OPINION:
The political left loves to talk about “normalizing” things and how that’s bad. It doesn’t want the media to normalize President Trump, for example, by covering his presidency with anything that even approaches reasonable objectivity.
Although the left’s political media industrial complex is often devoted to preventing what would be considered routine coverage of an American president, it is also aggressively pushing the absolute normalization of something that is decidedly not routine: the riots in Los Angeles over the past two weeks.
Leftists aren’t only trying to normalize the riots but are also smoothing over Democrats’ reaction to them because opposition to Mr. Trump’s immigration policies is at the core of this.
Naturally, they must first dismiss any thought that the riots are disturbing. The Media Research Center, a watchdog group that exposes liberal media bias, tracked CNN and MSNBC from June 7 to 11 and found 211 combined instances in which the riots were referred to as “peaceful” in some way. CNN was responsible for 123 of those.
“There are agitators, of course, in every crowd, but most of the crowds that I saw, that I spoke to … these are peaceful people,” said MSNBC’s Steve Patterson.
“There were some incidents of violence. There were specific individuals involved in that,” said CNN’s Erin Burnett. “By and large, peaceful protest.”
Those are wild ways to describe actual rioting, which featured burned police vehicles and chunks of concrete thrown at law enforcement officers from a highway overpass. That’s not even to mention widespread looting and destruction of private property, including when rioters lured commercialized self-driving cars to them just so the vehicles could be burned.
All this was happening when the president mobilized the National Guard and Marines to quell rioters, but the media portrayed him as the bad guy compared with the lawbreakers.
“Donald Trump referred to those peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights as insurrectionists,” a horrified Nicole Wallace intoned on MSNBC.
Did you hear that, America? These were just “peaceful protesters” using their God-given right to free speech.
They are just like you and me.
Except they’re not.
Most of us do not throw Molotov cocktails and chunks of cement, nor do we try to set fire to federal buildings or loot Apple stores.
This is the same hustle the left tried to pull with the idiotic public relations stunt from Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who barged into Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference in Los Angeles on June 12. Ms. Noem was talking about the riots when Mr. Padilla aggressively interrupted from off-camera without his U.S. Senate pin or immediately identifying himself. Security is tight around Cabinet officials, particularly near riot areas, and Mr. Padilla was rightfully removed from the room, cuffed and briefly detained, then released.
Democrats and their media pals hopped up and down, describing it as the latest evidence of the ongoing Trumpocalypse.
On MSNBC.com, Charlie Sykes called it “appalling” and the “thugification of the Trump administration.”
He got to the Democrats’ real play here: “If this is how the administration treats a sitting United States senator, how will they treat the average citizen?” Mr. Sykes wrote.
The obvious answer is that “average citizens” don’t shout their way into press conferences held by Cabinet officials near riot areas.
The reason Democrats and the media have pivoted to the “What if they came for you?” strategy is that they have already lost the policy argument on illegal immigration that is underneath all their protests.
They want you to forget that the L.A. riots were the left’s reaction to the simple enforcement of immigration law in California and its aim to make it about something else entirely. They know the American people have already made their views clear.
The president’s pledge to finish what he started on illegal immigration and repair the intentional damage done to border security by the Biden administration was a central issue in the 2024 campaign. The voters resoundingly sided with Mr. Trump, who won all seven battleground states.
To this day, polls consistently show that illegal immigration is an “80-20 issue” with enormous majorities saying they agree with Mr. Trump and disagree with Democrats.
So why are the Democrats acting like this, if public opinion is so stacked against them?
It’s because that 20%, the rabid left, runs the party, and because Mr. Trump has the singular skill of making all his political adversaries lose their minds and their grips on reality.
And so the best they can do is try to excuse the dangerous insanity of the left by saying to normal people, “See, they’re just like you!”
And they don’t get why it’s not working.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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