Media Elites Lose Their Mind Over Trump’s Big Day

On a day in which the Republican presidential nominee headed to Mexico City and Phoenix for truly historic campaign events, many in the U.S. media writhed in agony.

It soon became apparent on Twitter — often the window into the true feelings of news reporters and journalists — that they despised Trump on his big day. Trump found success on his trips to Mexico and Phoenix — even The New York Times admitted the trip was bold and “audacious” — and some in the mainstream media simply lost it.

“Lefty media types: Stop. Take a breath,” Kristol tweeted. “You loathe Trump. Fine. But it’s now hampering your ability to report [and] analyze the race accurately.”

It wasn’t too long before even the mothers who lost children to illegal aliens were being compared to the Aryan Nation. That’s right. You just knew mentions of Nazis, Klansmen, and David Duke were coming.

It got so bad that William Kristol, The Weekly Standard editor and a conservative Trump foe, admonished the press.

“Lefty media types: Stop. Take a breath,” Kristol tweeted. “You loathe Trump. Fine. But it’s now hampering your ability to report [and] analyze the race accurately.”

The Weekly Standard tried to do their part. Kristol’s chief writer, Stephen Hayes, said Trump’s strategy of flying to Mexico City largely worked.

But on the mainstream and more liberal side of the media, the comments on Trump’s meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, and later, his Phoenix immigration speech, reached a frenzied level of Trump-bashing.

Perhaps the best example of that hampered ability to analyze was the attempt by many in the media, especially Reuters and The Huffington Post, to portray Trump as a liar when he claimed he and the Mexican president never discussed how to pay for the border wall.

In fact, it appears that Peña Nieto simply told Trump that Mexico would not pay for the wall, and Trump moved on. But even that is not clear. Still, The Huffington Post boldly declared “Peña Nieto says Trump lied about paying for the wall.”

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That was mild stuff compared to the tweets. While many of the most hard-edged, angry tweets in the media came from opinion journalists, such as The New York Times’ Charles Blow and Salon’s Joan Walsh (Walsh even bragged her daughter was working to defeat the “monster” in North Carolina), admonishment also came from so-called straight journalists.

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For example, as is common practice among Trump-hating elites, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty was used against Trump — as if those words are legally binding. The journalist was ABC news analyst Matthew Dowd.

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Politico’s Ben White also got some licks in last night, deriding the “damn fool wall.”

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Politico’s main political reporter Glenn Thrush actually tried to decry media bias in favor of Trump from the trip.

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But most outrageous of all were the attacks on the “angel moms,” the parents who lost children at the hands of illegal immigrants.

Rania Khalek, a self-described journalist “with opinions,” suggested the angel moms were “like a hate group.” She tweeted that Twitter’s live feed should be turned off as the moms took the stage and spoke.

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Khalek works for Electronic Intifada and has also written for The Intercept, the magazine run by left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald. Her remarks sparked outrage across Twitter.

When an angel mom stood up to Khalek, she stood her ground, again accusing the angel moms of whipping up hatred.

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Trump’s shining moment on Wednesday infuriated Trump critics and exposed, perhaps to the largest degree yet, the very real bias in a part of the media that is supposed to be neutral, dispassionate, and objective.

Hayes, of The Weekly Standard, indicated why so many observers thought the trip paid off.

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“Trump’s sharp edges were rounded, his hot rhetoric cooler,” Hayes wrote. “If voters are concerned that Trump is incapable of behaving like a statesman — and many of them are — Trump showed them that at least on this day, he could. He was, ever briefly, the kind of Trump many Republican elected officials have long hoped publicly that he could become.”

This kind of success — and worse for anti-Trumpers, laudatory reviews from some Trump critics — could lead to more Twitter outbursts from America’s objective political journalists.

Paul Farhi, media reporter for The Washington Post, said Twitter is a seductive, alluring platform for journalists to use — but often they overstep by making overly opinionated remarks. Farhi said he is often struck by what neutral, nonpartisan journalists say on Twitter.

But Farhi said the problem predates Trump.

“Maybe Trump has exacerbated things,” Farhi said.