Exactly which direction is he toning, here? President Trump had his Raleigh rally tonight and in between calls for civility and deescalation of rhetoric he bashed a lot of the usual suspects including ‘Crooked Hillary’ and the media. And despite the events of the week and the president’s own words appealing to unity, the crowd was still chanting “lock her up” and “CNN Sucks!”
Trump took a weird meandering route through this portion of his speech (meandering? Trump? Noooo….), saying the media needs to take a leadership role and calling them dishonest in rapid succession. “Everyone will benefit if we can end the politics of personal destruction,” said the President. “We must unify as a nation in peace, love, and in harmony.”
“The media has a major role to play, whether they want to or not,” he said, and then crowd noise, which was constant anyway, amped up, culminating in a crowd-wide chant of “CNN SUCKS.”
Trump said, continuing, “and they do indeed they have a major role to play as far as tone and as far as everything.”
He also said the media is trying to use the bomber’s actions to attack him, but the media did not do that to Bernie. The crowd reacted strongly each time, except when Trump said that Republicans don’t try to blame Democrats “every time radical leftists seize and destroy public property and unleash violence and mayhem.” Maybe because Republicans 100% do actually do that.
Anyway, watch:
Blaming Bernie Sanders for the shooting of Republicans “would have been the wrong thing to do” he said. I don’t know about that. If the national voice has decided we blame rhetoric for action, then that ought to apply to Democrats (who Bernie counted as during the election) or, conversely, should not apply now if the national voice has decided not to do that. It ought to be consistent.
It isn’t though, especially in the media. And that is who Trump is describing in the above segment.
And not for nothing, but he didn’t call them “enemy of the people” or even say “CNN sucks”. He said they are unfair and aren’t honest. After Kavanaugh, after the double standard on blaming rhetoric … well let’s just say he ain’t exactly wrong, y’all.
It’s not exactly “toning it up”, as promised. It’s toning it the same, or maybe less than before.
They’ll treat it like he spit on someone’s grave though. Even though, unlike in the baseball game that was shot up by a democrat, this week nobody actually got hurt.