Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, surging in multiple national polls in a head-to-head with Hillary, the mainstream media is combing over the controversial candidate’s present words and past deeds, looking for any opportunity to cast him in as negative a light as possible.

The MSM is coming after Trump with both barrels — but they might be surprised to find him heavily armed.

The past week has seen Trump face a bombardment of negative media stories, but the New York business mogul is hitting back just as hard. The New York Times, that beacon of unbiased news, dropped this over the weekend: “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private.” That followed a salacious story in The Washington Post that Trump pretended to be his own spokesman — supported by audio tapes that sounded distinctly not like Trump.

“You’re going so low as to talk about something that happened 25 years ago … I think we have more important things to discuss,” Trump said on “The Today Show,” in response to The Post report on Trump’s allegedly posing as his own publicist in the 80s and 90s.

The Post in particular has it out for Trump. It was reported last Wednesday that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and The Post’s owner, had put together a hit squad of 20 reporters tasked with digging up dirt on Trump. But Trump launched a stinging preemptive attack against Bezos. “He’s using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like [it] should be taxed,” Trump said. “He has a huge antitrust problem because Amazon is controlling so much.” Indeed, in 2015 a prominent group of authors sent a letter to the Department of Justice requesting an investigation into the company.

Many in the media have called for or conducted their own “investigations” into Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Trump has quite sensibly said he’s not going to release them while in the process of being audited.

But the media cannot resist anything it might be able to use to cast doubts about Republicans’ honesty, and George Stephanopoulos raised the issue with Trump on Friday on “Good Morning America.”

“It’s none of your business,” Trump shot back at Stephanopoulos when the anchor pressed the issue once again. “You’ll see when I release, but I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible,” Trump admitted. Stephanopoulos continued to press the candidate on the media-manufactured controversy, but the presumptive GOP nominee was having none of it.

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“I know [Clinton’s] a good friend of yours, and I know you worked for her and you didn’t reveal it,” Trump fired back. “There are emails missing all over the place. The whole thing is a scam.”

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Trump has come up against this sort of bias before. His perfectly reasonable and factually accurate comments about illegal immigration from Mexico were repeated by most mainstream media outlets as comments made about all Mexicans. Likewise, his admittedly ill-thought-out comments about Megyn Kelly and blood were used by the media as alleged proof that Trump — a successful father with a successful daughter who constantly praises her dad for being a positive role model — is a misogynist.

But when Trump was just one among many candidates vying for the GOP presidential candidacy, and one who wasn’t taken too seriously at the time either, Trump was able to weather such controversies with relative ease.

Now that Trump is presumptive nominee — and Clinton is struggling to inspire a party more moved by a 74-year-old socialist with ideas as outdated as he is — his media love affair is ending. It usually happens this way.

John McCain was one of the media’s “good” Republicans — “the Maverick” — until he became the nominee in 2008. Then he was transformed into a dangerous warmonger who didn’t care about minorities. Romney was the sensible, distinguished moderate while he was one among many running in the primaries in 2008 and 2012. Once he secured the 2012 nomination, he was promptly transformed into a religious extremist who hated poor people.

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Though often denied, this liberal media bias is widespread, largely the result of liberal cultural bias, of the echo chamber which the mostly liberal elite inhabits, and the incestuous ties between mainstream news publications and Democratic/left-wing activism.

Take Stephanopoulos, a close friend of the Clintons who worked on Bill’s campaign and is a former employee of the Clinton Foundation. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who began his career straight out of college as campaign press secretary for a Democratic congressional candidate, then served as her congressional press secretary. Tapper’s wife was the regional director for Planned Parenthood D.C.

It is this inherent bias which clouds the sociopolitical debates of the day. Conservative concerns about immigration or urban crime become “racism,” or Christian concerns about the spiritual and social effects of abortion, divorce, or sexual promiscuity become “women’s rights issues.” Even the use of the word “abortion” for what in any other age would have been called “feticide” or even “infanticide” is a stark reminder of this inherent cultural bias.

As with McCain and Romney, the media attacks against Trump will only continue to intensify as election day draws nearer. But unlike McCain and Romney, Trump has demonstrated a willingness to fight back.