On Saturday, a bunch of people paid a lot of money — at least $40,000 apiece, and one or two people took Trump up on an offer to speak if they gave $1 million — to hear Trump glorify cop assailants.
Both WaPo (with bylines from Marianne LeVine, Josh Dawsey and Maegan Vazquez) and NYT (Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher) dutifully gave Trump the headline he would have wanted.
Biden = Gestapo
By doing so, they accept as a both-sides question whether legal investigations Biden has nothing to do with make him a Nazi.
Five paragraphs in, NYT describes that Trump featured the recording made with then-accused, now convicted, January 6 felons; Maggie describes those detainees as “people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”
Mr. Trump entered the event to the recording of the national anthem that he made with a group of people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral college win. Mr. Trump praised the song.
There’s no mention that most of these men assaulted cops and one of the handful who didn’t is a Nazi who likes dressing up as Hitler.
400 rich people paid what could be an average person’s annual salary to watch Trump glorify violent cop assailants, and NYT didn’t mention the violence part. WaPo didn’t mention the video at all and only mentioned political violence when describing the Biden campaign response.
NYT did describe that Trump celebrated Rod Blagojevich and WaPo described Trump claiming that Henry Cuellar was only charged with bribery because he is tough on the border.
Compare that treatment to USA Today Zac Anderson’s, which focuses the entire story on the recording and includes three paragraphs discussing the significance of Trump’s focus on it and two more explaining how we can be sure most of the singers were accused of assault.
The recording is part of Trump’s efforts to whitewash what happened when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory.
The attack on the Capitol led to Trump’s second impeachment and contributed to felony charges being filed against the former president for efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Yet Trump has embraced the Jan. 6 defendants on the campaign trail, calling them “unbelievable patriots” and “hostages” who have “been treated terribly and very unfairly.”
[snip]
It’s not clear which Jan. 6 defendants participated in the recording that Trump plays at his rallies, but many of the defendants held in the Washington, D.C., jail around the time when the recording apparently was made were accused of assaulting officers.
An analysis published by Just Security, an online forum hosted by the New York University School of Law, found that the vast majority of Jan. 6 defendants held in the D.C. Jail on March 13, 2023, were accused of assaulting officers. An individual who advised the group that made the recording told the Washington Post that it was made in February of 2023 at the D.C. jail, but said she did not know who the singers are.
USA Today also managed to avoid taking Trump’s bait to equate Biden with the Gestapo, not even in the body of the story.
400 people paid a lot of money to watch Trump celebrate men who assaulted cops. All 400 of those people are directly supporting a culture of political violence. They need to be held accountable for their role in supporting political violence.
When that part gets suppressed — when those 400 people are given a pass for the political violence their dollars help to fund — it normalizes political violence.
That, not Trump’s manipulation of easy marks to get a headline detrimental to Joe Biden, is the story.