order of timing:

First, the LA Times refused to endorse Harris. As a result the editorial board editor, Mariel Garza, resigned and their young staff melted down. Then it turned out that the reason was that the owners daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, who has had huge influence on the paper (despite her father’s denials),as she openly told the New York Times, did it because of Harris’s lack of support for Palestine against Israel’s “apartheid” and “genocide”. That puts the Lefty staff in a tough spot. For context the LA Times had previously endorsed Harris for California Attorney General in 2014, the Senate in 2016, and Biden-Harris in 2020.

Second, and probably more important, a few days later The Washington Post refused to endorse Harris, this time apparently on the express orders of its owner, Jeff $200 billion Bezos. The meltdowns here have been similar, although one hilarious catch is that Jen Ruben, the pet “conservative” Never Trumper of the WaPO has not quit despite earlier praising the LA Time’s Mariel Garza for doing so over there. There has been a huge follow-up to this with Bezos explaining his reasons via the front page of the WaPo (but that’s more suited to another post on the MSM meltdown). So far some 200,000 subscribers have quit the paper, including the following person:

The seething continues today, just look at these comments from WaPo insiders:

During the meeting, the paperโ€™s opinion columnists and editors, exhibiting a high level of distress, unloaded on opinion editor David Shipley, complained that Bezos was destroying the paperโ€™s reputation as an โ€œindependent journalistic organization,โ€ and repeatedly denounced former president Donald Trump. One editor fretted that the โ€œone thing that canโ€™t happen in this country is for Trump to get another four years.”

They’re not a newspaper; as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has said for years, “Think of the media as Democrat Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense”.

Third, USA Today and the 200 Newspapers Owned by Gannett Will Also Withhold Their Presidential Endorsement.

Finally there was the interesting case of The Nation, which is too fringe to be part of the MSM, but which is an important little cog given its Far Left leanings and long history (it was always run by communists who expressed their love for the USSR right up until it died). They did decide to endorse Kamala Harris – and then their Interns Declared War on them via…ย The Nation, because of the Palestine thing.

[Y]esterday, theย Nationโ€˜s fall 2024 internship staff just published a collectively written counter-essayย attacking their editorsย for selling out and endorsing Harris โ€” and they published itย in theย Nationย itself…. watching the rebelliously proggier-than-thou Zoomer servitors of theย Nationย rise up against their elders fires my shrunken coal lump of a heart with a warm, amber glow โ€” you really do hate to see it happen, and to the nicest people, too.

Maybe the LA Times and The Nation should swap staffs, then each would be happy?

By the way, billionaire investor Warren Buffettย has just announced he’s not endorsing Harris either, after years, decades, of endorsing Democrats and adding to the La Times, WaPo, Gannet News, The Firefighters Union and the Teamsters. But then he’s an investor celebrated for being far-sighted, and he clearly sees the writing on the wall for Harris-Walz, not suffering from TDS it would seem.

As for the rest of them, this is ultimately what Trump Derangement Syndrome means; the Left and his Right Wing opponents destroying themselves.

You love to see it.