Donald Trump has an uncanny power to change people’s minds.
It’s not that he’s a master of persuasion. Quite the opposite. Simply by taking a position, Trump can send most of the Left and half of the U.S. media sprinting to the opposite position.
Trump is often wrong, and even more often offensive. Journalists and his critics have developed a knee-jerk reaction of adopting the opposite position, regardless of their prior positions and sometimes regardless of facts.
So when Trump says the economy is bad for the working class, much of the commentariat joins in a rendition of “Everything is Awesome.” It happens on all sorts of issues. Crime is a perfect example.
“The epidemic of gun violence in our country is a crisis,” President Obama wrote in the New York Times in January of this year. “Suicides. Domestic violence. Gang shootouts. Accidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost brothers and sisters, or buried their own children. We’re the only advanced nation on earth that sees this kind of mass violence with this frequency.”
This sentiment was all over the Times. Veteran opinion writer Joe Nocera in 2014 noted Chicago’s nickname, “Chiraq,” indicating it was a bloody war zone.
“Unending” mass shootings were the focus of a front-page Times story in May 2016, which noted “most of the lives they scar are black.” The article warned of daily mass shootings “at neighborhood barbecues, family reunions, music festivals, basketball tournaments, movie theaters, housing project courtyards, Sweet 16 parties, public parks”
“Mass murder occurring in slow motion every day,” as Philadelphia’s former mayor put it in the article.
The Times editorial page wrote of “America’s intolerable levels of gun violence” in January 2016
Then Donald Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention this summer about the crime wave sweeping the country. Cue the reversals.
Liberal Times blogger Paul Krugman mocked the “speech … whose central premise was that crime is running rampant….[I]t’s hard to see how anyone who walks around with open eyes could believe in the blood-soaked dystopian vision Mr. Trump laid out.”
The Times published an essay in August asking “America Is Safer Than It Used to Be. So Why Do We Still Have Calls for ‘Law and Order’?” The article explained “The country’s violent crime rate is about half of what it was in 1991. Cities, in particular, have become markedly less dangerous.”
You saw this about-face all over the media.
Ian Milhiser, blogging for Clinton-supporting Center for American Progress, wrote in late 2015 about “America’s gun violence epidemic ,” and warned of a potential “arms race where gun makers and the National Rifle Association sprint to ensure that new methods of killing people are widely available.”
A few months later, Milhiser mockingly wrote, “Donald Trump wants you to think that America is a scary, scary place.” Milhiser cited statistics that crime is down and shootings in Chicago are flat. “The frightening landscape that Trump presents, in other words, does not exist.”
The United States has “give[n] up on gun violence,” liberal journalist Philip Bump wrote in 2012. “It sees mass shootings and weapons-related deaths that dwarf every other country,” he lamented in a piece on how to address “the scourge of gun violence.”
The Trump began hammering away at the rising danger in our streets. In July, Bump wrote “No, Donald Trump, crime is not ‘out of control'”
Last week, Bump dedicated a lengthy article to a Brennan Center study concluding “Warnings of a coming crime wave may be provocative, but they are not supported by the evidence.” Not even when he was helping induce the panic.
It’s not just crime where Trump has changed minds in this way.
Max Boot, a voracious hawk, seems to have been pacified by Trump’s bellicosity. “Why is Trump so eager to claim every event as terrorism?” Boot asked on Twitter. “Like all demagogues he wants to create climate of fear so he can seize power.”
This is the same Max Boot who spent last decade warning us of Islamic terrorism’s existential threat as an argument for more war.
“The question in my mind,” Boot said on CNN in October 2002, making the case for war, “is: are we going to have to see a mushroom cloud over Manhattan before we realize that we are not containing Saddam Hussein?”
“Then and now, evil always wants more;” Boot wrote in the midst of the Iraq war, “Whether it’s Hitler or Bin Laden, history teaches the dire consequences of appeasement….Pulling out of Iraq would only whet [bin Laden’s] insatiable appetite for destruction, just as giving up the Sudetenland encouraged Hitler to seek more.”
The Trump Effect could yield lots of good. It’s already dampened the media’s “gun-violence epidemic” talk. Let’s hope for more of this.
Trump supports the ethanol mandate. Perhaps this position will foster more skepticism of alternative fuels. Maybe Trump’s support for Planned Parenthood will push journalists to discuss the racially tinged eugenic nature of the abortion industry.
And Trump broadly rejects the conservative approach to governing. Dear media, you’re free to join us on this side, lest you stand too close to Trump.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
