SAUNDERS: Are media in the tank for Donald Trump? Some pros think so.
WASHINGTON — When The Associated Press called Monday’s Iowa caucus for Donald Trump around 5:30 p.m. Pacific — a half-hour into the voting and before many Iowa Republicans had cast their ballots — it must have felt like a slap in the face for the other candidates in the race.
Ron DeSantis campaign official Andrew Romeo wrote on X, “Absolutely outrageous that the media would participate in election interference by calling the race before tens of thousands of Iowans even had a chance to vote.”
Romeo concluded, “The media is in the tank for Trump, and this is the most egregious example yet.”
Media in the tank for Trump? Wow, I didn’t see that coming.
The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy responded that Romeo’s “only error is that the media is actually in the tank for Biden.”
Democrats were critical of the early call as well. Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted, “This such a self-defeating move at a time of massive distrust in the media and electoral system. Just wait an hour until people have voted. You don’t get a Pulitzer for being first to tell people something everyone knows is going to happen.”
Why would anyone suspect the media are “in the tank for Trump?”
Maybe because Trump’s poll numbers have risen along with the mounting legal cases against him — 91 criminal charges filed in four states. Trump garnered 51 percent of the vote in Iowa. Trump beat all of his opponents put together. DeSantis clung to second place with 21.2 percent, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley claimed 19.1 percent.
Democrats must be thinking, “How can this be happening?”
I can relate. I felt this way during the 2016 election. Despite all his gaffes and all of the women making accusations against him, Trump kept succeeding.
Not a coincidence: From the moment Trump and his wife, Melania, rode a Trump Tower escalator on his way to announce that he was running for president, Trump was a constant presence on TV news.
It was “free media” — as opposed to paid advertising — that helped catapult Trump to the head of the pack. The tracking firm mediaQuant figured that Trump enjoyed $5.6 billion in “free media,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review, “more than Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz combined.”
During the 2016 primaries, I was among those who believed that cable news hosts kept inviting the real estate magnate on their shows because they wanted him to win the Republican nomination. They thought he would lose to the inevitable Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
It certainly felt that way.
But then, things didn’t turn out the way most of punditry — I’m guilty here, too — predicted.
The more prosecutors go after Trump, and the more the media breathlessly report on the charges, the more Republicans see him as a victim.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but when you talk to Republicans about politics, their biggest beef seems to be, not with Biden, but fellow GOP voters whom they deem to be insufficiently pro-Trump.
That doesn’t bode well for Republicans in November.
Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X