October 24, 2024 - 10:00am

Another week, another extraordinary claim in the legacy media about Donald Trump. This week, an Atlantic story has reported that the former president privately scorned the family of a murdered soldier, referred to her as a “fucking Mexican”, and once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The pre-election dust-up should frighten Democrats, whose champions in the media still do not understand why their fellow countrymen prefer Trump over establishment politicians.

Published on Tuesday, the story is written by Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. “I’ve been interested in Trump’s understanding of military affairs for nearly a decade,” he writes. “This country had never seen, to the best of my knowledge, a national political figure who insulted veterans, wounded warriors, and the fallen with metronomic regularity.”

Goldberg goes on: “Today — two weeks before an election that could see Trump return to the White House — I’m most interested in his evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.”

The story is meant to serve as a comprehensive rundown of objectionable comments Trump made openly or allegedly about members of the military, some old and some new. From a journalistic standpoint, problems with the article abound. Key accusations are sourced to an anonymous “witness” and disputed by others who were in the room on the record.

Conservative columnist David Harsanyi pointed out that “in the old days” newspapers simply would not have run the reporting. “You have ‘anonymous’ sources up against a bunch of people who were there [who] deny hearing it. This new one is even less believable. Just complete journalistic malpractice,” he wrote. Meanwhile, former White House aide Ben Williamson seemingly caught the Atlantic changing a quotation he passed along on behalf of Trump’s onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows. The sister of the murdered soldier, along with others who were present at a meeting with the family, have disputed Goldberg’s reporting as well.

Nevertheless, Goldberg’s story immediately became the focus of Beltway media chatter, bouncing around TV news and even landing in a Tim Walz speech before the day was over. Yesterday, Kamala Harris called her opponent a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power”. This is a dangerous strategy for Democrats, but also reveals an even more dangerous misreading of the electorate. Princeton professor Matt Karp revealed this week that the Center for Working Class Politics “surveyed 1,000 Pennsylvania RVs and found that calling Trump a threat to democracy is Harris’s *least effective message* — with all voters and especially working-class voters”.

The reaction to Goldberg’s story is squarely in this category, and the Left risks sucking time and attention away from more effective messaging by focusing on it. What’s more, if you spend any time with Trump voters, you realise most people who cast their ballots for him will in no way be convinced by reports about the former president denigrating soldiers. Critically, that’s a separate question to whether Trump voters should be persuaded by such reports.

Perhaps they should be. But if journalists and Democrats still think they are, then they are bad at their jobs. Since Trump first insulted John McCain’s heroism in 2015, GOP voters have made it clear that they dislike establishment politicians, from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton, more than they dislike Trump’s conduct. Some Trump fans actually defend and enjoy his crassness, but they’re a minority of the normal people who vote for him.

The reality is that most have decided that they like or tolerate this stuff because Trump at least, in their minds, is better than Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The former president may say objectionable things about the military but they don’t think he’s as likely to, for instance, send their kids to war. That’s an important distinction, and it’s at the heart of Trump’s ongoing appeal.


Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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