The Media Is Ready to Hold Trump to a Lower Standard

Acknowledging the obvious—that Trump is all but set to skate on everything he’s been charged with, regardless of the merits of the cases against him—Thiessen and his co-author write, “Trump may not need Biden’s pardon, but America does.” Naturally, you shouldn’t hold your breath that these two will hold Trump to account when he launches his revenge campaign in a few weeks’ time for the sake of “America.” The whole point of this call to have Biden pardon Trump is less about any authentic desire to heal our divisions than it is to simply entangle Biden more permanently in Trump’s lawlessness.

More importantly, you can mark this op-ed as the last time we’re going to hear about the importance of unity for a while. With Trump returning to office, Thiessen won’t be the only person in the commentariat who’ll be recalibrating their barometers for harmony and unanimity. The media will soon be leaving their fetish for bipartisanship, compromise, and comity behind since the only people on whom they ever impose these standards—Democrats—will be out of power.

If you are old enough to remember the first time Trump came to power, then you’ve seen this movie before. During his tenure, President Barack Obama was constantly besieged by the worst pundits in America for his failure to bring Republicans—who were at the time following Mitch McConnell’s monomaniacal pursuit of obstruction at any cost—to the table to support broad bipartisan initiatives. The chief dunce of the Washington press corps at the time, David Broder, established his own benchmark for Democratic policy legitimacy at 70 Senate votes, thus setting up the Affordable Care Act to fail at an arbitrary standard that ended up not mattering because, as near as I can tell, Obamacare is still the law of the land, oddly durable for having failed Broder’s big purity test.