In 1972, New York film critic Pauline Kael uttered a now-famous quote that has come to embody the mainstream media even 50 years later. After Richard Nixon won re-election in a landslide, with 520 electoral votes, Kael noted of the race, ‘I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.’
It’s too bad Twitter wasn’t around then. This would have become the viral meme to end all viral memes.
Journalists live inside a bubble. We know this. In a way, they always have. But since the dawn of the Internet age, as it has become easier and easier to be hyper-partisan with no repercussions, the media has only retreated further inside that bubble.
Yesterday, reporter Chris Cillizza — who laughably said, ‘Let me say for the billionth time: Reporters don’t root for a side. Period.’ before the 2016 election — tweeted a thread reminding the world that journalists not only live in that bubble, but they are completely unaware of it.
A number that stunned me in the NYT/Siena poll: 42% of people said that the years Donald Trump was president were “mostly good” for America.
Just 33% said they were “mostly bad.”
It speaks to the power of nostalgia — and how we as humans tend to remember the good stuff and…
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 15, 2024
Cillizza is referring to an April 13 New York Times/Sienna College poll that spelled horrible news for Joe Biden. While the national race is still very close, Biden is underwater in nearly every internal metric within the poll. But after more than three years of Biden’s disastrous presidency — both domestically and abroad — Cillizza still seems shocked that people have fond (or at least fonder) memories of Trump’s first term. He continued:
Objectively, the Trump years were very tough on Americans. 350,000 Americans died of Covid-19 in 2020. Donald Trump tried to use the power of the presidency to overturn an election. The economy tanked.
And yet….
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 15, 2024
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The lack of self-awareness here is stunning, even for Cillizza. He mentions ‘the Trump years,’ but in explaining that, he leaves out three of those years when America was doing much better by every measure. (We also love his little ‘insurrection’ dig there, even though most Americans now recognize Jan. 6 as nothing of the kind.)
Remember: he doesn’t root for a side.
After that, Cillizza took a really strange turn into The Cringe Zone, trying to come up with an analogy for Americans’ fond memories of the Trump years.
How to understand it? I think of it in terms of dating. In college I dated a girl for 2 years. We broke up. For plenty of good reasons.
But a few months later, I found myself reminiscing about all the good times we had together. I couldn’t even remember why we broke up in the…
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 15, 2024
‘ … in the first place’ is how he concluded that tweet.
Dude. Comparing Trump to your ex? Really? That’s just weird.
I think Donald Trump is the country’s ex in that regard. People are nostalgic about how things were four year ago — even if the actual record of how things were is not so good!
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 15, 2024
We say this in all earnestness: the left, including and especially the media, need professional help for the bizarre places their Trump obsession takes them.
But disturbing analogies aside, that tweet is just more gaslighting. Until COVID, most of Trump’s presidency was very good for Americans — in our wallets and our sense of security. We could cite all of the numbers, but all you have to do is ask people how much they paid, then and now, for groceries, gas, utilities, and more.
The last tweet in Cillizza’s thread is the real doozie.
Which presents a major problem for Joe Biden: How do you convince people they are misremembering the past?
I wrote about all of it in my JUST PUBLISHED newsletter. Subscribe via link in my bio! pic.twitter.com/4LB7kv1tBQ
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 15, 2024
There it is … like clockwork. It’s OUR fault we don’t appreciate Biden more than Trump. We’re just ‘misremembering’ everything. We have failed our President yet again, perhaps because we haven’t lowered our expectations enough.
(And no, Chris. No one wants to subscribe to your newsletter, LOL. Nice try though.)
Chris, your entire argument that things were worse during Trump will hinge entirely on 2020 and COVID, which was still around in 2021 during Biden.
So when people say things were mostly good, they were. And they were better than now.
— Frank (@richardrahl1086) April 15, 2024
Maybe he thought we wouldn’t notice that little trick he tried to pull.
The worst part of the Trump presidency was the hate-drenched media spewing chaos and conspiracy theories. The best part was everything else. https://t.co/ovnj2tM5ME
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 16, 2024
‘Could I have been wrong?…
No, no. It’s just the false sense of nostalgia from the ignorant masses who didn’t listen to me.
Yeah.
That makes more sense.’ https://t.co/oD9kaa0wZn— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) April 16, 2024
They think we are stupid. They need us to be stupid. It’s the only way any of their arguments work.
A number that stunned me was how the 100+ year old journo industry spent 100% of its credibility in the past 8 years and is now completely irrelevant. https://t.co/MZCqlSfoeY
— ~~datahazard~~ (@fentasyl) April 16, 2024
Journos have been destroying themselves since at least the ’90s. But, indeed, they all went completely bonkers in 2016.
GP Speaks more to relativity. There was no inflation in the Trump years, interest rates were low.
Biden years, we have wars all over, high inflation, and high interest rates. https://t.co/xBEB62zLa3
— The Gormogons (@Gormogons) April 15, 2024
This is the argument an honest journalist would have made. Not ‘nostalgia,’ but relativity. Cillizza, however, is anything but an honest journalist.
People are remembering 2017-2019. They are (rightfully) discounting 2020 because of the obvious special circumstances and the non-ideological understanding that all the negatives that befell the country that year would have occurred no matter who occupied the White House. https://t.co/PgwnChMNT0
— Kewgardens (@kewgardens1) April 16, 2024
To the left, the “Trump presidency” was the remainder of 2020, starting in about March. https://t.co/rQqdaSE9z0
— Aldous Huxley’s Ghost™ (@AF632) April 16, 2024
Exactly correct. Some Americans could have told this to Cillizza before he tweeted … if he ever bothered to talk to any Americans outside of his bubble.
You dope. A global pandemic hit and things went south. Before that? Wasn’t so bad, and way better than where we are now. But you don’t root for sides, or whatever. https://t.co/bbWL1blljD
— Name cannot be blank (@realchrishynes) April 16, 2024
Yes. He is a dope.
And as for the ex-girlfriend comments? We just … we don’t really know what to say.
You don’t need to do this. You are literally a living meme of “You don’t need to do this”
But you do. And we’re all here for it. https://t.co/vcP0GWkTQG
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2024
“we broke up” https://t.co/QqwNkMudBW
— Luke (@LukeRMahoney) April 16, 2024
You wouldn’t know her, man. She lives in Canada.
Dear @ChrisCillizza:
Day-drinking on Monday afternoons never ends well. https://t.co/KgoCSGOAAt
— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) April 16, 2024
HAHA. Like we said, it’s plain weird.
We should ask Cillizza how many times he drunk-texted that ex after he finished writing these tweets. The number has to be in the double figures, at least.
But if she saw his thread, maybe she would have answered him, ‘THIS is why we broke up, Chris.’
