By Dave Andrusko
I chose not to fixate on the compulsive hatred of former President Donald Trump for having the gall, the chutzpah to interact with staff and customers at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. How dare he…campaign.
But Dan McLaughlin had no such compunction.
McLaughlin posted a story yesterday on National Review Online in which he demolished an ugly hit job on the former president by Newsweek “National Correspondent” Khaleda Rahman. It served double duty because it explains why many people hate, loath, and have contempt for the national media.
This is not the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s Trump filing some orders for french fries! So..
Why do it? Because Trump manning the fry cooker and the drive-thru window was a well-executed campaign appearance, in which Trump was able to showcase his best side — his rapport with ordinary working folks, his humor, his spotlight-stealing stage presence — and minimize his many well-known weaknesses. This is called campaigning. It is done every day in every county and district in America, by candidates for every office from the highest in the land to the most humble.
But it was manner in which Rahman went after Trump that disgusts—and worries —McLaughlin.
And yet, Rahman and Newsweek treat this ordinary fast-food outlet and its ordinary manager and employees as legitimate targets for a political attack read across the country and the globe because they didn’t treat Trump like a monster or tell the former president to get lost. Not content to report on the powerful on behalf of the people, they must go after the people on behalf of the powerful — if the people are even mildly helpful to one Republican for one afternoon. This is the same sort of thing the national political press has been doing since it dug into the background of “Joe the Plumber” in 2008 just because he had some sharp words for Barack Obama when the Democratic candidate showed up campaigning in his driveway in Ohio. It’s the instinct that led CNN to go after a grandmother who made internet memes. It’s a tactic we have seen increasingly (Jon Stewart’s Daily Show deserves a good deal of the blame): the idea of trying to discredit politicians by going after their supporters.
What worries McLaughlin?
Indeed, there’s something even more sinister at work: an effort to shame or intimidate ordinary people away from Trump and other Republican candidates for office by sending the message that if you support them or even interact with them in a friendly fashion just once, the press will dig into your past to find whatever it can to embarrass you. This, from the very same press that can’t tell us what Kamala Harris was doing when Joe Biden was forced off the national ticket, or bother to dig up records of the cases she argued or tried in court as a lawyer. They can’t even track down Harris’s own claim of employment at a McDonald’s. This is exactly the sort of behavior that feeds into Trump’s popularity when he has the media and the prosecutors after him and tells people, “They’re not after me, they’re after you, I’m just in the way.”
Shame on Rahman for targeting the Feasterville-Trevose McDonald’s. Shame on Newsweek for printing it. And the next time somebody asks you why people hate the national political press, here’s your Exhibit A.
