Journalists in the national media hate former President Donald Trump on a personal level, not because they can articulate legitimate disagreements on policy vision but because he didn’t cry in public.
I mean that literally. Trump didn’t cry about the thousands of people who were dying in 2020 from the coronavirus but instead was mercilessly optimistic about America getting through the pandemic. That bothers journalists to no end who prefer that their presidents cry.
And that’s why they love President Biden so much. Biden has empathy. Biden cares. Biden cries.
New York Times liberal Ezra Klein encapsulated that reality with a pair of tweets on Thursday. “Biden buried two children, and a spouse, who died because of disasters he couldn’t stop,” he wrote in one. “So if he gets a little sharp when politicians undermine something as simple as wearing a mask to save the lives of other people’s parents, spouses, and children, well…”
Klein was apparently referring to the incident the day before in which Biden said Republican governors dropping state-wide mask mandates were doing so with “Neanderthal thinking.”
In a follow-up tweet, Klein said that he’d “watched a lot of Biden speeches” (poor him) and that “the refusal, particularly among political leaders, to wear masks, gets him angry in a way little else does.” He added, “I don’t think you need to reach too hard to understand why. There’s little as real to him as the possibility, and pain, of loss.”
True, Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car crash, one of his sons died a few years ago of brain cancer, and his other son had a drug addiction and was kicked out of the military. Few people probably envy him.
But why should that protect him from scrutiny? In the time he has been president, thousands of people have continued to die from the coronavirus, and there are yet more infections. We’re currently averaging about 65,000 new cases each day.
Before Biden was sworn in, the media told us the former president was responsible for each and every new COVID-19-related death. Now Biden puts the blame on “Neanderthal thinking,” and, well, it’s because he’s “a little sharp” from the “pain of loss” he’s endured.
Nothing arouses the media like a good show of empathy.
When Biden traveled to Texas last week to show more empathy in light of the mass power outage, the people at CNN could hardly contain themselves. “This Texas trip plays into a role Biden is familiar with, being a consoler in a time of crisis and grief,” babbled Jake Tapper. White House correspondent Arlette Saenz was in deep agreement, replying, “It certainly does” and that Biden assumes that role “quite naturally, as he is well known for his empathy that he relays …”
I kid you not, 15 minutes later, CNN’s Phil Mattingly was on air to say Biden was “slipping into a familiar role: consoler in chief.”
Superficial displays of emotion mean everything to journalists.
Thousands of people continue to die, but, hey, Biden cares that they die.
