MSNBC’s Rubin Claims Mainstream Media Has Covered For And ‘Cleaned Up’ Trump Until ‘Only Very Recently’
MSNBC analyst Jen Rubin told host Ali Velshi on Saturday that the mainstream media has “normalized” and “cleaned up” Donald Trump, and with their effort at “false balance” in treating “the Republican Party like the Democratic Party” have covered for and failed to report on his “totalitarian” intent.
Rubin was on MSNBC’s Velshi Saturday along with The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, during which they discussed an article from Coppins advocating that people attend Trump rallies to get a true sense of exactly what they are facing from the ex-president in 2024.
After Coppins made his case, Velshi said that people who watch MSNBC “don’t even want to watch clips of Donald Trump on our shows,” but added to Rubin that “People I talked to do treat him as a quirky abstraction, as opposed to possibly the guy who’s going to help oversee the demise of democracy in America.”
Rubin blamed the press for the lack of “urgency” about Trump.
“This speaks to how badly the mainstream media has covered him,” said Rubin. “They have normalized him, they have cleaned up the rhetoric so he sounds in a clip or he reads in print much more coherent than he actually is. It’s only very recently that the mainstream media has been reporting on his really shocking totalitarian claims. But of course, he’s been this way all along.”
Rubin said that the media has “done such a bad job” because they try to treat Republicans like they treat Democrats in pursuit of “false balance” and a “failure” to “side with truth.”
She went on to add that Trump rally-goers are “part of a fascist cult” and “utterly irrational,” and therefore “impervious” to facts.
Her prescription for the mainstream media is to focus on the “reeducation” of people who have lost sight of the danger.
“What you have to do if you care about democracy is mobilize the people who already know that he is a danger, and reaffirm and reeducate the people who are perhaps kind of flirting in the middle, they’re soft Republicans, they’re never Republicans, about the danger of going back to Trump,” she said. “And I think that’s the job between now and November.”
When Fox News hosts bash the mainstream media, it’s popular to mock them for not including their network as part of that media, and so it’s worth noting that the implication of the MSNBC analyst and the MSNBC host who said he agrees with her presumes that they and their outlets are not part of that guilty MSM, either.
VELSHI: I mean, people don’t even want to watch clips of Donald Trump on our shows, the feedback we get when we do that. But I think McKay hits a very important point. The urgency of Trump, the potency of Trump, the danger of Trump. And I think he’s right. People I talked to do treat him as a quirky abstraction, as opposed to possibly the guy who’s going to help oversee the demise of democracy in America.
RUBIN: Well, I think two things are going on. One, this speaks to how badly the mainstream media has covered him. They have normalized him, they have cleaned up the rhetoric so he sounds in a clip or he reads in print much more coherent than he actually is. It’s only very recently that the mainstream media has been reporting on his really shocking totalitarian claims. But of course, he’s been this way all along.
And I think because they have done such a bad job, because they have made an effort to treat the Republican Party like the Democratic Party, this notion that he’s not so bad, that he’s just kind of a cartoon character has set in. And that’s on the mainstream media, that’s on the failure to be honest and to side with truth rather than having this false balance.
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.
