We are already getting a sense of what the media complex will be delivering in the form of fractured reporting regarding the 2024 election. I do not mean it will be mostly (entirely) pro-Biden/anti-Trump, as that is a given. I am referring to the more specific aspect of how this coverage will be delivered. Mostly, it can be summed up in a term of brevity.
Oblivious contradiction.
Conveniently, one article came out this week that encapsulated much of this type of coverage. Now, granted, it does come from Rolling Stone, so it cannot be taken too seriously. However, contained therein are elements we have already seen leeching into the media coverage of the campaign, and its concise inclusion of many of the elements means it becomes valid as a touchstone example.
At The Stone, they appear to have a pair of dedicated writers on the campaign beat – Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley. This duo delivers for us a rendition of the Biden campaign strategy, something that entails a not-at-all ominous-sounding description of an election Superstructure.
EXCLUSIVE: For years, Trump and other Republicans have been working to “steal” the 2024 election.
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) March 24, 2024
This is an inside look at how Team Biden and Democratic lawyers have built a “superstructure” to fight back “on all fronts”: https://t.co/G3Lf9aLhDX pic.twitter.com/L0B0cD7T6l
What they describe is a complex framework that will be used to battle Trump on the campaign trail and to have tools in place to combat what they perceive to be attempts on Trump’s part to undermine the electoral process. A battalion of lawyers is at the ready to be dispatched as needed. Other efforts and plans are being drafted to combat what they see as attacks on the democratic process.
Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.
“President Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election, if it’s very close on Election Day,” says a source familiar with Biden’s thinking. “If that ends up being the case, we are… also expecting the Republican Party to go into overdrive to help him steal it. We are continuing to build out the infrastructure to ensure that doesn’t happen.
And this begins the paradoxical approach to things. The first example comes from Rolling Stone itself. This same pair of reporters had a similar approach to the Trump campaign back in December, and they came away with a decidedly different summation. Trump was setting things up in a similar fashion – building a team of lawyers, challenging certain election standards, and (gasp) doing anything possible to win the election. Yet this was declared by the Stone-brothers as Trump plotting to steal the election.
This begins the trek down the path for the press, where, in a nod to Yogi Berra, when they come to a fork in the road, they will take it. Look at the very fact that they are invoking the word “steal” for the 2024 contest. For years, that has been the tripwire word because anyone who even hinted that the 2020 election was stolen was branded as an “election denier,” questioning the integrity of our democracy and operating within The Big Lie.
Now, today, it is fashionable to suggest that the upcoming election could be stolen by Trump. It is sound reasoning and cagey campaigning, and not a conspiracy to state, “Trump has been working for years to pre-rig the 2024 election.” Huh.
This position also contains another contradiction. How is it that the Big Lie was always beaten back by the insistence that ours was the most secure election process to be found, that any claim to irregularities was unfounded claims, yet today it is projected that the next election could be entirely compromised? These are the same people, mind you, that, while touting the incorruptible characteristic of our elections, declared Trump only won the White House in 2016 due to Russians meddling with things.
This hints at another conflict in messaging, for the record. While Putin has long been held up as Trump’s puppet master, they have to ignore the fact that the Russian leader has come out in favor of a Biden victory in November.
This all trends with the other inherent contradictions in the reporting. We get told that Trump represents a direct threat to our democracy, and as a result, it supposedly makes sense to have his name undemocratically pulled from ballots. Then, there is the need to prevent him from winning because he can become an authoritarian. The solution? Have the government indict him numerous times over and slap nearly one hundred charges against his name to poison the voting well.
Our press appears unbothered that the banana republic practice of arresting political opponents is in play, as they accuse Trump of possibly enacting that practice. All of this is more than mere projection; this is desperate deflection at play. The media are going to continue this practice of demonizing what the Trump camp is doing, and heralding when the Biden campaign engages in the same practices by reclassifying what it is they are doing.
