Running Through The Media Playbook Vs. Trump

                                            [Actual photo of our national news media at rest]

Over the last several days we have seen the Democrats' lapdogs in the national news media begin to run through their standard playbook that they use every four years to attempt to beat down and damage whomever happens to become the Republican presidential nominee. They used this playbook vs. Romney in 2012, vs. McCain in 2008, and indeed have deployed it against every Republican nominee for over half a century.

Now that he is the de facto GOP nominee for 2016, Donald Trump will be subjected to the same standard playbook.

Thus, on Friday we learned that the Democrat lapdogs at the Washington Post had assigned fully 20 of that dying newspaper's reporter staff to do Democrat oppo research and reporting on Trump. Trump should be relieved, I guess, since in 2008 the Wapo assigned 50 of its staff to develop hit pieces on Sarah Palin.

The initial fruit of those 20 reporters' labors was the 'devastating' revelation that Trump, over a quarter of a century ago, apparently made a habit of pranking the local New York media outlets and radio talk shows by pretending to be his own spokesperson. Next thing you know, the WaPo will come up with a tape of Trump as a jr. high student calling his neighbors and asking if their refrigerator is running, or if they have Prince Albert in a can. (If you don't get those two references, that likely means you are under the age of 45 or so.)

Next, over the weekend, the lapdogs at the New York Times issued a very predictable hit piece chronicling Trump's behavior towards women, again focusing on events that allegedly took place a quarter century or more in the past. Already, at least one of the women in question has appeared on television to state that the New York Times' piece is - very predictably - false.

Hey, this is what they do.

We will see much more of this sort of hit piece reporting in the coming weeks and months, as Hillary Clinton's press agents desperately attempt to justify their refusal to report in any real way on her growing email scandal and her husband's activities with Jeffrey Epstein. Again this is all very predictable - we have seen it so many times before.

In past election cycles, this kind of unrelenting, undisguised bias in the national news media has had a significant impact on the ultimate election results. Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened in the 2008 election had the WaPo assigned 20 reporters - or indeed, even one - to look into and report on Barack Obama's relations with Bill Ayers and other radicals during the 1980s and 1990s. Had that happened, John McCain probably would be finishing up his second term in office, for better or worse. Instead, to this day, the WaPo has still never made the slightest effort to actually vet the current President to the public.

Ironically, the news that the Democrat media are now running through their standard election playbook is actually good news for Donald Trump. Because it just shows that these people and media outlets continue to lack the most basic understanding of what is actually happening with the voters in this election cycle.

All of those past election cycles involved conventional candidates and conventional themes, the lone exception being 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. This election cycle is different - the mood of the public is different, and obviously the candidates are non-conventional candidates, one being kind of a carnival barker businessman, the other being a career criminal.

In such an environment, the standard playbook deployed by the WaPo, NYTimes and other Democrat support media isn't likely to work. Just as Nate Silver and 538.org continuing to use the same projection model that made them so right in 2012 is making them so consistently wrong in 2016.

Many people probably think the Trump camp was in full panic mode over the weekend. In reality, I'd imagine they were likely celebrating the revelation that their opposition remains so utterly clueless.