Matt Taibbi: Mister Trump, whom I do not support, won the debate and the media is lying about it

Did the angry man yelling ridiculous lies do really well in Tuesday? If you don’t believe that, you’ve probably been brainwashed by the media, says a misogynist crank:

Conspiracies, pet-eating, and the “same old tired playbook” figured prominently in morning headlines. “Harris baits Trump over and over,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self,” was Salon’s take. “Harris Baits and Batters Trump,” wrote the Miami Herald. “Harris Baits Trump Into Arguments,” added CNN. “Harris Baits Trump: Inside their Fiery Debate,” was another Times headline, while The Wall Street Journal went with “Harris Baits Trump in Fiery Presidential Debate.” There were cheers that Harris was able to “bait him into defending himself rather than talking about issues.” And on and on. Instantly, bait everywhere. No wonder Jake Tapper talked about fishing after the event.

[…]

Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo …

They surrounded Trump with rigid consensus framing and watched him flail against it, which did make him look frustrated, old, and at times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? Not sure about that. If conventional wisdom says you’re crazy, that doesn’t make it true. What if it’s the other way around?

Who’s to say the “consensus framing” that “immigrants are not eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio” and “it is not legal in any American jurisdiction to executive babies,” and “Trump did not save the Affordable Care Act” is true? Maybe Trump is the real truth-teller? Why were the moderators asking about meaningless stuff nobody cares about like “the economy” and “aboriton” rather than real issues like “are content moderation policies fascism” and “what about the Democratic Party’s most influential figure, Yuval Harari?“

Taibbi is so deeply in the tank for Daddy Trump that he’s denying a reality not only the general public and betting markets but most Republicans can see:

Taibbi’s theory suffers from two serious flaws. The first lies in the linear nature of time. Taibbi seizes on a Democratic Party press release summarizing reactions to the debate and concludes that the reactions were implanted by the party into the media. But the news release came after the reactions. That is how it was able to quote them.

The simplest account of how this occurred, and one that comports with mainstream physics, is as follows:

The debate occurred.
Many observers, witnessing the debate, had more or less the same impression.
They recorded their impression on social or traditional media.
The Democratic Party’s media-relations staff read these accounts and shared some of them.

I believe this makes much more sense than Taibbi’s belief that the Democrats secretly instructed a wide array of journalists what to say happened at the debate.

The second flaw with Taibbi’s analysis is that the belief Trump looked terrible was shared by many people who could not possibly be controlled by the Democratic message machine. As the debate occurred in real time, online betting markets moved in Harris’s direction, and Trump’s scammy meme stock plunged.

What’s more, the conclusion that Harris effectively baited Trump into an incoherent performance was echoed by many observers who are sympathetic to Trump. “Trump Took the Bait. Harris Kept Her Cool,” wrote Eli Lake in The Free Press. “He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him,” moaned Brit Hume on Fox News. “She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set multiple traps so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years,” complained The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

And of course the even bigger flaw in Taibbi’s feeble propaganda is that to find an example of a media consensus forming against the performance of a Democratic candidate in a debate you have to go all the way back to…the previous time presidential candidates debated. Amazing how much control the Dee En Cee has gotten over the media since late June! Maybe they should be getting reporters to return to the 2016 norms about printing hacked emails while they have this level of influence.

Anyway, I’m beginning to think the political analysis of people who thought that Kamala Harris would drop out before the Democratic convention cannot be trusted.